Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I don’t want to sound morbid, but death has kind of been on my mind lately. No, intervention isn’t necessary, it’s literary deaths I’ve been thinking about, rather than the more personal kind. You see, as much as death is an integral part of actually living, it is an integral part of telling a living story in many cases. How a character dies, or survives near fatal situations, though, that is what is interesting.

Literary deaths are typically fast deaths. Sure, there are some great pieces of literature that deal with the slow and painful death by wasting away, but by and large those kind of deaths would slow a story line too far to “work”.

Take for example any fantasy novel set in the middle ages. In reality, most of the battle deaths then took place months after the skirmish, from raging infections. Hacking at your opponent like he was a side of meat tends to produce some truly horrific wounds, and these weren’t people that bought stock in Lysol, or took antibiotics, or were even big on the whole bathing thing, so the results were not at all pretty. People then knew this, which is why some knights carried small thin blades so that could stab a fallen opponent, even in a civilized tournament, and grant him a swift death.

Novels generally don’t have time for this, so a man that dies in battle has his skull crushed, or his mount falls on him, or a spear pierces his heart. It’s dramatic, it’s fast, and it paints a much more palatable picture in the mind of the reader than a suppurating wound does.

For the same reason, women that die in childbirth are typically lost due to blood loss, not from the infections that were far more common.

So if you want to kill someone quickly in a novel, and make sure your reader knows they are truly dead, your options are still pretty open. Shooting, especially in the head, is always popular, as is throat slicing, hanging, and drowning. Burning, with or without a stake, is also a popular option, but it can leave the possibility that the body isn’t who you think it is still open. Poison is one of my personal favorites, simply because the wide range of symptoms and delivery systems make it very flexible, but it is less flashy than an explosion, or ejecting a person into the vacuum of space.

I guess the point of all this is that we as readers want death, like life, to have meaning. If a character that we hate, or love, dies, then we want to see it as part of something else. Sure, your villain may have just broken the neck of a village girl over nothing more important than spilled wine, but her casual murder shows the villain’s true character. If that same villain were to trip over his cat, fall down some stairs, and break his own neck, the death wouldn’t satisfy the reader. Yes, he’s just as dead as if the plucky hero stabbed him through the heart with the dead girl’s bread knife, but it just doesn’t feel the same.

Cheers,

Michelle