Mandyville vs Killing Your Darlings

Yesterday, I talked about not falling into the trap of sending your characters to Mandyville. It involves keeping a list, especially if you're writing a series, and how to mention them and so on. What we're going to talk about here is just letting them go versus killing them off. I touched on the idea of killing your darlings back in July and you can find that post here. Let's dive into the idea of just letting a character fade into the background or killing them off.

The idea of letting them fade into the background, like I said yesterday, is a bit of lazy writing. It's not horrible but sometimes people are going to want to know about secondary characters that you introduce. Yes, I know that people aren't going to think about secondary characters, but never underestimate what your readers might connect to. Especially if you're right in the fantasy genre and you have a bunch of secondary characters that, in their own way, become important. Think about Dumbledore's Army - that's a whole bunch of secondary characters that we continue to follow and learn about, even if it's only here or there. None of them fade into the background, even in Deathly Hallows, which is centered squarely on the trio.

There is another way to deal with secondary characters that you don't want to deal with. You can kill them off, but, like everything else in writing, you want to use it sparingly. If you kill off everyone without a good reason, then your readers might lose interest in the story because it's too dark. It's why I'm not reading A Song of Fire and Ice at the moment, even though a lot of other people love it, so it goes both ways. There's also the idea that he writes the character deaths so they fit perfectly into the plot but some of us readers don't want so much death. The gist of my rambling is to use it sparingly but keep it in your back pocket.

As always, there are middle areas in these two extremes. They could leave a note, there could be an email, a quick call, and so on. Just make sure that it fits into your plot and doesn't feel like it's a throwaway. Until next time, remember to back up your work and keep on writing!