Don't kill if you don't have to

It’s very easy and tempting to kill people in fiction. Too easy.

If you hold a writing competition in a high school—and I speak from experience here—90% or more of the stories you will then have to read and mark are a bloodbath, especially from the boys.

Obviously, in some stories such as The Hero's Journey or the Slaying The Monster type, death and killing are going to factor in at some point, especially in the Monster story. Jaws wouldn’t have much bite if the shark didn’t! In Jaws, the opening chapter features a grisly death, but that’s because of the nature of the shark—it kills and eats.

Unless the beast is the centerpiece and title of the story, then you might want to rethink things. Killing someone is extremely easy to write… "He shot him dead," "He stabbed him through the heart," but it's so easy that it is tempting to forget what the repercussions of this would be in any context at all. Even the most incredible gangsters and assassins don't shoot ten people a day. Neither did soldiers. Things usually happen very quickly, and you either fight, die, or run off. Do these people have families? What do you do with the bodies? How will the killer cope with all this killing later?

A recent example of a slew of mindless and ill-considered killing is the recent film “The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Conduct” by Guy Ritchie. Various Brits dispatch Nazis with a quip and a double-tap from a silenced machine gun. Thwip, thwip, jolly good. The various heroes stroll around leisurely, shooting hundreds of guards while another hero fires and stabs arrows into his own allotted amount. The scene lasts for ages, with the heroes strolling from one end of the harbor to the other. Nobody is alerted, no alarms sound, nobody radios in, and nobody stumbles across previously unconcealed, double-tapped corpses. We know the Nazis lost the Second World War, but if it had been this easy, I doubt it wouldn’t have lasted more than the time it would have taken Henry Cavill’s character to quip and thwip his way to Berlin. The whole thing ended up boring and silly, a standard of a high school writing competition.

Which brings us to my own story, Crybaby, which I hope you’re enjoying so far. It features a killer Indian Elephant. Wow, is he a killer. There will be some crazy, horrible, and unfortunate deaths in the chapters to come. It is a monster story. The monster is Crybaby, the elephant, the main driving force, and the title of the book. And yet, a couple of thousand words into the story and nobody has died, why? The answer is, because if I, the author, kill anybody too early, it will desensitize the reader and reduce the impact of the terrible havoc to come.

The thief in the opening chapter is a killer, you know this; it’s written that his plan in is to kill and steal from the shaman and the mahout after he has drugged them and knocked them unconscious, so why doesn’t he? Because who would? The thief has got to the point where he can strangle or beat to death the two old men, but he doesn’t because he can’t be bothered with the effort, and after I, the writer, have spared them, I suddenly realized that I might need them again anyway in further chapters. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all mapped out, but a story is a funny old thing, and a shaman is a very good story card to play when struggling with a tricky plot point.

You should also know as a writer. I settled down to write the paragraph where the thief murdered the two old men and realized that it would be all wrong, that such a lazy and mean character would dismiss the idea when it came to do it as too strenuous and gory and that the repercussions of murdering the two men in cold blood would be much harsher than if they woke up robbed. Tough luck but no physical harm done.

Okay, so that worked for my first chapter, or in my mind it did. There will be deaths soon for the grislier among you but as a writer, I believe you should allow yourself to be led by your characters and their shifting motivations and feelings. When writing death scenes or killing or battles or wars, first try to write your characters out of it because that’s precisely what they would be trying to do if the could look over your shoulder, have them run away from it, question it and analyze it, write it without any killing and see if it improves your writing. Yes, even before you write the pivotal death scene that sparks a murder mystery or detective story, try NOT to kill the victim and see how that works out, it may open very unexpected paths your story can take.

Thanks for reading, if you missed Crybaby chapter one you can catch up here…

Thank you for reading.

Your time and curiosity are truly appreciated. Stay tuned for more exciting content and stories.

Until next time!

All the best,Mark 🤩

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