5/5/24
Death Comes Suddenly and Unexpectedly
This is number sixty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
LET ME START by saying: I know of no impending deaths, either of people I know or characters I write about. I am in good health and was given the all-clear by my cardiologist this week. Relax. A little.
What I am talking about is the death of a character in a story that so upsets readers that they have to sit back and decide whether they will continue reading the story (or watching the television series or movie). I know many people, for instance, who continued watching Game of Thrones, despite their favorite character having just been killed. I dealt with it in every season finale of NCIS in the first sixteen seasons. (Once they were no longer on Netflix, I quit watching.) At the end of each season, I had to decide whether the show was worth watching with so-and-so dead.
On the other hand, a typical response to a death in one of my stories—which are supposed to be entertaining erotica—is met with a lengthy rant and declaration that they will no longer be reading the story and have just voted it a one.
This has happened more than once. Deaths in my stories seem to happen out of the blue. Everyone is totting along joyfully and then all of a sudden X has been brutally murdered. It affects me as much as losing my closest friend would, because I have invested a part of myself in this character. I am so devastated that I cannot continue.
But we do.
Despite the number of people who write to me to tell me they read my stories to escape from reality, not to have their nose rubbed in it.
“I get enough of this on the daily news!”
“You’ve broken the contract with your readers!”
“At least I know how the story ends because for me, it ended today.”
And yet…
And yet, we are seemingly obsessed with having every mundane detail in a story the way it would be in real life. “That’s not how it would really happen.” I got that even in Devon Layne’s outer space fantasy story, The Assassin. “Actually, the tides would be so severe on such a planet that they would wipe out every living thing on dry ground daily.”
In my currently running serial, Follow Focus, there are many things to criticize. It is a historical novel, set in the early seventies. It cost me about five or six hours of research per hour of writing time. There were so many details about pay scales, cameras and film, open embassies, war, politics, and real estate that I was overwhelmed by the amount of research.
And what bit of the story was considered unbelievable?
“It’s called Toad in the Hole, not Toad in a Hole.”
A mistaken article.
But what no one is expecting in that story is for a character to die. And since the story is available for both online reading and eBook, I’ll give the spoiler: No one does.
Follow Focus and the entire Photo Finish series are available at Bookapy.com.
So, that all begs the question of why put a tragic death in my entertaining erotica stories at all?
The answer is simple. My characters become living breathing personalities that insinuate themselves into our hearts. I’ve sometimes told people that the characters I write are often more real to me than the people I meet. But as real people, I can’t write them without being real. And life contains those tragic moments just as it contains the first time making love to your one and only. Dealing with tragedy is a necessary step in becoming an adult.
I spend much more time exploring how the remaining characters deal with the death, are changed by it, and survive past it than I do describing the death itself.
It’s not always a death that drives this forward. It can be a loss, a breakup, a tornado, a failure. They all drive the characters forward.
And sometimes, they drive us forward as well.
We relive a similar incident in our lives and experience the emotions again. We gain the opportunity to deal with a life tragedy vicariously, through the experience of these characters.
I seldom set out to kill a character. I knew when I wrote Nathan Everett’s For Money or Mayhem that someone important to Dag was going to die. I didn’t know who or when, but that was the theme of the Seattle Digital Noir mysteries. When I realized who and how that character would die, I was devastated. It was a defining moment in my life. Everything I knew about life changed that day. My relationships changed. My lifestyle changed. My emotions changed. Nothing was ever the same again.
When an eleven-year-old little sister died in one of my Devon Layne series, I didn’t even know she’d died until the next chapter. I thought I’d saved her! And I was crushed when I found out I’d failed. That is as an author. I can only imagine that it also affected my readers, based on the number of emails I received.
Suddenly and unexpectedly.
The death of a fictional character opens both author and reader to forming a deeper relationship with other characters. It sucks us further into the story. We are either severed from it or we become part of it. We are emotionally invested in it.
Understand that I have no “justification” for the death of any character in any of my stories. Even in real life, justification of a death is trite and hollow.
“She was 96. She had a good life.”
No! She had a long life. She was miserable throughout. She was mean and heartless and no one was really that sad to see her go. Saying she had a good life is trite and meaningless. She left the world a better place because she was no longer in it.
There is no reason for a death in a story. It usually surprises me. It comes suddenly and unexpectedly and is a turning point for me as an author because I must give up or turn it into something that changes people. And no matter how entertaining my stories may be, how sexy the love scenes are, how successful the characters become… You do not read one of my stories exempt from being changed.
I’ve often read stories that have a depressed individual suddenly cured by having sex for the first time. Hah! It doesn’t work that way. Next week, “Dealing with the incurable.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
