How does one know when to kill a character? And as a follow up; how should they be killed?
Both questions are equally valid (As I keep telling myself) and both questions don't have any good answers (As I keep finding out). Take Siddiq Bajwa. The washed up cop whose hay-days are behind him after he got a junior detective killed on the job. Should this man die?
Okay maybe let's give a little more context. Siddiq Bajwa was born on Suko, an Asteroid cluster in the outer reaches of the Rim. Born to a family with three brothers and a single mother, Siddiq was thrown into a world without the privileged of dreaming big. After signing onto the military he transferred over to the Police branch of the Suko Military when his eldest brother died in the line of duty.
He got zealous. Zealous after Zealdak.
Where to start with Zealdak? The retail conglomerate that leaned a little too hard on the local-friend marketing that suspicions grew when their prices dropped just a little to low for the market to account for. Siddiq followed them in deep. He worked with stock-brokers, ship-lane traffickers and even pushed a little harder on his underworld contacts. It was a conspiracy that dug into the mud exchange borns were raised to know was sacred.
Siddiq had his thoughts. He had heard his rumours. But it was in the belly of Pallas Station at the Cedon Fisheries that his worries had become fact. They called him Big Koe. He was six foot seven and with a gut wide enough to fit three of Siddiq. Big Koe liked dealing with dirty money. He was a gambler; or a 'two-timing-coin-hopper' as he called it. Siddiq had wormed himself into a game that night and with a pair of aces on the flop, he held a breathe for the burn.
Siddiq pushed where he felt was weak. Big Koe obliged. A couple of names went flying. Heimdar. Ken-To. Jovie. One stuck though. Orin. Jacob Orin, CFO of Zealdak Corporation.
And as such the rest would be jotted into the history books. Siddiq would take his lead and run. And Jonathan Alonzo, junior detective, would die a few months later in a failed sting.
But man... am I missing a lot of context.
What you've just read is the background to a character arc. You may have seen it already; in fact if you go back and just read that first descriptor of Siddiq Bajwa you'd realise the character and his story is rather uninspired.
The rest of the story; the details that set-up Siddiq for his story to even matter again are the first third of my novel and are not even mentioned here. Characters like Novak, and Leila and even Bruce could play huge roles in rounding out the edges of his story but are not even mentioned. Let alone the plot points.
Instead of beating around the bush (and perhaps giving away more than I should about the novel), I'll instead give you my decision. The settlement to my dilemma.
No he doesn't deserve to die. At least not yet....
Does that feel like a cop-out answer? (writers are full of them) Well it kind of is and it kind of isn't. Because I'd finally like to get to the point of this post. Instead of giving you all those extraneous details and plot points and character moments that matter I'd like to provide you with some general reasons why I decided not to kill this character.
It didn't fit the pacing
It didn't matter enough to the plot
It didn't matter enough to the characters
It didn't do anything for his character
I didn't want to
Again, pitchforks down, that last one does sound like a cop-out. But it really ain't. Killing characters is a big decision in a story. Reasons 1 to 4 are valid, structural issues that you would see in criticism. But number 5 well that's a privilege. The privilege of the writer. If you don't want to then don't do it. Killing character and for that matter most large decisions you make for your characters should at least fulfill two of the five reasons I've listed above. The death of Han Solo in Force Awakens achieved 3 of the. His death fit the pacing, mattered to the characters, and I assume the writer wanted to (At least Harrison Ford did). The other two not so much for reasons too long to get into detail here.
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