Cleaning out the Closet: How to Let Go of your Characters Effectively

Character Clutter  

I hate cleaning out my closet. I’ve lived in my house for eight years, and I've only changed my closet layout twice. Over and over, one of my three sisters would come to me and say ‘Hey, it’s time for you to clean out the closet.’ Sure, I’d clean up the stuff, I didn’t want to get rid of anything. Yeah,  the pink unicorn slippers I got for my tenth birthday barely fit me. I never wore that dress, but I loved it. Letting go of my childhood things scared me!

When I became a teenager, I just put it off…until, exactly two weeks ago. My sisters had been begging for a remodel, I was finally ready. In one day, we redid the entire closet,  and all it had cost me was a day of labor. 

For me, my books are kind of like my closet. I love them so much, I keep them. And then they clutter up my books. So we need to declutter! But it’s so hard sometimes. 

Trust me, I know. I have so many loveable characters, and I can’t kill them. (forgive me for being emotionally attached)

 There are so many memes out there about authors loving to “kill off” characters, but I don’t think that’s always true. Sure, sometimes it’s  satisfying to get rid of the evil villain, but my random side character?  I love random side characters! So how do we learn to let go and clean out our closet of characters? 

Clean It Up

Meet Kayleigh. A character in my novel with a terrible life, a character I love. At the end of my novel, when I wrote her and another one of my character’s death scenes, I cried. 

But not because of Kayleigh…because of Micheal, the second character, and Kayleigh’s brother. He was someone I slapped onto the page at the last minute, adding a name off of the internet, and soon becoming one of my favorite characters. He was strong, caring, a little bit of a tough shell. Not to mention, he was handsome. I tried to let go of him. I promise I did! But he somehow managed to come back into the second book. 

Have you ever had this problem? Do you have an, in other words, indestructible character? Readers get frustrated when one character just keeps on coming back! 

Here’s an example, with someone I’ll call Fred: The poor guy has fallen off a cliff, but survived by landing in icy water. Later, he got stabbed by a serial killer, but a kind stranger rescued him just in time. And to top it all off, he gets a gut feeling he shouldn’t get on his flight, and finds out later that the plane crashed. He just won’t go down, and it seems fake. Readers throw down the book with disgust because it seems unrealistic and cliché. 

Now, I’m not saying these things are bad and that they don’t or shouldn’t happen, but they shouldn’t all be happening in the same book or to the same person. 

So here’s a tip, author: be reliable and relatable. 

What does this mean? 

I’m going to break it down. 

Be reliable

When someone dies, the details need to line up. To get the reader invested, everything has to make sense. So if we are going to make someone die, we need to be consistent, and we need to stick by our decision. Sometimes, we’re scared that someone's death could make the story fall apart. And sometimes it does. But sometimes, them surviving can make the book fall apart. Too much clutter can wreck the story. 

 Be relatable 

This is how we make death seem real, to make the emotions raw. We draw our readers in and make sure they feel grief. In order to let go of the character, we need to let ourselves grieve for them, and we need to show the grief affecting their families and friends.. We need to make it relatable. 

 So here are the four reliability and relatability tips. 

Reliability Tip No. 1

Build emotional investment. 

If you’re invested in the character, your readers are invested. 

To build emotional investment, you and your readers need to bond with the character. Whether it’s a sweet, lovable character or a snappy, mean one, you need a bond that will make your readers cry. You may be wondering: how does this relate to learning to let go? Well, what I’m trying to say is that  if we have an overload of characters, we can’t just throw out one, or add one. When we let go of a character, it needs to be meaningful. It needs to support the story. It needs to make sense. 

Reliability Tip No. 2

Strategize, Strategize 

We don’t want it to be predictable or obvious. We want this to be something that hits the readers hard. We need it to shake them to the core, but it can’t be forced and random. Don’t try and shock the readers.  Their death needs to have a solid meaning and plot justification. In other words, we want it to carry an important message, support the story, and and like a puzzle. In the end, it should form a beautiful picture that makes perfect sense, one that you want to read again zooming out to see how everything fits. We need to make an impact! 

Reliability Tip No. 3

Setting the Scene 

This technique is called foreshadowing. In summary, “a warning or indication of a future event.” We set the scene. We build tension. We 

drop subtle hints. When the time comes to reveal what we’ve been hinting at, it’s going to be vivid. It’s going to be close to our core. The loss is going to be real. It can’t be fake or expected., It’s sudden, but not random and crazy. It fits. 

Reliability Tip No. 4

Make it powerful 

Make it have meaning. Don’t think “Welp I got to ‘let go’ so time to kill off a random character!” 

Please, please don’t do that. It must have a meaning! Nobody is going to care about your character dying if you don’t care. If they don’t have a reason to die, then they don’t need to die. 

Now, what reasons could we have? Sometimes we need to let random people die in our books, but that has a meaning of its own. It shows the sacrifice it takes for a good book to come together. Find a random book on your shelf and analyze it. Think about what this author is feeling when they let go of a character, think about what the character is feeling. Now, it obviously has to be a book with a death scene.  For two great examples, read the ending scenes of Ember’s End by S. D. Smith and The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson

How do we put it all together? 

So now we get to the best part. 

We’ve talked about the dangers of too many characters. We’ve talked about letting go. We’ve talked about making it all meaningful. 

But how do we do it? How do we put everything back into our closet, and make it all fit and look nice? How do we let go of our characters and make their deaths meaningful? 

Okay, so the first question is: how does all we’ve talked about come together? What does all this have to do with letting go? 

The first step of letting go is to make a character's death purposeful and satisfying. As authors, we need that. Use your pain to feed the grief into your storyline! We don’t grieve for our fictional characters like we would grieve for a real person, but have you ever read a book where the character dies and for a moment a small part of you died with. It makes sense, but you don’t want it to be 

rue. 

We don’t always like letting go. But sometimes we rush the aftereffects of the scene. The aftermath can be vital to the scene, showing the grief of the family members, friends, and individuals involved. And, sometimes, we even have to write the killer if it’s a murder or planned death. 

Keep an author’s journal. That really helped me. I write about what my character was feeling, thinking, and their internal conflicts. It helps you to write the scene and show what the character is feeling, instead of just telling. 

Sometimes, letting go of a character is hard. And writing that letting go scene can be the hardest of all. But stay strong, writer! When your friends hound you about bringing that character back, hold fast, unless it’s clear that their life would be more meaningful than their death. But if you let go of a character properly, sometimes it can make the story. It’s up to you to decide how you are going to let go. 

✨Well, we have reached the end of today’s blog post! Thank you, readers, for coming this far!✨

~Billie