When Good Characters Have To Die

Villains make it easy to justify the end. A ‘bad guy’ does dastardly deeds throughout the story culminating in a suitably proportionate demise.  Authors are happy, readers are happy and everyone walks away from the story satisfied that there’s justice and symmetry in the world.

But what happens when a good character dies? A character who has supported the lead throughout the story and become someone the reader and writer like very much, if not love? There’s shock, there’s sadness all round, often tears and angry letters to the editor: in short, no one is happy.

So why do it then? Why spend the time to introduce a good character in act one, only to kill him or her off in act three?

Let’s see, J.K Rowling apparently had slated Ron Weasley for an early demise when she was writing Harry Potter, but decided the golden triumvirate of friendship was more meaningful in the end and saved ‘the axe’ for Sirius Black and Dumbledore instead .

Han Solo, too, is rumored to have been on the chopping block, but George Lucas reportedly decided he didn’t want to kill off any of his characters. Yet Ben Kenobi and Yoda didn’t live to see the end of the series in corporeal form. The best they could manage was as an ethereal presence, guiding Luke from the great beyond with glittery spectral wisdom.

So, what’s going on with Sirius, Dumbledore, Ben and Yoda, which make them ultimately expendable? Why did it become necessary to kill them off?

There’s the obvious shock value, of course, which heightens the conflict in the story and creates a sense of realism and danger. But when it comes to mentor characters, the wisdom-spouting ‘fatherly’ characters who’ve been with the fledgling hero since page one—their death is almost as certain as a ‘Red Shirt’ on a Star Trek away mission.

Main characters need to grow as the story progresses. They need a chance to choose their own path, as it were, and if they are lucky enough to begin their journey with the aid of a mentoring friendship, that friendship has to be altered in some negative form in order for them to have the opportunity to show the reader what they are truly made of.  As bittersweet as it is, the main character needs to experience sorrow and loss in order to gain the strength and depth of a hero and take on the odious bad guy at the end.  

I felt Harry’s pain and disbelief when Dumbledore died. My jaw dropped in the theater when Ben Kenobi disappeared in a flutter of brown cloak as Darth Vader’s lightsaber passed through him. And oh boy did I ever want Harry and Luke to avenge their deaths.  I couldn’t help but think at that point, no matter what their twisted motivation might be for becoming evil, Voldemort and Vader must die. And I was suitably satisfied at the end when the bad guys did die at the hand of the avenging hero (or in the case of Vader, becoming the hand of the avenging hero). 

As a reader or a writer, what’s your favourite story character you wished had never died? Whose untimely death turned your insides into a knot and made you scream for revenge?

A Blog Award!

I've been given a blog award!

Thanks to Sutton Fox for the honor of nominating my blog for the Reality Award.

According to the rules of the award, I need to share 7 facts you might not know about me...

humm...lets see..

1. I'm a natural blond. Or at least I was before my hair went mousy and grey-ish, so now it comes in a bottle.

2. I was named after a shop in Toronto. My mother was driving by a boutique and liked the spelling for Kathryn on the sign and that was that.

3. I was a trained animator in a different life. It was fun until I realized you actually have to be able to draw.

4. My handwriting is so messy I should have been a doctor. I do all my writing on my laptop so I can actually read it.

5. I love old movies. Arsenic and Old Lace with Cary Grant is one of my faves.

6. I like cottage cheese. There, I said it. I eat it plain and it is yummy.

7. My favourite book of all time is...The Little Red Engine, by Diana Ross and Leslie Wood. (This is very much pre-Thomas the Tank Engine days. We're talking the original epic train story, not the later smarmy knock-offs) My mother read that to me so many times when I was a kid I swear we wore out the library card. I think that the Little Red Engine's message which he repeats throughout the book: "I can do it! I really can." And, "I'm sure I can!" have stayed with me throughout my life 'cause it might take me a while to get where I'm going, but I'll get there in the end. :)

So now it's my turn to nominate 5 other bloggers for their inspiring, amazing, and lovely words:

Piper Denna at http://piperpatter.blogspot.ca/

Maya Blake at http://mayabauthor.blogspot.ca/

Morgan Q. O'Reilly at http://themorgandiaries.blogspot.ca/

Kelly Moran at http://kellymoranauthor.blogspot.ca/

Marry Murray at http://bigbluepencil.blogspot.ca/


And because every award comes with a few rules, here's the rules of the Reality Award:

1. Thank the blogger who gave you the award.

2. Post the award on your blog.

3. Share 7 little-known facts about you.

4. Nominate 5 bloggers to bestow the award upon.

5. Contact them and let them know to come pick up their award at your blog!

June Blooms

Hey, guess what? If you haven’t looked at your calendar lately, it’s June. I’ve always liked June. Strawberries come into season, roses bloom and the school year (finally!) reaches it’s end for a lot of kids. Bring on summer! Beach trips, sandcastles, barbecues and chocolate dipped ice cream cones at the local Dairy Queen. Yum!!! Time to relax, time to have fun.

June is also my birthday month (my grandfather nicknamed me Rosebud). Not that I’m happy about being a year older, but hey, can’t stop that clock and still be around to notice, unless you’re immortal like a vampire, or some kind of freaky automaton robot thing with a human soul trapped inside. Heh.

So how’s that story coming along, you ask?

Well, I’ll tell ya. The last six months have been a whirlwind of productivity in getting my life onto some sort of forward moving track. Thanks to those twin sisters of success, Persistence and Patience, I now weigh a lot less and am in better shape than I was ten years ago. My home business of creating photo art is about ready to launch, and getting up at 5 am to put in a solid hour of writing a day has resulted in paragraphs of crap being revised into paragraphs of slightly-more-readable crap. Yep.  Progress has been made. Am I done the book yet? No. But every step counts, every word counts, every second spent on making my dreams a priority count.

Yolo: You only live once. So just do it. Very sage words spoken by a very wise friend.

And sometimes just doing it means taking a chance on yourself; stepping out of your comfort zone and trying something new, so it’s with a mixture of excitement and anxious nail biting, that I make my next announcement…drum roll please…I got a new job. A promotion at work which I am very honoured to have been given as it entails more responsibility and slightly more pay for the trade-off of slightly less hours. Actually, a lot less hours. Which means, that’s right, more time for me to put the things that matter the most in my life first, like caring for my son, and running that small business properly and, oh joy, oh bliss…writing stories. Scary for my bank account of course, but I’ll make up the difference soon, won’t I? You know, when Tin Heart is snapped up and becomes a NYT best seller, right? RIGHT?

*sigh*

Truth is I’m not a special snowflake. I’m just like everyone else. I struggle, dream, and paying bills each month will always be a circus juggling act. But sometimes dreams are more important than money. Happiness most certainly is.

 YOLO. Just do it. Let your inner rose bloom. You never know what will happen if you try.

Happy June everyone!

~Kate

Dreams do come true!

Six years ago, when I started on this journey of becoming an author I had the good luck and honour of meeting a group of like-minded ladies with whom I became good friends. Over the years, we have not only shared our work with each other and helped each other grow as writers, but also our dreams of getting that Holy Grail all authors dream of, "the call." For some of us, getting that call has come in landing an agent (awesome!!!), for others, it arrived in the mail as a contract with a publisher (way awesome!!!!), but for Maya Blake, I am happy to announce the call has come for her in a very big way.

Being a writer has been Maya's passion for many years, and she has had successful releases in the e-pub industry, but while she's enjoyed these successes, she's had a bigger dream that goes back to when she was a teenager and picked up her first Harlequin novel--she wanted to become a Harlequin author.

This was no easy goal.

Writing is a craft that takes lots of time to learn, but writing for a particular line of a particular publishing house takes many years of practice, many hours of discovering what style and conventions are appropriate to use, and many more hours discovering what not to use. It is so easy to get discouraged when you think you've got the writing style down, and you screw up the courage to send off your manuscript, which you've sweated over for hours to make it as polished as you can, to learn --oh no!-- the writing is indeed good, but that story isn't going to cut it, because well, because of a hundred things which you couldn't possibly have known before you tried to put your work to the test, but you sure as heck know now because the end result is a big, fat and tear-inducing...no.

No. Such a small word. But so very powerful. It can stop dreams from becoming reality, if we take it as the final answer. This is when patience and persistence become our very best friends, and surrounding ourselves with positive people who hold us up and keep us motivated rather than bring us down becomes essential. Well, Maya didn't take no for a final answer. She cried, she felt disappointment, she felt frustrated, and there were probably many times when the moments of writing she managed to sneak in between kids, and job, and daily life seemed impossible choices to make for the sake of a dream. But she never gave up. And that's important. That's what makes her story so exciting and pleasurable to tell. She could have given up at any time, but she didn't. She kept that dream alive even, after having gotten very close many times to succeding only to be told "no" again, that doubt crept in to say, "maybe I'm not cut out for this after all." Maybe. If she had given up, certainly. But she didn't. She tried again, and I am overjoyed (seriously, I jumped around the room doing a happy dance when I found out) to say Maya Blake is now a Harleqin author. Her first Harlequin book, The Price of Success, (that title is soooo fitting, isn't it?) will be out in time for Christmas 2012.

Holy awesomeness, Batman!!!!

In the writing world, it doesn't get any better than that.
Unless you find your work on the New York Times bestseller list. And for Maya, I think that's just a matter of time, too.

Thanks for stopping by today!
~Kate

Steam What?

Steampunk.

An interesting sounding word. But what does it mean?
At a quick glance it would seem to have something to do with punks and steam, which begs the image of spiky-haired, leather-clad social deviants with a penchant for hot, vaporous water. Not exactly what it's all about, really, but not entirely off the mark either. Anything not on the main-stream radar could be considered deviant, and certainly Steampunk imagery is often powered by corseted ladies captaining air-ships or mad-scientist gentlemen, with wild hair and amazing spectacles, employing steam-billowing engines for dastardly means. Not exactly your run-of-the-mill role for a historically accurate ladies and gentlemen.

Steampunk is 19th century with a twist. A re-imagining of how history might have unfolded had certain devices and choices been made. Think Victorian bustles and parasols, heeled boots and brass buttons, dirigibles, steam-locomotives, printing presses, clockwork gears and a host of mechanical inventions which embody the adventurous spirit and optimism of the Victorian era.

Not that Steampunk has to be set in Victorian England. No, no, it works equally well in the 'Wild West' of America, or in a post-apocalyptic world which has been reborn with 19th century aesthetics. To be true to the genre, however, and resist the temptation to dabble in Dieselpunk and Cyberpunk, it is generally considered that Steampunk should not rely on elements of invention which predominantly occur in the 20th century such as gas engines, television and digital computers.

As a sub-genre of science fiction literature, according to Wikipedia, we can blame--or admire--K.W. Jeter for coining the term in an effort to describe a relatively "new" adventure in writing which incorporated 19th century style and setting with the mechanical devices imagined by the writings of H.G Wells and Jules Verne.

The Time Machine. 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea. Victorian era adventurism and invention, with just a hint of the fantastic....that's what Steampunk is all about. Just imagine the adventures you could go on by reading it.

Thanks for stopping by!

~Kate

Muse messages

And today my brain is busy receiving critical messages from my characters so off I go into writing land.

Happy Friday everyone!

~Kate

An Interview of a Different Kind

In the interest of discussing the advances I’ve made in revising my current manuscript, I thought I’d ask my heroine, Lady Anne Amberleigh, for her opinion on the matter. Not sure if it was a wise choice, but this is what she had to say:

Me: “Hello? Lady Anne? Are you available?”

Lady Anne: “I beg your pardon? Are you addressing me?”

Me: “Yes.”

LA: “Well, I dare say it’s been long enough. A girl could go quite mad, sitting here with nothing to do except fuss with the silverware.”

Me:  “Okay, well, it’s time to give an update on how the book is progressing. I thought you might like to explain.”

LA: “Progressing? Surely you jest.”

Me: “Um, no. Where are we up to in the revisions?”

LA: “The exact same place we’ve been for over a fortnight, my dear; the beginning of chapter three. I’ve grown quite hungry, you know, staring at this platter of scones while you have me dallying about with napkins instead of chatting with the Captain and drinking tea.”

Me: “What does it matter? You hate scones. And you don’t end up drinking the tea in this chapter anyway.”

LA: “That is entirely beside the point. I need progression. You have been entirely too lax in your literary duties as of late.”

Me: “What about the new scene I wrote? And all the time I’ve spent plotting book two?”

LA: “Ha. You have been dallying about on that Faceplate nonsense.”

Me: “I believe you mean Facebook. And it’s not all I’ve been doing.”

LA: “Oh yes. This new obsession of yours with exercise. Quite obnoxious if you ask me, deliberately making yourself all winded by, what did you call it? Jogging? Lawn tennis is a decent lady’s past time, but I suppose Mr. Kellogg would approve of that sweaty business.”

Me: “A healthy body is a healthy mind.”

LA: “Then you should not have eaten all those chocolate biscuits.”

Me: “Okay. We are so off track right now. Back to the point…. About the revisions?”

LA: “It’s this invention of the difference engine that’s the problem.”

Me: “What are you talking about? Do you mean the computer?”

LA: “Quite. It’s a devilish distraction. What in heaven’s name is wrong with using a pen and paper, or if you must be mechanically assisted, a typewriter?”

Me: “The computer makes it easy to do edits to a manuscript. The way I write, I’d go through a ton of paper with all the spelling mistakes.”

LA: “The way you write, a character could die while waiting for the book to be finished.”

Me:  “Ha ha. Very tempting. But then it would be a tragedy and not a romance.”*sigh* “Are you really in such a hurry for the story to continue?”

LA: “Certainly! I want to try my hat at persuading Captain Leonidas that it will be advantageous if we become friends.”

Me: “Ah, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not sure he will agree.”

LA: “But he is very fascinating to talk to.”

Me: “Hum. You sound awfully interested in the Captain. Aren’t you supposed to be getting married to the Duke?”

LA: “Oh, please do not mention that atrocious cad. How could you have me betrothed to such a loathsome creature?”

Me: “Heh. I think you have some surprises coming your way, Lady Anne.”

LA: “Surprises sound fantastic, as long as they do come. You will write faster won’t you? I’m not enjoying the long passages of nothingness and this tea water is quite cold.”

Me: “Heaven forbid.” *rolls eyes* “Very well. Let me get back to it then and start heating things up for you. And next time I do an update, I think I’ll chat with Captain Leonidas instead.”

LA: “Good luck to you, then. He’s a solitary creature. Quite reclusive, even for an Automaton.”

Me: “On the contrary. I do believe I know one subject he’d be more than willing to talk about.”

LA: “Oh? And what might that be?”

Me: “You.”

LA: “Er…”

Me: “Ha! Shocked you into silence, have I? Well, goodbye Lady Anne. Thanks for chatting and putting me straight about where we are in the revisions. Not.”

Well, I hope she enjoys the stale scones and cold tea…because by the end of chapter three, they will be the least of her concerns. And her day will only get worse from there.

Bwahahahahaha.

It’s always fun to end a blog post on an evil cackle, isn’t it? Thanks for stopping by and having some fun here today…

~Kate * who is staying OFF the internet for a bit and sticking her nose to the writing grindstone.*