McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Do they exist?

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Starbeam:
Possibly not quite answering the question, but George RR Martin has a tendency to off viewpoint characters.

Nawlins34:
Duly noted, adding him to my list as well.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Starbeam on November 10, 2009, 06:27:43 PM ---Possibly not quite answering the question, but George RR Martin has a tendency to off viewpoint characters.

--- End quote ---

True; I'd not mentioned that because of the way that series has not ended yet, I didn't think it was quite what the OP was looking for.

Kali:
Just as a note, no matter what you do or how well you handle it, there will still be people who throw the book against the wall and vow never to read another thing you write if you kill off the MC. ;)  Although I'm ok with a character dying during the course of the book, if it's the MC and especially if it's in first person, I dislike such endings.

You might have to file this under "can't please everyone", though, and write the story you want to write.

Kris_W:
Almost every rule in writing should end with the phrase ‘…unless you are a genius with a large fan base.’ I may find examples of writers who broke the rule I want to break, but that rarely leads me to successfully breaking it myself. I find they aren’t really rules at all, but instead straightjackets that keep us from hurting ourselves.

Writing a satisfying story in which the view point or main character dies in the end is the sort of straightjacket some much published, genius writers have managed to escape. This isn’t something I would recommend to a beginner writer.

‘Diary of Anne Frank’? It is definitely her first book, and the view point character dies in the end. There is valid argument as to whether it is a novel or not, but I think that it would be a valuable read in figuring out how to appeal to the audience. 

‘Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ is a ‘first’* book by an author who has gone on to become very famous. The book won a lot of awards. It’s a very good book to emulate.  John le Carré’s prose got a lot more murky in his later books and, alas, even more of a genius. I was already addicted by then.

How about ‘Flowers for Algernon’? Opps, the Wiki site says that he only regressed back to an IQ of 68. I had been sure he, like the rat, had died from the experimental treatment.

And then there’s Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. The viewpoint character definitely dies and the audience is definitely relieved by it.

And the book with the ending only the soft hearted call ambiguous - Podkayne of Mars.

You also might look at examples where the main character dies in the middle – such as in Dickens’s ‘The Olde Curiosity Shop’. That one is worth reading along with the history regarding the distribution. It sort of puts the Harry Potter craze in historical perspective.

Oh, and the 'Illiad'. Most of the main characters die in it. Most of the rest die in the sequal.

I suppose I can toss in ‘Lovely Bones’. A viewpoint character is dead all the way through it, and even has her death scene. Again – genius.

* All the published writers I know have 6 to 12 manuscripts in a bottom drawer somewhere. Their ‘first’ novel is almost always merely the first that was publishable. It could be that by writing this story you are filling up the required space in that bottom drawer so that another, future, book is made possible. This is a GOOD thing.

In the end, stick to the golden straightjacket of writing - “Always write the book you need to write.”

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