I may have mentioned it here before – I’d be surprised if I hadn’t, but several years ago I thought the most absurd thing I’d ever heard a writer say was that they were surprised when a character died. How could that possibly be? That would be like a car manufacturer being surprised the vehicle was designed with only three wheels.

And yet, here I sit – again – scratching my head over what seems like the most improbable thing. One of my characters died on my watch.  And to be fair, this time it wasn’t some ‘barely-there-background character.’ No, this time it was an honest-to-goodness long-time main character.

If I’m completely honest, I had an inkling the character wouldn’t make it to the end of the series at the end of book six. I kind of figured there would be losses and this character was likely to be among them. After all, this book culminates in what is basically a war and even Dobby and one of the Weasley twins died in the end.

Nevertheless, it was a surprise to me when I reached a point when I knew what was going to have to happen.

As an aside – there are two types of writers – plotters and pantsers. Plotters have a nice outline where they have an idea of what’s going to happen at every point in the book before they actually write it. See the author of the aforementioned Harry Potter for a writer who is a plotter. Pantsers, on the other hand, and as the name implies, are seat-of-their-pants writers – making the whole thing up as they go. This is how I’ve written all six books of this series – in order from front to back as I go. This is not to say one way is better or worse than the other – it’s just how things are. Many pantsers would probably like to be more plotter-ish (guilty), and I assume many plotters would rather be a little more spontaneous. They both work fine for the people who do things that way.

As I typed, about mid-way through book six, I realized that I had written the story into a place where the only logical outcome was going to be this person not carrying on to the end of the book. But I kept typing, trying to convince myself that I could get out of it; that I could find a way to keep the character in a way that made sense.

Alas, it was not to be. So, now, when I hear a writer talk about how surprised they were when a character up and died, I can empathize with them. It’s far more shocking, if not outright traumatic, than you’d think. 

Consider, this is a character who you, as a writer, gave life to. This is a person on the page who has been a critical component of a large story and the building of a world. There might be more stories in your little writer’s head that this person would have been perfect for. But this isn’t the MCU – there is no Time Stone or do-overs. (If this were science fiction, then maybe, but it’s not.)

So, yes, it’s a very cool thing to make worlds out of whole cloth and create kingdoms and religions and after-lives and magic. But the other side of that coin is that sometimes the world you create becomes almost sentient and makes some of its own rules and twists fate – and you just have to roll with it to maintain the integrity of your creation.

And if you can maintain the integrity of the character as part of the loss… well then, maybe it was meant to be all along.