Heroic Writing, part 11: Death and Dying

A few nights back, I was sitting in chat with , , , , , , , , , and and the topic of a particular hero’s choice of firearm came up.  I will not recap the entire conversation here, because, while it was interesting, it was only tangentially related to what I wish to discuss.  What was important, from my point of view, and what I found myself reflecting on thereafter, was the way in which different characters respond to death, dying, and the taking of life.

A common theme, especially in western superhero fiction, is that real heroes do not kill people- or, at the very least, they do their level best to avoid it.  Superman, certainly, is portrayed in most popular culture as being against killing, and Batman struggles against nearly impossible odds and still, somehow, manages to almost never kill.  Wonder Woman- who was raised as an amazon warrior- basically never killed until the nineties.  The number of heroes with an ingrained code against killing is ridiculously high, especially when the caliber of their enemies is taken into account, and yet I cannot bring myself to dislike it.

Rather than turn this column into a soapbox for me to parade my own philosophy on, what I would like to do is invite you to consider your own characters views on death and killing.  More specifically, I want to invite you to consider what has informed your character’s opinions.  Fair warning: I will be delving a bit more into my own characters in this column than usual, although I will try and make sure that all the points I bring up are of general usefulness and, also, not boring.  I may occasionally bring up some other authors’ characters, whether they are Angels Falls characters or characters from rather more mainstream publications.

To start the ball rolling, I’d like to direct you to a short journal I wrote some years back highlighting why villains in well-written fiction are usually less anxious to commit murder than heroes.  Obviously this isn’t universally true, and any number of major-league villains are all too happy to do away with pesky annoyances in a permanent manner if the opportunity arises, but it does start to highlight something of a double standard that has been getting more and more pronounced in recent decades- specifically, that while villains may make plans that could potentially kill many people, it is the heroes who as often as not get away with what can only be called murder from a legal standpoint.

To that end, let’s discuss types of homicide.  As a point of clarification, I will be talking specifically about American law; if you wish to learn more about non-US law, the information is readily available, but it is not strictly relevant to .  According to The Free Legal Dictionary by Farlex, homicide includes the intentional and unlawful taking of a life, called murder; the unlawful taking of a life due to being enraged or simple carelessness, called manslaughter; and the deliberate but lawful taking of a life, termed justifiable or excusable homicide.  Murder is typically broken into two categories: first degree murder and second degree murder.  First degree murder occurs when the death of an individual is the result of a deliberate and premeditated act- in other words, the murderer acts with malice aforethought.  Second degree murder occurs when there is intent to kill, but the act was not planned in advance.  Depending on the state, the line between these two degrees may be blurred, especially if the murder occurred during the commission of another crime.  It is common, although not universal, for a criminal who allows a victim to die, whether intentionally or not, to automatically be found guilty of first degree murder.

Another blurring of the line happens when a state has a law that distinguishes voluntary manslaughter from second degree murder.  Basically, voluntary manslaughter means that the perpetrator was sufficiently enraged that he acted with the intent to kill, but the jury deems that any reasonable man would be similarly enraged.  It is distinguished from second degree murder by the degree of emotional involvement of the perpetrator.  Involuntary manslaughter happens when someone dies due to carelessness or negligence of the perpetrator.  There is no malice, no intent, but there is still fault because the perpetrator should have acted more cautiously.

Finally, the categories of justifiable homicide and excusable homicide occur when someone dies but the jury deems that there was a sufficient reason to make the death lawful.  Soldiers and police killing in the line of duty are usually found to have committed justifiable homicides; when someone is killed because the perpetrator was defending himself or someone else, the finding is generally excusable homicide.  Justifiable and excusable homicides typically do not carry legal penalties, although they may be difficult to prove, given that prosecutions will generally attempt to show that a lesser degree of force could have been used successfully.

One thing to consider when thinking about your character’s position on killing is, obviously, your character’s background.  Looking back at the Batman, for a moment, I have always thought that his unusually strong code versus killing was a result of witnessing his parents’ deaths at a very young age- his personal understanding of how deeply that loss can damage a person (the Batman is nothing if not profoundly damaged) drives him to seek alternatives to what must seem the more expedient option, even when dealing with seemingly hopeless lunatics such as the Joker.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are characters like ’s Soviet Superwoman and ’s American Mom- these are characters who have seen military action, have killed men in the line of duty, and no longer want to do that.  The reasons a character may wish to avoid killing their enemies are legion, but they do not describe all heroes equally.

On the other end of the scale are heroes who will kill; these characters tend to be a lot more ambivalent, both to the audience and in the eyes of the public.  Some of them may even be considered antiheroes or villains.  Of course, the classic example here is The Punisher, a man who was so emotionally crippled by the death of his wife and son that he felt he had no recourse but to avenge them by killing their murderers- and then continued in that vein by attacking and killing any criminal that he felt was somehow escaping justice.  In my own stable of characters, there’s Will-O-Wisp who has committed cold-blooded murder on at least one occasion in order to protect her older brother.  Note that I use the term murder here advisedly, because she did not kill someone in a fit of blind rage; she did it deliberately and coldly, and she got away with it.  While Will-O-Wisp does not go around indiscriminately murdering anyone who annoys her- and, in fact, she does not even think of herself as a murderess- she is still absolutely a murderer and she does not feel guilty about it.

A gray area concerns heroes who kill either by accident or in the line of duty.  Typically, heroes who try to avoid killing others are rarely shown to make fatal mistakes- and when they do, those mistakes have serious psychological consequences.  An example from mainstream comics would be when Captain America killed one of the Flagkiller’s minions; although he was not held legally accountable, he regretted the action and continued to second-guess his actions and choices for several of the following stories.  Further, he demonstrated unreasonable anger at both himself and his opponents- he felt that he had been placed in an untenable situation and that the only choice he had been able to make was a bad one, so he lashed out even more violently than he normally would have.  One of my own characters, Apollo had a similar experience when he killed an assailant entirely by accident.  The point of these scenes is to force the hero to confront a difficult situation that cannot be solved by hitting it; making the consequences dependent on the hero’s character makes them compelling, especially if they demonstrate (as previously mentioned) the possibility of failure.  Finally, there are characters, such as my own Zed who may be called to kill someone without warning and without hesitation all the while acting in the line of duty; while Zed dislikes killing and is vehemently opposed to it outside of duty, he is also a former soldier and a current police officer; he knows his duty and he will not hesitate to do it.

I’m going to break away from established events in Angel Falls and mainstream comics to discuss, just briefly, the concept of grief.  Grief is a primarily human concept, although it is not unreasonable to assume that creatures with human-like intelligences and emotions also suffer from it.  In her book, On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the five stages of dying.  Faced with death, a hero may go through the stages of grief- denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  These stages all typically appear when death is expected and not instantaneous, although there is no set order and they may be intermingled with other feelings.

Now, it is not unreasonable to assume that heroic characters- and I’m using the word in the full Greek sense of it, not the watered-down modern sense- may become inured to the feelings inspired by possible death; they face death on a daily basis, after all, and they’re still around and kicking.  It makes sense, though, that these same characters might display flashes of these emotions during suitably tense or emotionally charged battles. 

A more difficult story- and a potentially more gripping one- is a story that deals with the hero’s inevitable death or the inevitable death of a loved one.  In my experience, the temptation is to lessen the impact by either offering a last-minute escape or by simply ignoring the consequences.  I urge you, as an author, do not do this.  If you choose to write a story in which it is necessary for a character to die or to suffer bereavement, then follow through.  Failure to do so cheapens a fundamental human experience.

Bereavement occurs when a character loses someone close to him; it can be prolonged, as in the case of disease, or sudden, such as when a loved one dies in an accident.  The emotional stages of bereavement are similar to those of dying, but they tend to be more predictable.  When the death is prolonged, later stages are often eased by the anticipatory stages; if, on the other hand, the death is sudden or unexpected, later stages are generally much harder to overcome.

There are some other issues to deal with; one, in particular, that I’d like to deal with is the question of how long the emotional stages of death and bereavement should affect any given character.  Bluntly, there is no hard and fast rule; I suspect for most characters, one or two stories, maybe three if the process is started before the death actually occurs, would be sufficient.  Some characters, however, may reasonably experience grief differently or on a completely different scale.  I have one character, Liberty Belle, who has been mourning her husband for literally decades; given that she has not physically aged beyond her early twenties and she is over a hundred years old, I thought this was a reasonable assumption.  Basically, she doesn’t experience time in quite the same way normal humans do- if she did, she would have to go mad- so strong emotions take longer to take hold, but are also much harder to dispel.  Of course, it might also work the other way- elves, for example, are often portrayed as flighty and somewhat shallow.  If you assume that behavior is a response to their incredibly long lifespans- Tolkien posited that they could not die of age, for example- then it is possible that they only ever suffer the weakest pangs of loss because all other life is so transitory.

I took a class back in college focused on teaching books and literature to adolescents, and it was fascinating.  The name of the class was “Teaching Young Adult Fiction”, but my fellow students and I quickly came to calling it by the affectionate and surprisingly apt moniker of “Death Lit”.  The reason for this is because, as teenagers, people start to understand that there is an end to life, and the idea is scary; much of young adult literature, therefore, spends a great deal of time investigating the mysteries of death and loss.  I’m going to recommend a few books that I’ve read, some of them from that class, some of them as part of my duties as the unpaid high school librarian for seven years.  Some of these may be books that you’ve read or that your children have read- they are books that I believe can help you when it is time to write your own story about grief and bereavement.

One of my favorite books on this subject is Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper.  Now, a little disclaimer: there have been a number of fairly scathing reviews of this story and, if I’m honest, there are some places where this book could be improved.  Further, the ending is abrupt- far too abrupt, in fact, and it feels as if Picoult wrote herself into a corner and then had no choice but to use a sledgehammer to break herself out.  That said, if you can get past that, this book does an amazing job of exploring long-term grieving and what happens when a family is stuck with a situation that has no happy ending.

While I’m here, let me add Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.  For me, this was an intensely difficult story to read- it’s the author’s account of making sense of the sudden loss of her husband.  I read it not long after my grandfather died, about a month after I wrote In Defiance of Dying, and found myself having to put it down regularly as I empathized so strongly with what Didion was feeling.  Again, this book is not without its flaws- Didion’s experience is highly personal, yet she writes like a detached observer; a highly emotive person (I am not) is likely to find that difficult to read and a bit wearing, especially as you approach the end of the book.  That said, I felt that Didion’s treatment was extremely honest and detailed- the kind of thing that someone who is accustomed to looking at the world through jaded eyes can really dig into and understand, and that can really help the cynic break free from his protective shell.

One last book- really, there are hundreds, but you’re probably better off seeking them out for yourself- and I’ll go: Alan Silberberg’s Milo: Sticky Notes and Brain Freeze is, in the words of one reviewer, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid if the mom died.”  That’s not a bad review- the book is definitely a book written for a younger set, filled with illustrations and the sort of difficulties a child typically faces in middle school, but it’s something that older readers can also read without feeling that they’re brains are being slowly turned into oatmeal.  The language is believable and themes are honest.  Most people have experienced loss at some point in their adolescent years, and this book feels like a true portrayal of how life feels when that happens.