Young Writers Society

I've been writing my trilogy of books for some time now. Without going into details, a few side characterless have been killed off throughout but now I'm writing the climax of the series. In the scene, every major and minor character has been pulled into a city wide battle. Out of the remaining 24 characters, only 5 will survive the next chapter.

This chapter (named Reaping for obvious reasons) goes through the battle as the characters are killed off one by one or in small groups. However I feel like killing 19 characters might be a bit much for some readers.

Should I stick with the mass killing of my characters or have them die off gradually? This battle does last for half of book 3 so there is plenty of room.

19 Characters to kill
Major - 7
Side/Minor - 12

I suggest you don't call it a Reaping, otherwise it may turn cliche.

A mass killing would probably be more disorienting for your readers than anything. I suggest spacing it out a bit if you're really committed to killing 19 characters. What I would recommend most, though, is considering why each of these characters needs to die (does it add to the plot to have them killed off?) and whether it would just be easier to cut them from the plot altogether. Having nineteen disposable characters that can all be killed off in the same scene seems a little outrageous.

It also strikes me as slightly problematic that one battle lasts half of an entire book? Perhaps it's more intricate than I can tell right now, but I would heavily consider whether this needs to take up so much of the book and whether you can scale it back. Long battles are fine, but you run into the serious struggle of maintaining reader attention throughout the whole thing if it just keeps going on and on and on.

I don't know twenty-four characters in real life. Unless this is an Ice and Fire size epic, you may have gone overboard.

Whatever suits your novel, of course. But I'd recommend the latter, especially if you've devoted multiple chapters to fleshing them out. If you don't brand deaths onto the reader's skull, they'll forget them; it's as simple as that.

Although, slow and excruciating deaths ... if there's nineteen, each will get lost in the shuffle. I'd jam the insignificant ones together and then ease the reader's attention to the less insignificant ones. Note I said "ease." This chapter's a golden opportunity to develop the characters' weaknesses. I'd put equal emphasis on each one, but just a slight bit more on the ones who'll remain alive.

It depends how bloody the battle is supposed to be Does each death move the story along? Is it essential that all of those characters die?

I originally was going to kill Jake, a character of mine that was originally on the losing side of a love triangle. But then, I thought...



And I worked him into the plot line, which is actually better. Some people say that killing off your characters is lazy, which is not always true, but doing that many at a time seems like you are trying to eliminate all the loose ends you would otherwise have to tie up. Just my thoughts.

Hope this helps!
-Grace