Who’s your fall guy?

by Vickie Johnstone

Fall guys… ah, we all know about those. Growing up watching Star Trek (my dad’s fave – and he looked a bit like him!) with William Shatner forever getting his shirt ripped diagonally (in the exact same place every time – was there magic tape?), I knew that whenever someone we didn’t really know beamed down to the spooky planet of the week, he wasn’t coming back. But that was okay because we hadn’t really got to know them, and sometimes their death saved the life of someone more important or much fitter, and it was always much better than one of our heroes – Kirk, Spock or Bones – getting squished.

I was thinking about this while watching an episode of the second series of The Walking Dead. I love this show – it’s my latest addiction! Anyway, a character that I really liked got… well… how can I put it? He got dead-ed. Kaput. Squished. Therefore this person (I won’t give it away) won’t be appearing again. I went to bed thinking oh no! I liked this character. He had personality. I’d gone through nearly two whole series with this person, sharing his laughter, sadness, struggles, battles with the yucky looking undead-ed people, seeing what he had for dinner… the whole kaboom. And now… well, you-know-who was zombie spam. But then if you have a series and you keep bumping off those characters that viewers don’t know so well or care too much about, after a while you’re going to end up with your core set of characters – a tightly knit pack of people who you think will never part. Yep, they’re going to live forever, together, happily ever after. Damn it if your favourite character gets squished – who are you going to be egging on thereafter?

So, say you’re writing a horror series and you end up with the character core, who do you bump off next? You’ve invested in those characters. They’ve gained their own fan clubs. It’s like some kind of character roulette. Eeeny, meeny, miney, mo. Then again, if you’re writing a romantic tragedy you might choose to bump off a character just because they’re so well liked by readers/audience in a bid to get us all weeping? What’s the alternative? No, no, not Mr Spock. Don’t let him be killed by the flying cheddar from outer space. Oh, he’s okay, let’s just bump off the expendable characters… yeah!

Which got me thinking, who’s the fall guy in your book? Have you been bumping off your characters with more oomph than a hungry Vickie gobbles a packet of Maltesers? Have you written a book where one of the main characters is going to meet a ghastly end just to shock or upset your reader, or to pull at the heartstrings so they don’t forget your story?

I started thinking of some of the characters who died in books I’ve read, leaving me a bit gutted – Boromir (okay, I only saw the film of LOTR, but still, boo hoo), Helen Burns, Anna Karenina, any main hero in Shakespeare’s tragedies (the genre kind of giving it away) and that guy in The Shining (but he did go bad), although I didn’t feel sorry for the wolf at the end of Little Red Riding Hood.

Many a book I’ve read has ended with the main character being snuffed out. Have I shed tears at an ending? You bet, ever since I read Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. That poor Little Match Girl and that even poorer little birdie up Nelson’s Column (oo-er), and don’t even get me started on Watership Down. Those are bunnies! Cute bunnies! Bunnies!! You can’t do that to fluffies! It got to the point that whenever I read a book with a sad ending I’d just rewrite it in my head. So the bunnies had a big bunny party and lived bunnily happily ever after.

So, who’s going to get it in your book? Will it be the evil villain of the piece, all deserving of his cruel end? Or are you penning a love story where you just know it’s not going to end up with wedding cake? Then again, are you writing a mayhem-fuelled murder mystery where, let’s face it, it’s anyone’s guess who’s going to make it to the end or turn up in a stew.

I’ve cheated. I’m writing a series for children, full of cute fluffy animals and moral behaviour, so I’m really not allowed to bump off anyone. It would be too upsetting. Let’s face it, I’d be devastated. I can’t kill off kitty cats. Even the naughty one keeps getting away with being naughty. I can’t kill him. I just lock them up sometimes. That’s okay, surely? And sometimes the other baddies get frozen – for a wee while, until they get locked up too. Sometimes they might get hit a little by another animal, but that’s okay, because they’re being taught a valuable lesson – don’t mess with the good guys! Only the bad guys get in trouble. And there’s no bloodshed. There’s no Little Match Girl trauma here. Yet, the wicked side of me would like to write a horror story now – a full-on, blood-splattering, ass-kicking horror where just about everybody gets it – even the core characters who readers have got attached to – in the worst possible way! How mean! But how liberating! Or is it?

So, are you down to your core set of characters yet? Are you at the point where you’ve got to choose who is going to go next? Are you feeling a little sad or are you cackling away with glee? Will you miss writing that character or has he run out of literary juice? Then again, will you take the rather cowardly, but nice way out and just get rid of one of the expendables? Who’s your fall guy going to be?

[A version of this article appeared on the blog Vixie’s Stories on March on March 6, 2012. It was submitted here by the author and is reproduced with the author’s consent.]

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