10 Funny Ways to Kill a (Fictional) Character

Do you enjoy cozy mysteries where the author finds unique, even funny, ways to do away with a character? I do. One of my favorite authors is Kathleen Ernst. She writes the Chloe Ellefson mystery series. Chloe is a curator at Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor living history museum. She finds dead characters in the most unusual places. I won’t give them away. If you enjoy cozy mysteries give the Chloe series a try.

When you combine an unusual death (minus the gore), an amateur sleuth, and a community of quirky characters, you can create a cozy mystery readers love.

What are some humorous ways to kill off a character? Here are a few ideas:

• A star football player is murdered by an imposter wearing his team’s mascot costume.

• Small-town mayor dies when a clown on a motorcycle runs over him during the town’s Founder’s Day parade.

• A futuristic character is approached by a robot shooting paper airplanes–but one of the airplanes is loaded!

• Farmer gets locked in the hen house and is pecked to death by rabid chickens.

• A drunk passes out in a big pile of leaves curbside and is scooped into a garbage truck.

• Candymaker, working overtime and alone, drowns in a vat of chocolate.

• Contestant dies after consuming 10 pounds of baked beans in an eating contest. (Oh, the possibilities!)

• Grammarian is crushed when a shelf of dictionaries falls on her.

• A fisherman on a riverbank is killed when an eagle carrying a tortoise drops the tortoise on the fisherman’s head. (Don’t laugh, this really happened to Aeschylus, the great Athenian author of tragedies.)

• A large molasses storage tank bursts, and a wave of molasses rushes through the streets killing anyone in its path. (This actually happened in Boston in 1919.)

If you are an author stuck looking for a unique way to kill off a character, Wikipedia offers a list of “real” unusual/ ironic deaths that occurred from 620 BC to the present. Also, check out Springhole.net’s “Cause of Death” generator, “Murder Mystery Victim” generator, and more.

Happy writing!

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What’s in a (Character’s) Name?

I have a new kitten, a little silver-gray tabby four months old. At the shelter, they called her “Hedwig”, it’s the name author J.K. Rowling gave the snowy-white owl in her Harry Potter books. My kitty isn’t white. She doesn’t look like an owl, act like an owl, or sound like an owl. She needed a name that fit her.

Authors put much thought into naming their characters. A name should mean something, reflect the character’s personality, or make the reader curious to know more. I named my kitten “Naomi Grace”. In the bible, Naomi is a recent widow who would have been all alone if, by God’s grace, her daughter-in-law promised never to leave her. I want my little Naomi always to have someone who will never leave her. Mine is her forever home. Her name reflects that.

Think about some of the great literary character names that readers remember—Atticus Finch, Ebenezer Scrooge, Robinson Crusoe, Ramona (the pest) Quimby, Miss Havisham—all were carefully chosen by authors to reflect the essence of their characters.

So, how do authors choose the best character names? Imagination and creativity are key, but if the perfect name doesn’t come to mind, there are tools that can help.

The US Social Security Administration web site includes a page where you can search names and their popularity for any year after 1879. You can search the most common names in US states and territories and even see how names have changed by popularity through the years.

Ancestry.com has a page where you can enter any surname and learn its meaning and origin. The page is free, you don’t have to be an Ancestry subscriber.

Name Combiner is a fun tool where you can enter up to four names and combine them to generate unique names and nicknames.

Here are some others:

Masterpiece Generator (from the UK)

Reedsy’s Character Name Generator

Name Generator for Fun (this one creates a random personality type for each character name)

If you enjoy exploring random places, seek out any small town and read about its history and people. You can also wander among old headstones in cemeteries. Jot down interesting names you find and keep a list.

A name should fit the character’s age, location, and personality. It should be easy to pronounce and fit your story’s genre making sense within the context of time and theme. Think about your characters’ parents and backgrounds. Let them help you choose the right names.

When naming characters
choose names that are right
for your character, your story and your readers.

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2 Writing Challenges to Start the New Year

My last blog post was in October. As with most of us, 2020 got in the way of my productivity. The pandemic, politics, riots, wildfires . . . each day, it seemed, there was something new to think about. Add to that a steady stream of freelance writing assignments, and blogging slipped to the bottom of my to-do list—

Did you know there’s a web site that features nothing but lists? Listverse will keep you occupied for hours. And check out Paula Rizzo’s book, Listful Living: A List-Making Journey to a Less Stressed You, where she’ll teach you how to tap into your own productivity style to get things done. Lists help us remember and to stay organized. Authors use lists. They keep journals in which they list new or unusual words, potential character names, mental images, sensory descriptions . . . Lists are like sticky post-it notes used to remind a writer of little things she or he might otherwise forget.

As we transition from 2020 to a new year, I have two writing exercises for you. Will you take the challenge?

First, think about 2020 (I know, you don’t want to!) and make some lists. Think about your strongest mental images and jot them down. What new words come to mind? Write those down, too. See if you can come up with ten lists about this past year. Then save those lists. Twenty-twenty was a year like no other in recent history. What you felt and observed in 2020, those strong emotions and images, will, one day, find their ways into your works of fiction. You’ll be glad you jotted them down.

Some of the world’s best authors use lists when writing descriptive prose. Here’s an example from an essay by John Updike:

Henry’s Variety Store
A few housefronts farther on, what had been Henry’s Variety Store in the 1940s was still a variety store, with the same narrow flight of cement steps going up to the door beside a big display window. Did children still marvel within as the holidays wheeled past in a slow pinwheel galaxy of altering candies, cards and artifacts, of back-to-school tablets, footballs, Halloween masks, pumpkins, turkeys, pine trees, tinsel, wrappings reindeer, Santas, and stars, and then the noisemakers and conical hats of New Year’s celebration, and Valentines and cherries as the days of short February brightened, and then shamrocks, painted eggs, baseballs, flags and firecrackers? There were cases of such bygone candy as coconut strips striped like bacon and belts of licorice with punch-out animals and imitation watermelon slices and chewy gumdrop sombreros. I loved the orderliness with which these things for sale were all arranged. Stacked squarish things excited me—magazines, and Big Little Books tucked in, fat spines up, beneath the skinny paper-doll coloring books, and box-shaped art erasers with a faint silky powder on them almost like Turkish delight. I was a devotee of packaging, and bought for the four grownups of my family (my parents, my mother’s parents) one Depression or wartime Christmas a little squarish silver-papered book of Life Savers, ten flavors packaged in two thick pages of cylinders labeled Butter Rum, Wild Cherry, Wint-O-Green . . . a book you could suck and eat! A fat book for all to share, like the Bible. In Henry’s Variety Store life’s full promise and extent were indicated: a single omnipresent manufacturer—God seemed to be showing us a fraction of His face, His plenty, leading us with our little purchases up the spiral staircase of years.

Self-Consciousness, Updike, John, (Knopf, 1989), “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington”

Your second challenge is to create one descriptive paragraph using lists. You can describe a place, an event, a group of people, an experience, an object, a memory . . . the list of themes is almost endless! Work on that paragraph, edit it, refine it, polish it until it represents your very best writing. Then save it. You might need it as a writing sample someday.

These two exercises are a fantastic way to give your writing skills a workout and getting your creative juices flowing as you enter 2021.

Happy new year!

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