Au Revoir Dédé

I killed off a character today, wrote him right out of life and it feels positively weird. And sad.

This was not a person of great meaning. I needed him to reflect the attributes and defects of other, more important player in the book I'm writing, but still, I liked him. I honestly don't know where he came from; he just appeared almost whole one late evening, a small boy named Dédé Bourillot, son of a largely inept dentist, born innocent, neither bright nor dumb, an inveterate trouble-maker of middling cleverness who just wants to get along. Dédé's most endearing--or troubling--trait was that he believed eating raw onions would make him smart and healthy. It did neither. If I had to have an image of what Dédé looked like, I would be that of Dil, the smallest kid in Richard Thompson's charming strip, Cul de Sac.

I now have to make his death count. There will be ramifications. His passing will be the stone thrown in the pond, creating ripples. The fact that right now I have no idea how all this will work is beside the point--Dédé will not have died in vain. That would be too cruel, too insensitive even for fiction, because here is the thing: once a character is created, he is no longer fictional. If he's done well, he'll have breath, life, thoughts, ambitions. He will engage others, meddle in their lives, become a power in and of himself. That's how good fiction works, I believe--by creating people we find endearing, and placing them in situations we understand and feel a part of.

It's not always easy. Dédé didn't have much of a chance to develop. He's in about 25 pages of what will be a 400-page novel but I'm hoping his brief life will be remembered. He will be resurrected a few times in the thoughts and memories of other characters.

I hope I do him justice.