I killed off a character, but not in the way you might think. In my Hemo Sapiens novel-in-progress, I decided to merge two characters into one.

Initially, I had wanted one, but I decided I would have two detective Sergeants play off one another in a good cop/bad cop sort of way. In the end, they had nuance, but there wasn’t really enough to justify the reader to track two people. They each had separate story lines and interacted often enough, so the question was how to combine them.

Allow me to step back for a moment. My word count was about 132,500, and I was still merging five short stories into this novel idea and making good progress. In fact, it’s been assembled, but I need to smooth some edges and fill in some gaps and transitions as well as look for opportunities to foreshadow and refine payoff promises.

During this process, I felt that the two Detective Sergeants weren’t worth keeping. I opted to retain DS Lewis, a female, and cut DS Jones, a male. Lewis was a bit more insouciant and Jones was more rigid. Jones drank coffee and smoked cigarettes while Lewis was repulsed by these. They exchanged banter and worked in parallel on the main case. Now, I had to ferret out all of these instances and turn Jones’s masculine pronouns into the feminine form.

In some ways, it will also read better. I found myself changing Jones said to she said instead of to Lewis said because the reader was no longer tracking the two in a scene with other. I feel that the he said|she said structure takes less effort for the reader to parse, so it’s a Win™, and I’ll take it.

I mainly use Microsoft Word to write, so I just searched for all instances of Jones and made all of the necessary adjustments to Lewis. Then, I had to proofread all of the surrounding content to look for straggling pronouns. I think I’ve gotten them all, and I’m ready to continue polishing the merges. Oh, and I’m not even done writing it yet.

I am aiming for at least 140,000 words, but I’ll take more if it makes sense. The last thing I want to do is to pad a story. If it doesn’t move the plot forward or demonstrate something about a character to a reader, I don’t want it. I hate bloat, and I’ll presume most readers are the same. Very little body fat. Believe me, I will fat-shame a book. At 132,500 words, I’m at 135 pages. At 140,000, I should be at 168 if the maths hold. I’ll be fine with that. Again, if I can get more with meat (apologies to vegans), I’ll do it.

I already have an origin story in mind as well as many sequels, so I want to keep enough meat on the Hemo Sapiens bone to serve them well.

If you’ve had to sacrifice a character for the greater good of your work, I’d like to read about it. Drop a comment. Cheers! 🍷