Do authors kill off characters in their books because they get lazy?

Because it advances the story.

They might or it might be for shock value but I think its generally a planned part of the story line.

No. They do so because the character has served their purpose, creates drama and emotion, and may add purpose to another part of the story. It could also be that they just want to remove an excess character. Sometimes as in life, characters just fade away and are not mentioned. When not killed off, they may come back in a later story or in the future as does in life.

They may have served their purpose, and the writer could not find a better way to get rid of them.

Those plot lines that were left hanging might be a set up for a sequel.

The author that always amazed me was Larry McMurtry (of Lonesome Dove fame). He dealt with the stories kinda like real life. Sometimes the bad guy lived and got away, sometimes the a good guy would get killed off and sometimes in the most mundane of ways. I never could predict at the beginning of one of his stories who would be alive in the end.

IMHO, I love character death in stories. When a character has fulfilled their arc, killing them off is a great way to increase the audience’s sense of investment in the remaining characters. Now, everytime they get in danger, you feel a little anxiety on their behalf because you know that this author is WILLING to kill off characters.

IMHO, Game of Thrones and Walking Dead were both overrated shows (not that they were bad, just that they weren’t as AMAZING as their rep). But one thing both did VERY well is use character death to raise the stakes for the audience. If you hadn’t read the books, Sean Bean’s death or the Red Wedding in GoT made you hold your breath a little everytime a character you liked was in peril.

Killing characters off also helps prevent a mistake that I think ALOT of long-running storytellers have. Not knowing when a character has lost their narrative purpose, and keeping them around to suck the oxygen out of every story going forward.

I’m thinking of a not so well known example where in season 1 of a show, a particular character was meant to be the romantic ‘will they/wont they’ character. But then the show changed it’s mind and decided that both characters were too decent for there to ever be good drama from their relationship (which was a shitty reason, but let’s ignore that for now).

The mistake is that because that actor was part of the cast, they kept him around for 4 seasons after that in which he was complete narrative deadweight. They tried to force his square peg into a few round holes, but they could never find a narrative purpose for him after that. He was a drag on every scene because he was just there to consume oxygen and say lines. He should have been killed off or ‘moved away’.

It’s more dramatic that way. Just as in real life. No need for a sequel.

Lazy and not-very-good authors do (and also for other bad reasons), sometimes, yes.

On the other hand, I’d say that not all characters who die and leave plot-threads severed by their deaths, are due to lazy writing. Death has a lot of effects, and can shake up many situations, and that’s certainly a valid thing to include in (good) fiction, too.

I’d say though that when the reader has a sense that a character is dying for any sort of transparent/shallow authorial reason, rather than because of the fictional situation, that indicates a weakness.

I have an early draft of Star Wars. In it Obi Wan Kenobi isn’t killed by Vader, but severely injured.
Lucas struggled with this because Obi Wan was too important to disappear due to injury.

Oh, that sounds interesting. Do you remember any more about what happened then?