: Re: How can I bring back a dead main character without cliches? So I have a main character who will die at the end of the first book. In the next book he will be alive, but nobody knows

@LarsenBagley300

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The first rule of cheating Death in Fiction is "No Body, No Crime". You have to fool the audience into thinking the character is dead, by showing them entering the death trap... but not showing the body after the trap is sprung. This can be tricky and you'll need to work out how to put your character in a spot that they can survive but not.

In real life, there are incredible acts of survival that shouldn't be. I've seen stories of sky divers whose chutes failed to deploy and hit the ground at terminal velocity and lived. (They are not fighting ready, to be sure, but they do not die). But in fiction you want to avoid this... it may be real in reality, but in fiction it's unrealistic. And in some genres, your readers will not buy it for a second. Superhero fiction has been so plagued by dead characters being resurrected, that the default reaction of any death of a character is "He'll be back". Doubly so if they're a member of the X-Men. In fact, among comic fans, there used to be a saying that only three deaths are permanent in comics: Uncle Ben (Spider-Man), Bucky Barnes (Captain America), and Jason Todd (Second Robin). And two of those were resurrected! Every trick in the book to resurrect characters has been used here; so that, when writing the comic series 52, which was a series that had one issue every week, one character was scripted to fake his death and the writers had several close calls because they couldn't convincingly "kill" the guy without the fans thinking it over and concluding he's not really dead.

Best advice is to kill the guy, mourn him, miss him, and have him return at the time where he is most needed to assist and not a moment sooner. Either that or have him pull a Tom Sawyer and crash his own funeral... that's always fun.

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