: 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

@Annie587

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That depends what sort of story this is. And how you killed the character off.

If the story is set in a fantasy universe, you could have the character brought back with a magic spell. If it's a science fiction story, you might be able to posit some technology that brings him back.

Failing that, I presume you would have to say that he was not really dead, that the idea that he was dead was a mistake. Whether you can make that believable depends on how you killed him. If he was gunned down in front of 20 eye witnesses, and several people who knew him identified the body, and he was then cremated, it could be pretty tough to explain how this was all a mistake and he's really still alive. On the other hand, if he was a soldier in a combat zone and didn't return from a mission and was declared "presumed dead", saying he wasn't really dead after all isn't too implausible.

In general, I think bringing a character back from the dead is tricky. Usually if I see such a thing in a story, I say, "Oh brother, the author changed his mind about killing off this character and now he's trying to bring him back." Like many things in writing, it depends if you do it well or poorly.

Two factors in doing it well: 1. Plausibility. The more you have to explain away the worse it is. 2. Foreshadowing. If before the character is killed, you drop some hints that he's planning to fake his own death or whatever the circumstances, then when you do it later the reader doesn't feel as cheated. Then it doesn't look like you just changed your mind.

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