Writing the Bad Guys
This post is more therapeutic than anything else. I’m struggling in my writing. I feel like my bad guys aren’t all that bad. I don’t know if it’s a mental block or a philosophical one. I feel as though I’ll have a hard time writing them accurately if I make them genuinely bad. Or, genuinely badder.
As a result, I’m mostly making the situation the bad guy. The bad guys are really more nuisances than anything else.
The problem I have with that is the prominence of bad guys in my reading. Ender’s Game, for example, features bad guys that aren’t really bad, good guys that aren’t all good (Graff… although he’s somewhat redeemed), and bad guys that are just plain bad (Peter, although redeemed in the later books, doesn’t smell so good in this book. Also, Stilson and Bonzo. That sentence fragment is for the editors in the crowd. I like to make you think on Monday morning). In the Lord of the Rings, you have Sauron, the Ring Lords, and their armies who exude evil, Saruman who was good but turned evil, and Boromir who has a little personality flaw but recovers.
In the light of all that, making the situation the problem seems bland by comparison. So, I put it to you, readers (all four of you), do you prefer writing with clear, evil-doing, bad guys? Do you like shades of grey/gray? Or would you rather the author just write the good guys?
It depends on the type of book. Sometimes I enjoy a villain who is redeemable and then redeemed, if it seems realistic. But in fantasy, I think a truly evil villain is needed…or not.
Tell me, oh Hermit Editor, how do you feel about villains who are redeemable but not redeemed?
for the record, i think shades of grey are far more realistic. i mean, hitler was a horrible person, but an amazing painter who apparently had a weak stomach. Stalin was a horrible person, but very loving to his family, etc. Some villains who come across as redeemable, or even redeemed, are only “redeemed” in the book because you learn their motivation for their actions.
That brings up the whole “does the end justify the means” debate, but really, given the right motivation anyone can do something that someone else considers wrong.
All that to say that yeah, shades of grey. some are redeemable, and some may just be plain evil.
and to add to that, in LoTR Sauron was bad, but if you read the Simarillion, he wasn’t even the worst, he was just a servant of Morgoth, the true evil in Arda, who was a “fallen god” (read: Satan,) and so really, Sauron wasn’t a truly evil character.
Well, I hated the wicked witch of Oz – and she was not redeemed.
I hated all the truly evil characters in Chronicles of Narnia – then there were some who were just serving the bad guys out of expedience – hmmm
Now I’m going to get caught up in the “but for the grace of God, there go I” line of thinking – I agree with Billy Graham’s expressed view that he was as capable of any horrendous sin given the right circumstances -
Well when you make the situation the bad guy, do you do it in such a way that it “justifies” the sin?
I remember reading a crime novel years ago – one of the “Deadly Sin” novels – I forget which one – but it centered around a lady with Addison’s disease who kept killing men.
She was painted as a sympathetic character – a victim to her disease.
So, I’ve just said a whole lot of nothing, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out. (What does Sam suggest?)
I like ‘em bad, usually. But I agree it’s very hard to write. It seems to me that this is because writing charcaters well is about understanding them well, and that is hard to do. Empathy for villains is often hard to generate. But we have the sin in us to imagine it, sadly.
I also like to see them overwhelmed by remorse, repentence, etc. Like Darth Vader. Cool character arc.
I had no idea that you had an active blog until just now.
I’ve tried not to think of my characters as good guys or bad guys. In a given situation one guys acts in a way that seems good or bad (probably relative to the protagonist) but the architypical bad guy as an embodiment of evil doesn’t really make sense to me. I mean, even Morgoth wasn’t a full embodiment of evil, unless he did evil for evil’s sake…which doesn’t make much sense to me…
and now my head hurts.