Writing the Bad Guys
I had the privilege recently to review a couple of stories by friends of mine. I love to read things that I have personal connections to, even though I know it can add to the challenge of impartiality. Bah, who’s ever really impartial anyway?
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that one of those friends wrote a bad guy in a particularly good way. Not that the bad guy was good–he was effectively, over-the-top, bad. I mean, oozed evil. Horrendous. Terrible. Capriciously evil. (I sure hope I used that word right… careless/motiveless about being bad?) He was just bad. I could genuinely dislike him without any effort at all. He lent himself to it.
It helped me to form some ideas about what’s really “evil.” I guess that we write evil as we know it. For me, it is one thing to do bad things, but it’s wholly another thing to do bad things without any cause whatsoever.
Maybe it says something about me as a reader rather than a writer that I’m so quick to forgive bad things done by people who were forced to it by a lousy situation. There is a part of me that says “It doesn’t matter why–if they did something bad, that’s all there is to it.” But then, motive has to come into play somewhere, doesn’t it? First degree murder is worse than manslaughter, isn’t it?
No answers, really… just questions. One day, when I write a story featuring a manslaughter suspect conversing with a first degree murder convict, I’ll trace it all the way back to this.
I had a strange involuntary reaction to this post. My right hand extracted a tissue from the box on my desk, my left hand twisted it in the middle, and then as I held it betwixt my nose and upper lip I heard my voice say in a deep register, “Pay the rent!”
