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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.

Chances are that the last couple of days, you’ve heard or read something about the recent election in Iran. Allegations of stuffed ballot boxes and fraud are everywhere. From everything that we in the west have ever seen from Ahmadinejad, we don’t really have any reason to doubt the allegations. People are passionate about it, too.

I don’t want to rob the situation of its gravity, but I do think there’s a lesson for writers (and readers) there. There is a natural human trait that loves to hate tyrants. This is especially true in America, probably because American history truly began with the overthrow of a tyrant. But, you can see this same reaction in Russia, China, France, even in the muted passions of my homeland, Canada. When people feel oppressed by tyrants, they will respond in some way. They may still get beaten down, but they’ll respond, and they’ll have support from around the world.

You can see this in great sci-fi and fantasy, too. The Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov explores ideas of subtle tyranny versus outright tyranny and left me wondering which was worse. So too did the Shadow series set in the Ender-verse by Orson Scott Card. These are themes that readers will connect with naturally (in varying degrees, of course). Realizing this is really helping me with my previous question about how to write bad guys. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be one bad guy. Instead, it can by a tyrannical system. Of course, usually you do find one bad guy at the head of that system.

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?