www.andrewmackay.net:

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?