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Sample Essay: Tips Towards Creating Endearing Bad Guys
Here it is. This is the kind of essay I can imagine other Culties writing for a sort of monthly workshop ritual. Not overly long and with enough examples to demonstrate the techniques that you're teaching.
[QUOTE][B][SIZE=4]TIPS TOWARDS CREATING ENDEARING BAD GUYS[/SIZE][/B]
It would have been no fun if, when hearing the story of Little Red Riding Hood for the first time, we had been told that the wolf was dealing with a serious personal dilemma with no easy solution. When you’re seven, it’s hard – and boring – to try and find redeeming qualities in the bad guy. Why should you care if the wolf was deeply hurt as a pup by a cruel little girl who used a slingshot to blind one of his eyes, after the rest of his family had been shot by the little girl’s older brothers? A family of people whose blonde curls and cute human faces led him to loathe everything about the human race – that’s why he has no qualms about devouring Little Red Riding Hood. He isn’t just hungry, he’s vindictive.
This would probably bore or confuse a kid, but it makes for a far more endearing telling of an otherwise idiotic fairytale. The wolf, traditionally a mere villain and an obstacle to be overcome, becomes a protagonist in his own right. Notice how I haven’t mentioned any of Little Red Riding Hood’s qualities; it’s the wolf, the archetypal bad guy of fairytales, who’s been made over. It’s all detail; of course. Ultimately, the anthropomorphic wolf still eats an elderly woman and then her granddaughter, in the safety of their home.
If Rapunzel’s witch keeps the long-haired beauty in her tower because she reminds her of a daughter she once had, the story changes. She isn’t simply evil; she is human. The witch refuses to let Rapunzel escape because she’s afraid to lose the only thing that keeps the memory of her daughter alive. Sure, she’s cruel and ugly and all that stereotypical “bad witch” horseshit, but at least we can understand her reasoning, even if we don’t agree with it.
Giving your antagonists specific appealing qualities can greatly increase the tension felt by your readers. Your protagonist wants something (X) because it will help him save his mother’s life. Your antagonist also wants X, but for what reason? If it’s to take over the world, he becomes flat, clichéd and almost objectified by the role he needs to play, the role of the “evil, evil, evil bad guy”. But if your antagonist wants X so he can save his own mother’s life, conflict arises. For instance, let’s say that X is a cash reward for finding a millionaire’s lost poodle. Both your hero and his greatest enemy are racing to find the poodle, because, incredibly, both of their mothers need an immediate organ transfer. The thing is, your hero is much friendlier and kinder than his enemy, who is known for being cruel and aggressive. Naturally, your readers will want your hero to find the poodle first. But what if your hero finds out that his enemy once went out of his way to help someone in dire need, for no personal gain and at great personal expense? Not only that, but the enemy’s mother is a very sweet old lady, a philanthropist who watched helplessly as her elder son (the enemy’s brother) went insane and had to be locked in an insane asylum? To make it even more unlikely, how about the enemy, in a rare moment of sweetness, even comes to visit your hero’s mother to see how she’s doing, because she used to be his kindergarten teacher?
Yes, it’s incredibly contrived. But it serves to create a certain moral ambivalence within your reader. If your kind and intelligent hero finds the poodle and is able to pay for his mother’s operation, then his greatest enemy (who, your reader finds out, isn’t so bad after all) will have nothing to live for, and a wonderful person will die. Yet if the bad guy finds the poodle, the nicest person in your novel, your protagonist, will watch his mother die.
Bad guys in action movies rarely show another side. In horror novels, monsters are usually monsters and nothing more – and it’s okay to lock them in a burning shed and hope that they die. But a human monster is rarer – even the repulsive Claudius, Hamlet’s father, feels regret at having murdered his brother in order to become king of Denmark. Yet he treasures his power too much to confess his crime. We’re treated to a monologue in which Claudius expresses his inner turmoil, and we grow to pity him rather than despise him. He becomes human.
Reading about people who are evil through-and-through is tedious. There’s too much of that around. You often see writers advising against creating protagonists who are “too” perfect, characters who are honest, hardworking, kind, honorable and brave all at once. Well, it’s just as dangerous to create bad guys who are “too” imperfect. Give them some redeeming qualities. The effect you’re trying to achieve is subtle but powerful: you want to make your reader feel a little guilty when your protagonist achieves his goal, as if they were also secretly rooting for the other team. You may have written a happy ending, but it should be bittersweet – “It’s too bad that the bad guy was so misled,” you want your readers to say. “If only he’d taken more time to know himself,” “If only he had channeled his rage into something productive…”
Even Judas Iscariot killed himself. Why? Could he have been all that bad if he felt guilty enough to end his life because of his actions? He’s not as opposed to Jesus as you’d think. Jesus – sinless, without fault – loses his temper in the temple, when he sees how a place of worship has been turned into a centre for exchanging material wealth. It isn’t very reasonable to upturn tables and start moralizing out loud. Jesus is human for a reason: it makes his story so much more powerful, because he feels pain and anguish and dies a humiliating and gruesome death. If he was just God without the human aspect, who would care? He wouldn’t feel pain or temptation; he would simply be perfect. Likewise, it’s less effective to have a “perfectly evil” bad guy than it is to create someone who is deeply flawed but ultimately understandable.
Remember: Your protagonist doesn’t have to be a good guy, and your antagonist doesn’t have to be a bad guy.[/QUOTE]
What do you think?
[QUOTE=corellion;949882]Give us some examples of these characters in fiction so we can talk and discuss and be academic.[/QUOTE]
I suggest we leave that until the whole essay thing is official, or more definitive.
Also, I have to go to bed now, because I'm picking up a friend tomorrow morning and we're not planning on getting much sleep tomorrow night. But I'm glad you find it useful.
Some of these characters include:
Tom from [I]The Great Gatsby[/I]
Sludden from [I]Lanark[/I]
Piotr Petrovich from [I]Crime and Punishment[/I]
Tybalt from [I]Romeo and Juliet[/I]
Sergeant Moon from [I]Penny Dreadful[/I]
[QUOTE=xec8;949897]
Sergeant Moon from [I]Penny Dreadful[/I][/QUOTE]
I just finished this a little while ago and I see what you're saying. I don't really remember too much about Moon, but I remember not hating him because he seemed like such a fuck-up. He was a total slob and I felt sort of sorry for him.
Thanks for putting this up.
I know it's asking a lot, and I read what you said above about waiting until everything is official, but I wonder how you woudl feel about giving us a short assignment related to your topic?
Either way, thank you very much.
[QUOTE=tomstrong83;949953]I just finished this a little while ago and I see what you're saying. I don't really remember too much about Moon, but I remember not hating him because he seemed like such a fuck-up. He was a total slob and I felt sort of sorry for him.
Thanks for putting this up.
I know it's asking a lot, and I read what you said above about waiting until everything is official, but I wonder how you woudl feel about giving us a short assignment related to your topic?
Either way, thank you very much.[/QUOTE]
I could give you a short assignment, yeah. Give me some time to think about it.
So I take it that the style in which my essay is written is appropriate; it would be great if we could come up with one of these a month. As the saying goes, teaching is the best way to learn.
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[QUOTE=xec8;949791]
What do you think?[/QUOTE]
It's a good essay. The difference between flat and round characters is basic but essential knowledge. It's important to know how to create rounded, fully human characters of depth and complexity, yet still have them play protagonist/antagonist roles with each other. Dramatic tension and situational conflict are vital to fiction. Yet to achieve it, you don't want to have to rely on the one-dimensional good guy/bad guy stereotypes of an action film. I'm just recapping in this first graph, what I think you've covered perfectly, converting it over into my own language and understanding.
At some moment in the 1980's, literary fiction (especially short stories) became insufferably introverted and stuffy. Some of it was long before then, to be sure, but by 1982, what started out as innocent post-60's navel-gazing had crawled completely up its own rectum and died. This death involved the mistaken notion that serious fiction can't have good guys and bad guys or anything at all resembling a plot. And this meant that any writer who longed for dramatic tension, conflict, and even a bit of action, would need to throw off the pretensions of the literati and throw in with the "hacks," heading straight for the genres (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, erotica, western, etc). Or perhaps even take a shot at writing for television and film.
The exciting thing, for me, about Chuck's work, is that it achieves situational dramatic tension without relying on the stock mold of our old favorite genres. And it achieves a certain degree of literary quality and voice, without getting lost in contrived and overly psychologized depths. That's a pretty fine line to walk. The reason I bring it up here is because I'm analyzing why a basic distinction between flat and round characters would be conspicuously absent from the lessons we've already had. It's the sort of thing that any beginning fiction writing class should at least touch upon, and an intermediate fiction class could go into this territory and profitably live there for an entire semester.
What's more, it's the sort of thing you [I]would[/I] focus on, almost certainly, in a more traditional fiction class. I'm guessing the absence of this approach to the territory in any of Chuck's essays and assignments has something to do with the "dangerous writing school" he came through under Spanbauer--something that traces back to Gordon Lish. From what I gather, it can be brutal under Lish. The sort of situation where you're challenged to spew forth the best words from your deep, internal process, writing directly from the wound. If it doesn't register as an authentic, original voice to the master, something he's never heard before, he says something dismissive that may set a sensitive beginning writer back for years. But if you're a genius, like Mark Richard or Amy Hempel, Lish pushes you past where other writers break and out comes something wonderful.
This all gets very altered and softened under Spanbauer, and given over more to a conscious learning and deployment of minimalist techniques, rather than the intuitive, personal trama approach favored by Lish. It's like they've formulated some of the biases I understand Lish deploys as an editor, but retrofitted those distinctions back into the primary process stage. But it's still all ridiculously high level stuff.
What I'm saying: it's simple for most students in "chuckshop" to grasp a concept like "submerging the 'I'" or eliminating static verbs, or artfully using choruses, but it's all part and parcel of a very specialized approach to writing and literature that may not transform very many people into great or even competent authors--especially if they don't already have some background.
If you've never studied the difference between flat and round characters in literature, and maybe done some basic exercises in character development in a college workshop, then coming straight into "chuckshop" while very young and inexperienced and just scooping up a bunch of high level techniques, all slanted toward minimalism, well, it's a bit like attempting to become a world-class oncologist before going to medical school or gaining any of the competencies of a general practitioner.
I think a combination of four years in college studying journalism, experience writing for a newspaper, tons of amateur experiments in fiction--writing and reading stories with his college friends--and a [B]great big huge dollup of natural genius [/B]made chuck into a terrifically good candidate for Spanbauer's workshops, able to use these distinctions of minimalism as [B]finishing techniques[/B], instead of basic building materials.* But for lots of other people, it's a diving into the deep end of the deep blue water, when maybe you haven't learned the basic strokes to stay alive and finish a story.
In other words, you've started in a good place with this essay and hit on some basic concepts of fiction that beginners will definitely need. And that's a good thing. The length of this post reflects both an attempt to make that observation--hopefully without sounding dismissive--and also a genuine grappling and search for the points of connection between different spheres of knowledge and technique.
[SIZE=1]*able to use these distinctions of minimalism as [B]finishing techniques[/B], instead of basic building materials.* [Although this building metaphor is imperfect, of course, because in the arts, all knowledge is recursive, and there's never quite such a neat division into separate echelons or spheres. When you finally find your "school," it's just as vaild to say you're starting over as it is to say you're learning the finishing techniques.][/SIZE]
VP - Workshop Dog
.jpg "Dr.Jekyll8Mr.Hyde's picture")
As a side step, a good way to counter or work against one-dimensional characters is the anti-hero, basically all of chuck’s protagonists, where you don’t know whether to love or hate the narrator. The anti-hero is typically a person you don’t immediately relate to or feel sympathy for but eventually redeeming characteristics bubble to the surface. A favorite of mine is in Choke, where the protagonist admits to the all accusations around him, especially in the nursing home: “yeah I raped your sister, killed your dog, ate your last pork chop, etc.” It’s loathsome and endearing all in the same vein; by admitting to all those atrocities he gives people closure and a person to direct their rage at. So yeah, that seems it step with your essay 8ce8dcx.
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