NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/misc/writing/3519

Text File | 1992-11-12 | 1.7 KB | 38 lines

Newsgroups: misc.writing
Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!rsoft!mindlink!a710
From: [e-mail] (Crawford Kilian)
Subject: Re: Fiction Advice 12: Show & Tell
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 02:01:00 GMT
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (Usenet)
Lines: 27

Jon Campbell raises a point that I really sympathize with. If you find
yourself, as the resident God of your story, creating really evil characters,
you may not be happy with your story or yourself.

I had a similar experience as recently as Chapter 2 of Redmagic, a week or so
ago, when I found myself portraying the actions and thoughts of a wizard
whose idea of right behavior is to cut someone's heart out as proper
gratitude for a success. It gave me the creeps, but it was essential to the
story that he be such a person.

Maybe this won't work for Jon or others, but I find I like my villains and
monsters. They're doing the best they can, and they think they're right to
behave as they do. I sympathize with them...but I also hope that their
"niceness" will enhance their creepiness. A (literally) heart-rending priest
is also affectionate to his junior priest and the soldiers who help him
conquer other tribes. He really loves them in a gentle, parental sense. And
that makes him and his culture more interesting to me, because a
one-dimensional evil is no evil at all. It's when your likable next-door
neighbor becomes a serial killer that you need to examine what made him do
it...and what makes him like you.

--
Crawford Kilian   Communications Department   Capilano College
North Vancouver BC Canada V7J 3H5
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