NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/misc/writing/3521

Text File | 1992-11-13 | 2.5 KB | 51 lines

Newsgroups: misc.writing
Path: sparky!uunet!decwrl!concert!sas!mozart.unx.sas.com!sasafw
From: [e-mail] (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Fiction Advice 12: Show & Tell
Originator: [e-mail]
Sender: [e-mail] (Noter of Newsworthy Events)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 14:34:14 GMT
References:  <[e-mail]>
Nntp-Posting-Host: dobo.unx.sas.com
Organization: Dobonia
Lines: 37


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Crawford Kilian) writes:
|
|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.

This has been a problem with my book, REMOTE CONTROL.  The central
character is a serial killer.  I portray him sympathetically, in the
sense that I show his reasons for doing what he does as internally
consistent, and he wrestles with the issue of the rightness of his
actions and becomes convinced that his actions are right and necessary.
But he does not have a redeeming "soft" side, where we see that he is
capable of gentleness and affection, because he is not capable of
gentleness and affection.  He is severely damaged goods in that regard,
and this is in fact one of the character traits I wanted to explore in
writing the book.

One of the agents I showed the book to (one I worked with, who was
willing to chat about his commercial as well as artistic concerns) said
it was a maxim of the fiction business that the villain has to "pat the
dog," and that I would find it an almost insurmountable difficulty in
selling my novel that my protagonist never does so.  He also said that
this was entirely a commercial concern--a book could be a very good read
with a villain who had no redeeming features, but it probably wouldn't
sell.  So far it seems he was right.

--
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  [e-mail]
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |