No Villains

 I do not know any saints, and I have not met any villains. I know people who have done good things, and I have known people who have done bad things. Some of those doing good things could be pigeonholed as bad people for some of the other things they did with their lives. Likewise, "good people" do bad things. 

When I write, I have written some prickly characters. People who are not smoothly pure. The advice given in The Perils of Settling Scores in Your Writing by N. West Moss I think I had already incorporated, but it is good advice and from someone smarter than me. Therefore, let me pass along this nugget.

Readers can feel when they’re being manipulated, and they don’t like it. Make a character too pure, and watch readers revolt. An example of this is the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. As Oscar Wilde supposedly said, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”—not what Dickens was going for, I suspect.

Sophisticated readers feel manipulated when an author is trying to force them to like or dislike a character, and they tend to push back. Dickens made Little Nell so utterly pure that her death became a symbol, not of innocence and childhood sacrifice in an uncaring industrial age (as I assume he intended) but of overly sentimental writing.

Characters who are all good or all evil don’t ring true, mostly because in real life, people aren’t all one thing or another. Even evil people might be kind to their dogs, and good people can break hearts, or worse. In order to create three-dimensional characters who readers care about, those characters have to be nuanced. Think of the monstrous Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The character was clearly a very bad man, an evil man, but still, he was erudite, and readers could see that he had his charms. The fact that Nabokov allowed us to understand the character’s allure made Humbert Humbert less of a generic, flat villain and more three-dimensional and human. That had the effect on me of making him more monstrous because he seemed so palpable.

So what does this mean for our own writing? Well, writers do well to not try to make readers hate or love their characters. Authors must care about all of their characters to some extent, otherwise how can we see what the world looks like through their eyes? To do this, we must, as George Saunders puts it, try to “intuit their expansiveness” as we do with the people we love. This goes for even the bad guys.

sch 10/22/22