Imagine you’re sitting in a well-lit room. Sunlight is streaming in through the many, large windows on three sides, as well as the skylights overhead. There are so many lights—from the can lights overhead to the sparkling crystal chandelier, to the lamps on every table—there is nary a shadow to be found. A man you don’t know walks in, carrying a flashlight, and tells you not to fear, he’s here to lead you out of this terrible situation. What is your reaction? Skepticism? Laughter?

Now imagine you’re in a different room. This one has no windows. You do not know if it is day or night outside. If there are any windows or doors, they are sealed so tightly that not an iota of light penetrates the room. You have been locked in this darkness long enough that you’ve lost track of time, lost your sense of direction, lost your sense of self as a corporeal being. Suddenly you hear a noise, a flashlight comes on. A soothing, deep voice tells you not to fear, he is here to lead you out of this terrible situation. You are drawn to the warm comfort of the flashlight, to the humanity represented by the silhouette beyond the flashlight’s beam, to the sense that the reappearance of light means you will be able to return to a state of normalcy—of time, of direction, of self.

This is the allure of the dark side.

“Good is a point of view, Anakin. The Sith and the Jedi are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power. . . . The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.”
~Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith)

“Your father was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.”
~Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars: A New Hope)

Sound familiar? What is it about the “dark side” that can be so alluring? Actually, what is it about human nature that makes the dark side so alluring?

“Bad”/dark characters are alluring because they give us a glimpse into the taboo or the forbidden. I’ve already illustrated this with my explanation for why Sir Drake (Ransome’s Honor) has been my favorite character to write so far in my career: because I could do pretty much anything I wanted to with his character. He could gamble, smoke, get drunk, carry on an affair with a married woman, bribe public officials, and scheme against Julia, all without having to feel guilt over any of it.

We all get annoyed when rush-hour traffic slows to a crawl because everyone has to try to get a glimpse at the carnage at the accident that happened. Tabloids and celebrity “news” magazines make millions upon billions of dollars every year by pasting all the sordid rumors and details of divorces, breakups, affairs, and other nefarious activities by public figures on their pages. Even though it may disgust us (remember the media spectacle surrounding the death of Princess Diana—or Michael Jackson or Prince?), we’re secretly drawn to it. We all have our vices, whether it’s celebrity gossip, true crime novels/shows, “reality” shows like the “Real Housewives” series on Bravo, soap operas, shows featuring vampires and werewolves and ghosts, etc. Whether it’s something you’d consider “bad” or just entertaining, analyze it next time you watch one of those shows or read an article about the latest Hollywood It-Couple’s divorce. What’s the draw? What is it about that story that is alluring to you? Then channel that into a way to seduce your character away from his or her goal.

There is a difference between “bad” and “evil,” and that difference is motivation. For a character to be a “bad guy,” he simply needs to stand in opposition to the achievement of the hero’s goal. This kind of a bad-guy character can actually be acting out of good intentions (in his own mind/worldview). These can be two people on opposite sides of a social or political issue; each is acting on his deeply held beliefs, each believes the other is wrong, therefore “bad.” Yet in their own ways, both are “good”/right. But it’s when motivations and intentions change—for example, when the person on one side of an issue starts to kill those who don’t agree with his belief—that evil enters the picture.

As an author, it’s my job to present my main character’s worldview in such a way to make you determine he is the good guy and the other one is the bad guy. This is how authors/screenwriters can get away with creating dark heroes/heroines: They get us so wrapped up in the character’s viewpoint, in what drives the character to make the decisions he makes, that we willingly go along for the ride and rubberneck and gawk at the “accidents” that happen along the way. Not everyone enjoys these types of stories—me, for one. When the show 24 first premiered, I was an avid watcher every week. So I was excited when the second season started. But then in one of the first episodes, Jack Bauer killed a confidential informant in an interrogation room to take his head to the “bigger fish” they were trying to catch. While the show tried to explain that this was for the “greater good,” I stopped watching. I don’t want my protagonists to be morally ambiguous, especially someone who is in a position in which he has sworn to uphold a certain set of moral and ethical codes (like the LAW). This happened to me with Heroes as well when, in the third season, all of the heroic characters I’d come to love started doing really stupid/bad things that were genuinely out of character with how they’d been developed so far on the show.

But there is definitely something to be learned/taught by showing the allure the darker side of life can have on people—in that it makes characters much more realistic. In the behind-the-scenes commentary/interviews with Peter Jackson and Phillipa Boyens, they explained that the reason they vastly diverged from the books with Faramir’s character in the movie—that he was tempted by the ring—is that for the viewers to (a) believe that the ring was as powerful as it was supposed to be and (b) believe in Faramir as a character, he had to be tempted by its supernatural allure.

There’s a reason why so many bad-guy characters in movies are portrayed by good-looking actors and actresses—because it’s a physical representation of the allure of the dark side. Even Satan is described as being one of the most beautiful creatures.

For Discussion:
Give an example of a story or character which shows the allure of the dark side—from your own writing or a book you’ve read or movie/TV show you’ve seen.

“It’s a fiction writer’s job to remember childhood’s hard lessons about vulnerability and dangers, and then to rouse those memories and fears in readers.”
~Jessica Page Morrell, Bullies, Bastards & Bitches

Think back to when you were a small child—as early as you can go back. Which of the following held more fear for you:

• A parent’s warning, “Don’t take candy from strangers.”
• A parent’s warning, “Don’t run with scissors.”
• Monsters in the closet/under the bed.
• The strange house on the corner (the “witch’s” house—or the house where the mean old lady/man lived).
• Scary movies/cartoons or characters therein.
• Bad dreams.
• Ghost stories.

For many, many years (up into elementary school) I had to sleep with the bedroom door open and the hall light on—and the closet doors completely closed. I don’t really remember any specificity of being afraid of the dark or of “monsters” in the closet, but that’s the way it was. (As a matter of fact, I still have to make sure that the closet door in my bedroom is closed—completely latched—before I’ll go to bed. But that may be more OCD than anything else—all of the dresser drawers have to be completely closed, too.)

Fear is a natural and, usually, a healthy emotion. Fear keeps (most of) us from doing stupid things that will result in hurting ourselves. Fear is the emotion that taps into what modern psychologists like to call the “lizard” part of our brain—or the deepest, most primal place within us where we’re all reaction and no reason. Fear is a part of our natural defense system. When we are afraid, there are certain physical reactions in our bodies—a higher flow of adrenaline that seems to heighten our senses and make us more keenly aware of what’s around us. Most of our deepest fears can be linked to experiences we’ve had or circumstances we’ve been conditioned to react to: a child bitten by a dog may be afraid of dogs; a woman who survived a plane crash as a child might be phobic of flying. Sometimes fears are part of our cultural upbringing (going back to Tuesday’s post about what “bad” is). As children, we’re told stories of evil stepmothers (so we naturally see a stepmother as someone who might be an adversary later in life); stories of old crones who want to eat children (so we’re afraid of old people); a song about a bridge falling down (so we develop a fear of driving across bridges). In every culture in the world, there is some kind of storytelling tradition that is built on playing upon people’s fears, whether it’s to teach a lesson or to just full-out scare people just for the sake of scaring them.

When we create bad guys, we want to play upon our readers’ fears—we want to tap into that primeval part of the brain and make our readers squirm, make them connect with the characters emotionally because they’re actually experiencing some of the same feelings/sensations the character should be feeling. In fiction, we can introduce the reader to characters they’d never meet in real life—to characters they would never want to meet in real life—by drawing upon the “bad guys” we’ve experienced in our real lives:

• The school bully
• The mean cousin or relative
• The abusive adult
• The teacher who hated you
• The boy- /girlfriend or spouse who cheated on you
• The boss who made your life miserable
• The people in the clique/club you wanted to be in but wouldn’t let you in
• The kids who were always made team captain in P.E. and always left you ’til you were the last person standing and they had to take you
• The P.E. teacher
• The sadistic personal trainer at the gym

I think you get my drift. When we’re creating antagonists for our heroes/heroines to come up against, we usually don’t have to look further than our own past experiences. And the further back you can go, the better.

For Discussion:
1. What are some of the fears you remember from childhood that you can draw on to add suspense/tension/conflict that could be used to add conflict/tension/suspense to a story?

2. Who are some people (no names need be mentioned) in your past who could serve as templates to start building an antagonist character?

In the lists we came up with yesterday of some of our favorite villainous/antagonistic character, we definitely had two different types of characters going: the sympathetic bad guy and the out-and-out, no-redeeming-qualities villain. And we’re definitely going to take a close look at both in the course of this series.

But first, let’s define what “bad” means when it comes to characters who are labeled as the bad guy/villain/antagonist in a story.

We must first start off with defining what the protagonist/main characters believe is bad—bad behavior, bad beliefs, bad ethics, bad spirituality, bad culture, bad politics, etc. Through this process, we can start to see that a “bad guy” in a story might not necessarily be “bad” (or evil) in and of himself. It may be the hero’s perception of the antagonist’s behaviors or beliefs or actions that make him the “bad guy” in the story. This is the kind of antagonist character we see more often in stories that are lighter-hearted, such as romance or women’s fiction or general fiction. These are going to be people who, while going about their daily lives, create conflict for our hero or heroine because the antagonist’s lifestyle or behavior or beliefs or work ethic is different than the main character’s. In A Case for Love, the antagonists are Forbes’s parents—because he finds himself coming to a point where he believes their company is doing something wrong. Does that make his parents “bad” people? No. But it makes their company’s actions bad in Forbes’s eyes, thus putting them in the antagonist role in the story.

The more specifically and strongly bad is defined and shown contrasted to good by the heroes and the villains, the more potential there is for conflict and drama. But be cautious with this. Unless you’re writing a children’s story (for children under the age of about seven), you can’t paint good and bad in shades of black-and-white. Some of the greatest stories out there are those that make the reader/viewer—even just for the briefest moment—wonder if we’ve got it all wrong and maybe the bad guy isn’t so bad after all (before either proving he is worse than we imagined or showing that it really is all about perception).

This black-and-white concept of good vs. evil is known as duality, and we must determine if our protagonist believes in duality: good vs. evil, light vs. dark. Even though we authors don’t want to make the conflict in our stories that black-and-white (again, unless we’re writing for children), it’s okay if our characters have a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil view of the world. The more your character has this kind of worldview, the more they may be willing to sacrifice, even to the point of martyrdom, because for them, the ends justify the means—if through their own personal sacrifice, good/light prevails (no matter the cost to them), their sacrifice is justified and the reader/viewer will be satisfied. We see examples of characters in which the duality worldview leads to the main character being willing to make the ultimate personal sacrifice in Braveheart, the Harry Potter series, and in the Lord of the Rings. (And yes, there are biblical parallels in this story structure.)

In addition to figuring out what the protagonist thinks is bad and what the protagonist’s worldview of Bad is, we must also determine what Bad wants. There are many roles Bad plays in stories throughout the ages, sometimes more than one. But here are some of the things that Bad (the antagonist, the bad guy, the evil force, the inanimate object that takes the place of the bad guy) can do within a story:

• Bad wants to teach the hero a lesson—e.g., what goes around comes around (the concept of Karma); or it can be a concept the hero must learn, such as forgiveness or tolerance or humility. This is the most common use of Bad in a story.
• Bad wants to teach the reader/viewer a lesson—whether or not the character learns the lesson Bad wants to teach, the reader/viewer can learn the lesson, either by seeing how the hero’s life is changed for the better or, more potently, by witnessing the character’s tragic downfall, e.g., King Lear, Romeo & Juliet, Oedipus, most of the Greek and Roman myths, Wall Street.
• Bad is a side-effect of a wager between supernatural forces—in this case, though the story is focused on the human pawn, Bad is in the hands of two supernatural forces that are entertaining themselves—or waging a passive-aggressive war against each other—who are wielding it in such a way that the hero character has no chance of overcoming Bad on his own, without allying himself to one or the other of the supernatural forces. The prime example of this kind of Bad is in the story of Job.
• Bad actually used to be Good, but has gone awry, been taken to an extreme, or has rebelled. E.g., the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, the cybernetic creatures in the Terminator movies, HAL in 2001, or something as simple as a healthy fear allowed to become a phobia (think about Monk).
• Bad was always Bad but should have been something the character grew/learned from; instead, he’s become bitter, jaded, cynical, etc. Therefore, Bad now actually lives inside the character and feeds off the character’s reaction to his previous encounter with Bad. (Can someone think of an example of this? I’m not coming up with one immediately.)
• Bad needs to be redeemed—whether it wants it or not. This is Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy.
• Bad wants something it shouldn’t have, lest it become Worse—money, power, social status, media attention. Think Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, whose most famous line was, “Greed is good.” This is also the nature of Bad as seen in the characters of Sir Drake, Lady Pembroke, and Lady MacDougall in Ransome’s Honor.
• Bad just wants something to break/destroy—break up a relationship, annihilate a different ethnic group, stop someone else from rightfully getting what he/she deserves, destroy the planet, etc. We see this kind of Bad in a wide range of stories, such as Schindler’s List, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Independence Day and Signs, the Bond films, and horror films.
• Most of all, Bad wants whatever is going to stop the hero from attaining his goal. No matter what it takes. So, technically, the author is the ultimate Bad Guy of the story.

For Discussion
Think back to some of those favorite villainous characters you mentioned yesterday. What kind of Bad are they? Are they bad because they are at odds with the hero and may believe or do something the hero doesn’t like? Do they fall on the evil/dark side of the hero’s belief in duality? And what’s the purpose they serve in the story?

It’s about time for a new series, yes? One of the series I’ve been wanting to do since running across a certain couple of books online earlier this year is: Bad Guys: The Villains and Antagonists We Love to Hate. With help from the two new books I picked up—The Power of the Dark Side (Pamela Jaye Smith) and Bullies, Bastards & Bitches (Jessica Page Morrell)—we’ll start to analyze the bad-guy characters in our writing and reading. And for those of you who aren’t writers, we’ll be looking at the antagonists in books and movies for examples, and I’ll be wanting your feedback as non-writers so we can learn from what readers take away from these kinds of characters!

As I’ve stated innumerable times over the years, the heart of telling a good story is conflict. And while that conflict doesn’t have to come from an antagonistic character (a bad guy/girl, villain, whatever you want to call it), some of the most iconic characters across storytelling venues have been bad guys: Darth Vader, Professor Moriarty, Voldemort, Sauron & Saruman, the Wicked Witch of the West, Nurse Ratched, all of the evil queens and stepmothers from fairytales, Captain Bligh, and so on.

Sometimes the story will give us a black-and-white picture of which characters are heroes and which characters are villains. These are usually stories which have a plot that hinges on some kind of “good will ultimately triumph over evil” idea (like Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings). Sometimes, the stories are more complex, and we are made to feel something for the antagonistic character—even though we know we shouldn’t. Sometimes the badness is in shades of gray; and sometimes, as with Heath Ledger’s immortal portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight, the character is as bad as bad can get—and we never really find out why.

I’ve been asked in a lot of interviews recently which one of my many characters I’ve had the most fun writing (which is quite different from tagging the one who’s my “favorite”). The answer is easy: Sir Drake Pembroke from Ransome’s Honor. Actors many times will say that it’s a lot more fun and interesting to play a bad guy than a hero—and that’s because the bad guy can get away with a lot more. I found the same to be true when writing Sir Drake. I could get away with just about anything with that character—so long as he could justify it to himself. Which we’ll get into at length in this series.

I’ll be posting an updated Favorite Bad Guys list on Friday, but I wanted to start the series out by finding out who some of your favorite bad guys are. From movies, TV, or books, who are some of those bad guys you love to hate?