Into the Fire

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Passionate: right or wrong. Writes love stories with a passion. Raw Romantic Redemptive

Which is the hardest to do?

 

Good%20and%20evil

 

As human beings we are born into sin. We all have that in common. It has been contended via discussions and in fiction that we are all capable of heinous deeds given the wrong circumstances and temptations. I do agree that we can be pushed to far places beyond where we'd like to go, but I'm not so sure that all of us would resort to depraved actions. By my saying that, please don't assume I'm excluding myself from the crowd that would. I don't know what I'd do under the kind of pressure that makes people crack.

So, as writers, which do you think is easier to create: the bad guy/villain or the good guy/hero? Same question concerning female characters. Women have so many shades of evil. Is it harder to create a bad guy or a bad girl?

Here's what I've discovered. It's very difficult to not write a stereotypical villain, male or female. After all, as human beings, we have similar tendencies. We can be grouped physically, psychologically, and even spiritually. It's not absurd to notice villains contain similar attributes which lend them to familiar caricatures.

So. What do you think? Is it easier for you to do the good guy/gal or the bad guy/gal?

 

Father, we wish to die to self daily to keep that evil flesh from getting its way. Help us to be the ones you called us to be. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.

 

 

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2 responses to “Which is the hardest to do?”

  1. BK Jackson Avatar
    BK Jackson

    Interesting question. I find all characters hard to write however, I’d say it’s hardest to write the villain–I think because I’m a product of series television. The hero is very familiar. You get many chances to learn their facets over time. But it’s usually a new bad guy a week. And often times, you don’t experience what the depths are that make them tick–why they do what they do.
    I’d love to write a series of books with a returning nemesis, inspired by Murdock vs. MacGyver. 😎
    In the first series of books I started in which only one is complete, they DO have a recurring enemy and it has been very hard making sure his story is believable. It IS too easy to write a cliched villain. Yet I also don’t want to put too much modern psychology spin on this historical character either, because that gets on my nerves.
    Apart from villains, the hardest characters to write generally are women. Makes no sense seeing as how I AM a woman. But I can’t write them and have little desire to write them. One of the series novels mentioned above is stalled indefinitely because in that story, the woman is lead and I just can’t seem to drag myself to the page.
    I don’t know why I have such a hard time writing women. I think it has a lot to do with the women characters I read about in fiction. Fictional women seem overly preoccupied with the type of fabric they wear or what kind of dress, etc. Or the author takes the woman character too far in the other direction and makes them so Rambo-ish it’s laughable. Women writers (I say women writers because apparently they make up the bulk of who’s writing these days) just don’t seem to be able to write female characters that mean anything to me.

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  2. Nicole Avatar
    Nicole

    Good points all, Brenda. And, yeah, there are a lot of cliched characters out there, both good and evil. I can do women, and I think I do men fairly well, and, like you, actually prefer to do men. Haven’t had to write a lot of villains yet, but I’m contemplating how to make one unique somehow.

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