Some of the ideas in this entry were informed by the Perth Writers Festival session Into the Firing Line, panel members Stephan Faris, Benjamin Gilmour and Peter Rodgers.
In particular, Faris has spent time reporting in Iraq as an ‘un-embedded’ reporter ie he was not travelling (relatively) safely with the invasion forces but in the infinitely more dangerous position of independent reporting. Gilmour, meanwhile, has worked with the tribesmen in Pakistan who are said to be fundamentalists allied to the Taliban.
This raised the inevitable question of how to present both sides of an issue, something the media is notoriously bad at. The panel discussed the idea that you need to recognise that there is always two sides – but that they don’t necessarily have equal moral standing/weight. In writing, you can and should try to understand ‘the other’, the villain or the enemy, which does not translate to endorsing them or legimitising them. It does however, open a path to, in some way, dealing with them.
In fiction, this empathy – note, empathy, not sympathy – extends to your villains. The trend for some time has been to make villains less black-and-white, less cartoon-evil and more real. Helping your reader understand your villain’s motivations, making them realistic, making his or her tribulations valid, makes for a more interesting character, and a better foil for the protagonist (if, of course, the protagonist isn’t the villain in the first place…).
One way to do this is to think your way into situations, actions, speech, that you might normally find morally repugnant – and then go one step further, in thinking of how such actions etc might be justified to the person committing them. Conveniently, if somewhat sadly, there’s plenty of sites and message boards online which will give you an insight into any hateful way of thinking and acting that strikes your fancy.
‘Because he/she is evil’ is not a good enough reason – people and life in general is just more complicated than that, and good fiction reflects and clarifies that messiness.
We are not all that good at seeing the other side, especially in today’s moral climate – we can’t seem to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy. Look at the UK teaching pack which asked students to “prepare a brief presentation on the 7/7 bombings from the perspective of the bombers”: such was the outcry – helped along with headlines like ‘children told to think like terrorists’ – that the pack was withdrawn amid much finger-pointing, and now it looks like a witch-hunt has ensued over it.
Here is the revised module [pdf] which asks students to consider the perspectives of relatives of victims, Muslims, and (the replacement for the bombers) the people in Britain – which is odd, since the students are people in Britain already, are they not? They don’t actually have to think too hard about this question; it does not require them to think beyond themselves. On the other hand, the whole-class discussion asks ‘what might have prevented the bombers’ action?’ Now, here, you would think, it would be really helpful to, I don’t know, consider the perspective of the bombers.
But that, it seems, would require empathising with them – understanding their position – and that is too close to sympathising for many people in today’s scared and inward-looking society.
Fiction, however, should do a better job, and in your own fiction, villains with realistic and rounded characteristics and motivations will make your story more solid than a cartoon evil-for-the-hell-of-it bad guy. The first step to lifelike – and therefore scarier and unforgettable – villains is to swallow your own moral stance and step honestly into theirs.
