Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Contrast in Characters

Contrast in Characters

I often read ininformed literature that a writer needs to make the heroes good and the villains bad and that any attempt to muddy the waters is only going to confuse and antagonized the readers. Now that might be true and I guess that publishers are the best judge because they see the statistics on what sells and if anyone should know the mind of the reader it’s them…On the other end of that line of thinking is the fact that some of the best prose ever written went right over not one but in some cases many publishers before finally being assessed at its true market value. So what publishers and critics purport as the gospel sometimes has to be tempered with some judgement.

The hypothesis that a sharp distinction is required between an antagonist and protagonist flies in the face of what I have learned in the experience of a life time….What I have seen in real people are shades of grey…Almost like we are born with the seed of good and evil blasted into our protoplasm and the best we can hope for is to give the good inside some ascendency over the bad. As a consequence, when I see characters in white hats and others who are unredeemed evil I tend to yawn and think…well this is just another example of where the reader must suspend disbelief in order to enjoy a good yarn.

Whenever I create a character that seems too good to be real I smell something stinky waffing up from beneath their arm pits...like somethign really dark is smoldering in the cauldron of their souls...that it's a testimony to their character and will that they keep a lid on it…and conversely when I see someone particularly devilish, something totally unexpected and decent pops up to give them a ray of hope. These are the characters I write about and if the reader has difficulty sorting the pepper from the rat poop, then they need to set aside my material because it doesn’t get any better than this murky blend o fsweet and sour.

Still I don’t think the reader should have any real difficulty sorting it out…they do it all the time in the course of their daily lives, where nobody shines all the time and nobody is really bad to the bone. I think we need to give the reader more credit that there is enough stark variation in the characters that surround us to tell them pretty clearly apart.

What I find compelling is how a character deals with that blending of good and evil. It’s the struggle to be a decent and caring human being not just in the face of external forces but wrestling with the inner ones as well. Life is not always pleasant nor should it be….I order to appreciate the good we have to be able to contrast with the bad….To love we need to know hate, to appreciate laughter we must know tears…happiness/sorrow, joy/grief and so on. Further I believe these contrasts are wired into our physiology as opposite ends of the same thread and the energy goes around and around….They are different forms of the same thing that go into making us what we are…

If all this sounds too deep then it’s something you have to put up with on this blog… Most of the members tend to shy away but surprisingly, there is a growing number of non-members that are amused by these rants.