The Undiscovered Country

Advocate

A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting with fellow writers. We discussed a lot, but one thought we had is how writers need to constantly and consistently look at all sides of an issue or argument.

We must see from the perspective of our antagonist as much as our protagonist, otherwise our characters appear flat instead of three-dimensional. No one likes paper-cut characters. It's nothing new, either. Even in the classic novels written hundreds of years ago, the antagonists were just as human and sympathetic as the heroes.

In a sense, we are our characters' advocate. They can't speak without us.

While I wrote my fantasy, I tried to be the advocate for all my characters -- to take even the side of the antagonists at times, because no person (or at least an extreme few), have the motivation to do evil for the sake of evil. They often act with the belief they are righteous, and that the end justifies the means.

For instance, one of my antagonists feels the need for revenge after he saw all of his family massacred. For years his hatred festered. It so blinded him that he wanted and needed to avenge that long-ago evil on the people who merely represented those that murdered his family.

His actions are wrong, but completely understandable.

There was one point when two of my characters exchanged a heated argument. I had to argue both sides equally, even though I knew who I wanted to "win." A few times the antagonists almost won the argument, and it took a long time before my protagonist found a way to win the argument. That ended up one of my favorite scenes in the book, because it was so darned challenging to write.

What I hope is that the reader will also wonder who will win the argument, because I myself wasn't sure while I wrote it.

Advocating for my characters is the main reason I write. For much of my childhood, I had difficulty expressing myself. I always say that God didn't connect my brain to my mouth very well. Writing, however, gave me the voice on paper that I lacked with speaking. Writing, in a sense, became my advocate. How can I not want to advocate for all the voices in my head that want and need to be heard?