Fiction Workbench

At Randy Ingermanson’s Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, he’s answering an interesting question today from Jacob, from the Netherlands. You can read his entire question and Randy’s reply on his blog, but I wanted to have a go at it as well–because it’s an excellent question and one that most fiction writers must deal with at one point or another.

Jacob writes:

How do I create Evil? (not an evil character, but just “evil”) Pure evil is a powerfull symbol, but how to give it body.

Randy points out that it’s incredibly difficult to address evil as a noun in a novel. It’s much easier, and perhaps more effective, to deal with it as an adjective–as a descriptor for what characters do. I tend to agree with that. Jacob is concerned that the portrayal of evil not be one-dimensional. He wants a fully-rounded portrayal of it in his novel. The problem is that evil by definition is one-dimensional. In order for something to be multi-dimensional and feel fully real in a novel, it has to have contradictions and contrasts and levels. That’s what makes a character feel “real.” In that sense, having only evil is–of necessity–one-dimensional. There are no contrasts or contradictions.

So, to get more practical about it, the best choice a writer can make with any aspect of a novel is to humanize it. Whether it’s a god, a supernatural force, an alien, or the Ultimate Evil–the only way readers will really relate to it is through their own human experience.

How do humans experience and express evil? They do “bad” things–lie, murder, cheat, steal, etc. But what makes it feel EVIL and not just a “poor choice” is the motive behind it. And ironically, the more understandable and laudable that motive, the more evil it becomes.

For example, I have a WIP (“work in progress”, for the newbies among us) that has a queen who loves her country and her people and hates to see them being oppressed by a neighboring nation. That’s admirable, right? But taken to an extreme, she becomes so obsessed with saving the country and bringing down the enemy that she becomes willing to sacrifice even her closest supporters and commit unspeakable atrocities in order to reach that goal. That’s evil. And it’s even more so because it starts as something “good” and goes to an extreme.

I think even the ultimate Bad Guy–Hitler–may have started out with “good” motives. The German economy was tanked, the people were suffering. Is it possible he started out with laudable intentions, and took them way too far? That’s Evil. And it’s chilling because we can relate to it. We all have good, noble motives–or at least motives that are understandable. And we all know what it’s like to cross the Line from acceptable pursuit of a goal to a corrupt, harmful obsession with it.

The best portrayal of evil in a novel will force the reader to look Evil in the face and acknowledge that they, too, possess the potential to embrace the darkness. It makes us re-evaluate what Evil is, what it looks like, how it behaves. And we have to face the fact that its true colors are more likely to be shades of gray than stark black.

So for Jacob, and any other fiction writer working through a similar issue, I would suggest personalizing your Evil Force. Give it a face. Make it influence someone we care about. Nobody is chilled by Tolkien’s Sauron. The chilling moment is when dear, sweet Frodo can’t destroy the Ring–because we know then that if Frodo can become dark, so can we. And that is when Evil becomes the darkest and most insidious. That is when it becomes the absence of Hope.

The How Do You Portray Evil? by Fiction Workbench, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.