Throwback Thursday: Harnessing Demons

(First published on my blog, 3rd October 2013)

I’m bouncing this post off of a conversation I had at York. A man I met on the first night was telling me about his crime novel. Naturally I won’t divulge details – for one thing that would be unspeakably rude. For another who wants to be pre-spoilified before it gets published? It might do yet.

The context was ‘how do you show something convincingly from a killer’s point of view?’ I think this is from  adhering to that old chestnut ‘write what you know’. Or if he was secretly a killer, he was very new to the task and wasn’t sure what he was doing yet. He had a point; how do you write convincingly, creating a fully fleshed three dimensional character, who has experiences and desires that you have never had and probably will never have? It isn’t exactly like you can just chat to a serial killer – might be ill advised to do so!

Well you can read about it. At worst your getting a report third or fourth hand. At best second hand. But he really wasn’t sure where to go from there. I think this is where the childhood game ‘let’s pretend’ comes in. When I played that as a child, I always wanted to be the bad guy. I wonder now if that was a precocious attempt to understand the dark aspects of my own nature? Who knows. It always seemed that the bad guy had a lot more fun and far fewer restrictions. I wasn’t put off by the fact that in children’s games at least, the bad guy always meets a bad end. That was a price of admission I was willing to pay for the freedom to be bad. It might be worth adding at this point that I was a supernaturally well behaved child with highly over developed senses of both guilt and empathy. It doesn’t take a psychologist to add those facts together.

Back to writing antagonists; my reply was simply that we all have these dark little creases in our souls and minds. Grubby places where our less admirable qualities fester and breed. Instead of ignoring them, we should own them and put them to use in a controlled way. In essence when you conquer your demons, don’t slay them. Hitch them up and put them to plough. Make them work for you. A book is one place where you can commit murder many times without actually harming anyone. Make the most of it.

I received a side long look for this piece of advice. No doubt I sounded far too enthusiastic and possibly four sneezes away from a killing spree myself. Which I’m not, obviously. I do stand by what I said. Everyone has some level of darkness inside them. No one is perfect or entirely good (I’ve met three people in my life who came close.) so why not tap into that when you write? Surely it will add a dimension to your ‘bad guys’ that you may not manage without it. Often a character seems unrealistic to me when they are all good or all bad. Good guys should have at least one flaw. And it should totally get in the way and cause them to make mistakes. Surely the reverse is true of bad guys? Shouldn’t they have at leas one redeeming feature? Something to stop them toppling like cardboard cutouts? I think so. Perhaps the people who write best, in the ened, are those who are willing to undergo the pain of knowing themselves. The bad as well as the good.

2 comments

  1. Another great blog. I’m really enjoying these. Asyou know, Jules, my writing tends to slip ever so slightly into the realms of darkness – only a little though. I sometimes think I may have a sadistic streak, because when I’m writing about my hero I keep asking myself, how can I make his life more miserable. I think that when I eventually reach the end (and i’m really close) the pay off will be considerable. And by taking this approach I have naturally unearthed the beast in my villain, so any redemption would be massive. I just hope I can tie it all together perfectly. A good character for me is one that reacts in a realistic way to the situation you place them in. So if they’re a serial killer and you push their buttons and wind them up, I’d expect them to do something spectacularly bad in revenge.

    Keep these coming because they’re so interesting

    1. Hello! I could have sworn I’ve been to this site before but after checking through some of the post I realized it’s new to me. Anyhow, I’m definitely glad I found it and I’ll be bokmak-roing and checking back frequently!

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