Question of the Month
copyright 2002 by Alicia Rasley
Ask me anything.... about writing, that is. It's all I know.
Questions about dark moments and bad guys and post-modern quotation marks or the absence thereof.
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uestion:
Re: the dark moment. In a romance, should I provide a dark moment for both hero and heroine?
Bea
nswer:
Well, both probably have some dark moment, but the central protagonist-- the one with the longest journey-- will probably have the most extreme one. For example, the dark moment for my current heroine is when she realizes her husband has lied to her, and her action is to finally leave him. It's bad, but she knows it's the right thing to do. His dark moment is watching her walk away, and knowing that he has lost her-- but that if he tells her the truth, he will destroy her love for her family. His is the one with the most impact on the plot, because he then has to go to the person in her family whose secret he is keeping, and confront that danger.
Another example-- say there's a heroine who needs to learn to ask for help, and the hero maybe has an internal task of choosing life over his self-centered, death-defying-and-seeking adventure-behavior. So maybe she finally, under great strain, asks for his help, and the worst happens, just what she always dreaded, he refuses (for his own reason-- he's decided to do that last bungee jump or whatever dangerous thing he's got on the agenda). That's a dark moment for her, because the worst happened-- she humbled herself to ask, and now has to face abandonment.
Then hero might get to the bridge where he's going to bungee-jump, still thinking about how her face looked when he said no, he had other plans and couldn't help her finish that important project or whatever she needed. He's distracted as he climbs up on the railing, hooking the harness up, and then behind him his buddy shouts, and he teeters there, and starts to fall, and catches one hand on the bottom of the bridge, and is dangling there one-handed, and is thinking he should just let go, and let the rope hold him, when his buddy yells that he put the harness on wrong, and he'll die if he lets go.
And he's hanging there one-handed while buddy tries to get to him, and he's thinking the buddy might fall too, and about heroine's face, and that he's going to die and her last memory of him will be that he refused to help her, and he suddenly realizes that he has to live because otherwise, the only person who ever really valued him would think badly of him, but his fingers are slipping and-- IOW, the dark moment is when he finally realizes he wants to live, but is about to die.
I suspect that in romances, the dark moment(s) will usually have
something to do with intimacy, which is why conquering it will allow these people to move on into great love. :)Alicia
I've got a villain, and I need him to be really bad-- not redeemable. But right now he doesn't seem human. He's like a robot of evil. How do I humanize him?
Sarah
You make him choose to be bad.
One of the best Really Bad Guys I've ever seen is Mr. Potter in
It's a Wonderful Life. (You remember, the old man who owns the bank and tries to ruin Jimmy Stewart who owns the savings and loan.)He's a really bad guy. I mean, he's twisted and angry and he sneers. He's also kind of elegant (it does help to be a Barrymore :). But what really humanizes him for me isn't the pity-part (he's old and infirm, but I figure he deserves that, because he's evil <G>), but one event that shows he has good in him but chooses the bad.
Uncle Billy (Jimmy Stewart's drunken but harmless uncle) arrives at Mr. Potter's bank with the savings and loan's deposit of $8000 in his hand. He's a happy man. His other nephew just won the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving dozens of men in World War II. When Uncle Billy sees Mr. Potter, he can't help but go over and crow about his nephew's heroism, thrusting the newspaper with the headline about it into Mr. Potter's hand. Mr. Potter is grumpy about being shown up by the family he hates, that goody-two-shoes Bailey family, and he just glances at the paper, and sees that dumb Uncle Billy has stuck the big deposit in the middle of the paper instead of his pocket.
Mr. Potter starts to call Uncle Billy back to return the money-- in other words, his initial impulse is human and benevolent. But then he consciously stops himself and chooses to hide the money and let Uncle Billy think he's lost it. (The S&L almost fails after that, and the bank examiners come to arrest Jimmy Stewart.)
Now why did that work for me? I guess because it shows he's not just an evil-machine. He's someone who chooses, for reasons we can sort of understand (being shown up by this idiot Uncle Billy), to do something bad. I think the motivation helps too. If it had been a different day, if Uncle Billy hadn't been crowing, if Mr P wasn't shown such sharp evidence that this other family was morally superior, he probably would have handed over the money with some caustic comment about Uncle Billy's stupidity. But this was a bad day, and the medal of honor thing motivated him to hurt this family.
That is, Mr. Potter is not uniformly evil. He's not evil just by default. He's evil because he's motivated to do evil acts, not because he's some guy who is evil to the core. That means the plot events have more of an effect, because they actually push him to do things he might otherwise choose not to do.
Don't know if it works for your fella, but Mr. Potter is very real to me. I don't sympathize with him, but I do understand him. He makes the choice to do evil things, and that makes him more identifiable. After all, we all have that choice, and we usually choose not to do evil things, but we can probably all imagine ourselves, just once in a while, going the other way.
So look at your bad guy and his actions and reactions. Think about him as a real person. What makes him feel inadequate and endangers his self-image? (That's when we're most likely to choose to do something bad, when we are afraid we'll be shown up as weak or stupid or unworthy.) What embarrasses him so much he'll do anything to avoid it? Think about having just one incident, perhaps early in the book, where he is faced with the prospect of humiliation or shame or defeat, and to avoid it or to avenge it, he chooses to do something bad.
For example, say that the hero trounces him at darts, and, to add insult to injury, as Bad Guy bends down to pick up a fallen dart, his pants split up the back and reveal his underwear to all the denizens of the pub. And the hero laughs at him. And Bad Guy goes off and contemplates this for awhile, and looks down at the dart he still holds, and decides he's going to put some poison on it and .... Even if the rest of the time, he's just evil for the sake of evil, we'll have an unwilling and uncomfortable identification with him. We all know how humiliation can make us murderous. We still won't like him, but we'll understand him. :)
Alicia
I just read a book where there were no quotation marks around the dialogue. Example:
------
James said, Why did you do that? It's only going to hurt more in the long run.
Well, it's hurting plenty now, she said.
-----
Is this a new trend? What do you think of it?Larry
I think it's stupid and annoying. <G>
But a literary writer friend of mine who had just read Cold Mountain was raving about this device (she writes "literary non-fiction", essays and the like, not novels) and said, "See, what's it's saying is, this isn't really speech. This conversation never really happened. You know, this is just a book! Wow!" She said that was the author's purpose in discarding the quote marks, to keep the reader always aware of the artificiality of the novel.
Of course, I couldn't let that go by, this post-modern implication that there's something revolutionary about proclaiming that a book is, duh, a book. (After all, Trollope made that very point-- "This is just a book, and I wrote it, and don't you dare believe in it!"-- and much more entertainingly, 150 years ago, without butchering standard punctuation.)
And then I said that her idea that "the book is just a book, not real!" is the trite sort of post-modernism that is in retreat now, that it's not a subversive idea at all, because if everyone knows that dialogue didn't really happen, why bother to make a big point of it? Far more than a revolutionary in-your-face honesty, what that attitude shows is a fear of the power of fiction to seduce readers out of their own world and into the world of the story.
See, fiction readers are risk-takers and thrill-seekers. :) There's nothing innovative and daring about saying, "Fiction isn't real." The real excitement comes from saying, "This really is real!"
Alicia
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