Tag: writing

HELP! WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN READERS START TO CARE ABOUT YOUR VILLAINS?

~ jpaulgordon018 ~ Leave a comment

Is it OK to Fall in Love with Reprehensible Characters?

Image created by John Daly using ChatGPT5 imaging tool

So, what does a villain mean to you? Psychopaths (think Hannibal Lecter and Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs)? Sociopaths (think Todd Alquist in Breaking Bad, or Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, or Dexter)? Something else?

I’ve been presenting my new novel, THE WHISPER OF FALLING SNOW (to be published this winter), to two different critique groups over the past couple of years. One of the most surprising things I hear back in my critiques is how, despite trying to resist doing so, my readers have come to care for and even love two of my chief villains.

Grigori (Gregory) Stepanov and Jeffrey Dane appear in a short story set in the lowest level of purgatory, published in New Literary Society on Medium: https://medium.com/new-literary-society/bessies-4e78d00ea709.

They are much chastened in the afterlife—who isn’t?—but in the novel, they are truly bad guys. Stepanov is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent lives—they may haunt him toward the end of his life, but his actions remain utterly reprehensible. Dane’s god is the State for which he acts as an assassin, killing Stepanov’s (truly psycho-sociopathic father) and tormenting others to the point of insanity.

So how could anyone come to care for these guys? How could I, their creator, come to care for them? What internal trickery of the mind did these characters work in my mind to make it so?

The truth is, I feel extreme ambiguity about normalizing characters who have done outright evil, not once, but as a way of life. It feels slimy, creepy, deeply scary. Like taking a couple of monsters from Auschwitz and making them people you can relate to.

In all fairness, they are not quite like the horrific individuals who made the selections when trains loaded with Jewish men, women, and children were shipped from the ghettos to Auschwitz for annihilation in the chambers. Stepanov merely signed the death warrants, and Dane’s atrocities were mostly committed on an individual basis. AS IF THAT REALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE!

Yeah, I’ve got some true sociopaths in my novel. Persistence Greenforest plays the role magnificently, and Pavel Stepanov (Grigori’s father) straddles the line between psychopath and sociopath. Lamia Nightshade and Adamant Darling are actual concentration camp nightmares. No one (thank God) relates to or cares about them. But these are minor characters in the novel. Grisha Stepanov and Jeff Dane play huge roles.

Maybe I let them talk too much, or relate too much, or grow too much. I don’t know. But what do YOU do with the villains you come to care about in your writing, or in the books you read? I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading!

Building Characters, Building Worlds

~ jpaulgordon018 ~ Leave a comment

I’m sharing this from my Substack ruminations for the day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about worldbuilding and scene-setting lately, in other people’s works, but especially in my own. Because I write literary speculative fiction, I tend to think of worldbuilding in terms of the underlying philosophical, metaphysical, and moral questions it raises. How can I do this without coming across as preachy? I hate being bludgeoned by an author’s loudly stated and embarrassingly obvious points of view—especially when they aren’t my own. Actually, I hate it just as much when someone uses a megaphone to blast out points of view that are my own.

So how do I present differing and meaningful world views of the true, the good, and the beautiful—or the false, the cruel, and the ugly—without insulting the reader? The most obvious answer is to let my characters speak and act for themselves, and to almost always have some doubt about where they stand. The less dogmatic and the more doubtful, the better.

Basically, just let the good guys and the bad guys and everyone else in between be like real people. The greatest compliment I get from my readers is that they come to care about my villains even though some of them do truly awful things. It shows me that I’ve accomplished something important. I’ve made them into three-dimensional human beings. Likewise, I’m pleased when someone says that some of the good guys are sometimes a bit uncomfortable to be around.

I was asked recently what my greatest fear about publishing is, and my response was, “Pissing everyone off.” But, as I thought more about it, I came to the conclusion that it was OK to tick my readers off, so long as it wasn’t everyone all the time. The books that have had the most impact on my life, on some level, annoyed me, made me uncomfortable, and forced me to look at the great questions of good and evil in radically new ways. I was grateful for that, not because I was converted, but because I was given the chance to look at the universe from a new perspective and through a different set of eyes.