A Drop of Evil in your Storyworld

If you’re writing a novel, you can’t do so without a healthy dose of tension. Whatever the protagonist’s goal is, your job as an author is to set up countless roadblocks between him and his prize. Maybe this means environmental disasters, conversational misunderstandings, simple mistakes, or physical limitations. But one of the most fun ways to torture your characters is with other characters. Specifically evil ones.

But one of the most fun ways to torture your characters is with other characters. Click To Tweet

“Hold up,” you might say. As followers of Christ, our nature is (or at least should be!) to bring about peace, resolve conflict, and ultimately help people. Yes, but as a fiction writer, you need to delay this resolution as long as possible. And you can do this by creating compelling, evil characters. People who’d like to kill your heroes, take their stuff, steal the hearts of their loved ones, and burn everything else. And the nicer villains will do it in that order.

But how do you put these evil characters into your world convincingly? My suggestion would be to avoid any sort of “monolithic” evil. That essentially means evil for evil’s sake, something which no real human engages in. In fact, everyone pursues some form of good thing that God wants them to pursue. Happiness, sexual gratification, security, justice – these are all good things created by our loving creator for a specific purpose. But if an individual pursues them in a way that opposes God’s chosen method, that’s evil. And if the evil pursuit of these things happens to cross the path of your protagonist, well, all the better for your story.

Maybe the bad guy in your book has justice issues. The people that killed his wife were never brought before the law, and instead he feels the need to take matters into his own hands. He might attack policemen at random or devise some grander scheme to punish all of society. Or maybe his vengeance is very focused on an individual, but collateral damage affects the protagonist. Whatever the case, your antagonist should be fleshed out, and his evil motivations should be well-established. This is true regardless of your genre.

But in a speculative fiction novel, you may need to determine the motivations of an entire species. Why do the lizardmen in your book pillage and raid human villages? Is it to please their angry god? Or is it because they feel threatened by man’s expansion? Do the aliens invading earth intend to harvest humans for food? Or does human lymph tissue possess some life-saving cure for the alien homeworld? Their actions may be utterly depraved from our perspective, but an internally consistent reason for their behavior will do wonders to breathe sophistication into your novel.

Let’s take some examples. I just finished reading Kathy Tyers’ Truce at Bakura. It’s an older Star Wars novel, but it has enough unique storyworld elements that it really is set apart from the standard Star Wars fare. The antagonists in the book are the Ssi-ruuk, a reptilian race of creatures who desire to eradicate humans, and they are completely callous to the dying pleas of these men and women. This may seem heartless, but Tyers does a great job of crafting the aliens’ motivations. The Ssi-ruuk just want to bring peace to the universe by eliminating pests. And they don’t care about human suffering because they truly don’t believe humans have sentience. It is ironically similar to the way humans deal with unwanted insects in their home.

A real-world example of evil ideology would be communism. Yes, its cousin socialism is in vogue right now, but communism is possibly responsible for more deaths in the 20^th century than any other movement. Between Russia and China alone, 21 to 70 million civilians were killed by their own countrymen, and that doesn’t even count Cambodia, Vietnam, or North Korea. To my conservative friends, this may sound like unadulterated evil. But remember that the communists weren’t killing their neighbors just because they enjoy killing. They truly believed they were bringing about a proletariat utopia, and were willing to go to great lengths to secure it. Yes, they committed murder, but in their minds they did so for an ostensibly noble purpose. Many still cling to the ideology because of the perceived good a Marxist world could theoretically bring – fairness, equality, and an end to excessive capitalist greed. Pursuing those ends isn’t bad, but communism always requires violent upheaval to get there. And that? That is evil.

It might be frightening to start crafting evil characters and worldviews in your novel. In fact, C.S. Lewis found the process incredibly taxing when writing the Screwtape Letters. But if you hope to create a rich storyworld with believable challenges to your protagonist, you’ll need to get inside the heads of your bad guys. This means trying to see from their perspective, which may be good practice to build empathy toward those with whom you disagree. But as a Christian writer, the important thing is to show that evil, no matter how powerful, clever, or prevalent, ultimately loses to Good.

Dr. Doom Image from: http://screenrant.com/marvel-becoming-doctor-doom-hex-mortis/

Ssi-Ruuk image from: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/493636809132666309/

Max McLean as Screwtape, image from: https://fpatheatre.com/production/the-screwtape-letters/