I Love to Hate You

I've been thinking a lot lately about what inspires me, and I have to say that I am often inspired by the sick and twisted.  Need proof?  Well,one of the first things I assigned my seniors to read was "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift, a satirical essay in which he proposes that the Irish (who were oppressed, starving, and overpopulated) ease their suffering by selling their one-year-old babies to the British...for food.  (Remember, this is SATIRE.  If you're not sure what that means, just imagine I said that Stephen Colbert came up with that plan, and then you'll understand.)

Anyway, I am inspired by the bad guys.  I love them, and a lot of people think that's strange.  I understand when this confuses people.  After all, I'm the mostly-vegan vegetarian living with fifteen mammals and reptiles who is all about making love, not war.  Had I been around earlier in history, I would have made an awesome hippie.  I even have the hair for it.

But what a lot of people don't do automatically is to separate between fact and fiction.  Real bad guys freak me out.  People are responsible for terrible deeds, and that never fails to sadden and disturb me.  These bad guys do not inspire me, and I really wish there were a way to cure the world of them.

But in the fictional world, the bad guys have one job: to create conflict.  Every story centers around that conflict, so no bad guy = no story, and stupid bad guy = stupid story.  Following that logic, great bad guy = great story.  They appall us, they offend us, and they make us cry, but that just means they're doing their job of causing the main characters pain.  And if the main characters aren't suffering, then you aren't cheering them on, and at the end of the book, they wouldn't have achieved anything. (You'd be so bored you would have put the book down unfinished ages ago, anyway.)

So the journey of a writer is to find that conflict and that perfect bad guy and allow them to torment the good guys.  It's the neverending story of good vs. evil, and as readers (and viewers), we eat it up every time.