Bad Guys Don’t Get A Say

As I near the end of writing my second novel, I have been struggling with a question that has plagued me from the start. I’m not going to lie, this is a tough blog post, but it’s important. So, I’m going to share.

The thing I have struggled with most is whether I should give the villain of my next book a chapter of his own. Unlike my first novel Memorial Day, which focuses primarily on the main character, Joe DaSilva, my second novel is a collection of eleven stories that are linked by the presence of the novel’s protagonist, Stella. The first and last of the stories are told from her perspective, but she appears in each of the other nine stories about the people who are closest to her.

The central conflict of the story is whether Stella will stay with or leave her abusive husband, Albert. But it is not quite as simple as that, because staying or leaving also may mean abandoning the community and the town she has called home since she immigrated from Poland when she was only fourteen years old.

Further complicating the story’s telling, for myself, is that some of the family myths, rumors, and innuendo in my second novel may not be all that different from things that happened to my ancestors just after they immigrated to the United States from Poland.

I remember listening to my ancestors tell partial stories about difficult things that happened to them– the kind of stories that always seemed to trail off with no real conclusion. I recall when finally I was old enough to recognize that some of the stories they shared among them actually were coded conversations that only they could decrypt. And I also recall when late stage dementia removed the filters from some of my ancestors’ memories and they laid bare “actual” occurrences about which we only can speculate.

Did it actually happen as they described it? Or was that story a fabrication of a mind somewhat dispossessed of the past? We will never know for certain.

To be honest, it does not matter whether either of those questions can be answered definitively because I am writing a work of fiction, and my thoughts about whether the villain should have a story of his own are not so different from my thoughts on Writing Historical Fiction.

As soon as you know the most plausible explanation for what might have happened and why, forget it. Push it into the background and get to the most vital part of the story.

I do not need to know everything about the villain in my story– nor does my reader– in order to portray the vast swath of destruction he sowed over three generations. He is present in the story, omnipresent in fact. He is as conspicuous by his absence as Stella is by her presence. Even though Albert almost never appears in the story, every single person in his orbit feels his gravity. However, he deserves no rehabilitation in order to make him a more credible villain because the story is not about him.

This story is about Stella and her struggle to free herself and her family from this terrible man. Her legacy is of courage and the survival of her family, not the depravity of the villain. That of course must be dealt with and borne by the witnesses, survivors, and heirs, and that is why they must be the core of the story– not him.

There are two other very practical reasons why I believe that “bad guys don’t get a say.”

The first is, once a villain becomes so central to a plot that their story must be told at great length, they really have become nothing more than a prop for the protagonist. This might be fine for a fantasy, sci-fi, superhero-of-the-multiverse kind of story because the typical protagonist in a story like that undergoes little transformation, except for achieving greater glory in their triumph over the villain.

Must win… Did win… Are we good here?

The second reason that I believe that “bad guys don’t get a say” is that I have no desire to contribute to any genre that normalizes any kind of violence, be it emotional, verbal, or physical. I do not need to understand or explain why anyone like the villain in my story terrorized his family in order to describe the impact of the things he did.

I know what the impact was. I saw it in my own ancestors, decades later, across three generations. I would never avoid calling out the things that happened, but I refuse to fetishize violence in order to make it “realistic” because, again, this story is about the witnesses, survivors, and heirs.

One final point on why I believe that “bad guys don’t get a say” when it comes to these matters– and this is a very personal choice. The only way for authors to write fully developed characters is to let those characters access the deep emotional well of empathy within us. As I wrote in an earlier blog post called Writing Through the Void, it takes a lot of time and careful attention to detail to develop that empathy. 

Writers live with their characters, for weeks, months, and sometimes years. And when we enter that void our characters, it can be a dark and foreboding place with no clear path out. A true villain does not deserve to have access to that emotional well of empathy.

And I do not want to spend any amount of time getting to know a person like that, not in my personal life, and sure as heck not in my writing life.

If four minutes on the big screen is enough time for the entire world to understand (and never forget!!) that Jaws wants to eat people, then I am perfectly fine giving my villain less than two thousand words across all eleven stories in my book.

I do not care what happened in my villain’s past that may have caused him to behave the way he did. I do not care what happened to him after the main events of the story. And I do not care that he most likely died alone.

(Empathy vs. forgiveness may be a topic for another post.)

My only interest in telling a parable about my ancestors— the witnesses, survivors, and heirs— is that they did not need to empathize with their villain in order to triumph. What they needed to triumph was each other, and their “bad guy” did not get a say about that either.

I am interested to hear your approach to writing about difficult topics and whether you agree that “bad guys don’t get a say.”

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