The Most Sane Madman in the Maddest Madhouse

*Ladies and Gentlemen, Dragons and Wolverines, give a warm mad genius club welcome to a budding writer (I don't care what he says, you judge!) making almost his debut appearance: my son, Marshall Hoyt. (And sorry this is so late. He and I had a miscommunication about where this was).*



If you’ve never heard of me, or are unaware of my existence, I can clear that right up for you. Sarah A. Hoyt will often make references to family members, including the cats…
Unfortunately, the cats are the ones that get called by their actual names. My brother and I, instead, are referred to as the infamous #1 son and #2 son (Respectively).Now, you’ve undoubtedly heard something from #1 son (Or, Robert, as the mentally stable like to call him), but probably have never read anything of mine unless you stalk Mike Kabongo and remember who won his little “Letter to the Editor” contest two years ago. If this is the case, you’re creepier than the guy I portrayed in that letter.

Now despite my mother’s many objections to this point, I am actually not that good of a writer. I either hit upon a very funny style, or an analytical, serious tone in my work. I have tried this “Write from the heart, express your emotions, snort rainbows and kiss unicorns” method that they often insist we use in school (Except in Chemistry, they don’t like it. If you’re getting emotional about the Periodic Table and start crying whenever you hear the name of certain elements they get you put away), but it just doesn’t suit me well and I often go overboard and make it sound like I sacrif iced a goat to the book they assigned us.

Despite this, at the request of my mother, I am your guest this morning… Or afternoon. It really depends on when you people read this, I have yet to observe the migration patterns of writers – one of the deadliest species on earth – so you’re all still such a mystery to me.

Let me just say this right now before any confusion arises: I AM NOT A WRITER. Yes, I am perfectly aware that the other three members of my family are happily in their rooms beating their characters over the head with a stick and writing them into novels and short stories, but I do not do such things with my time.

I refuse to write; mainly because I do not have the aforementioned “Talent” my mother believes I have. Instead spend my time doing things other than writing… like telling my parents I’m not a writer.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that I am NOT a writer, and the only one in my family who is not, I do get invaded by characters from time to time, and they bug the crap out of me, especially considering a lot of them are my family’s left-over characters. I have no clue what story most of these characters belong in, some of them are so strange and unearthly they couldn’t possibly be put into any logical story, which is probably why they were discarded.

Some of them, it’s easier to tell where they were meant to be, and which family member cast that character in my way, such as the shape shifting, time travelling musketeers (I’ll give a prize to whoever can correctly guess which family member(s) created them, and how the idea came to be in the first place).

My characters, the few that I have, are easier to place, such as the man who attempts to break the infamous “Time Loop” that supposedly can physically never be broken. But despite all this, I usually keep these characters under control and locked away in my closet (Fear not S.O.C.P., Society Of Characters’ Protection, they are well fed), and move on with my day.

Now, although I’m the sanest of my family (Quite obviously, since I’m the one that’s not a writer), I have scared many people who’ve only met me when I tell them that I am in fact the most sane one in my family.

“Why?” you may ask. Because in all truthfulness I am utterly insane, as is. Im like a monkey who believes he’s a human double agent needing to pretend he’s cat in order to properly protect the earth from the attack of space cats.

I do not take pride in the fact that I’m insane, last time I did that I was sent to the school phsycologist. Instead I let my family show by example how truly insane a person can get, so that I look greatly sane in comparison.

Now, I do love my family dearly, but they are the oddest bunch in the world, and I imagine that anyone else in my position would have jumped out the window long ago. I have a certain amount of tolerance, and I can stand my brother’s characters tripping me and laughing, and my mother’s characters getting into constant fights, and even my own characters poking me relentlessly. But this makes family dinners slightly unpleasant, and family outings a long trip with everyone (And their characters) in the car… But despite all this it is quite fun to watch the characters duke it out every five minutes, and it creates for a wonderful afternoon.

When I started writing this, I expected to write something interesting, perhaps something explaining why, as much I love “Back to the Future” and its two sequels, their logic is overly flawed and leaves several timelines without a Marty. But I suppose I ended up writing completely random and unimportant drivel. And if you’ve managed to read up to this point without having walked away in boredom, than I congratulate you, and insist you seek help.

If I am ever forced to write here again, I’ll be sure to have one of my family members put up a one day’s notice so you can avoid my post at all costs, and have a pleasant, not-so-boring day. Till then, here are your morning selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors and coffee, now go enjoy yourself you wild thang’.

I Demand That You Meet My Needs!

I was wondering what to post today when I came across this piece. It seems the combination of altruism and wanting justice is so deeply built in it can be observed in babies. Me being me I immediately wondered if longitudinal studies would show a connection between the babies with least empathy and sociopathic behavior, but that's a can of worms I'll deal with elsewhere and elsewhen. I don't have time to go chasing those worms today (long story involving Life Gone Feral and Job Gone Feral playing together).

What I'm interested in for today's post is this: how much classic fiction of all flavors involves the bad guy getting punished? Rather a lot, as it happens. It's only recently that the fad for non-judgmental stuff started poisoning the well, and gee, it runs so much against the grain that even babies approve (for baby values of approval, which probably means aren't upset by) of bad guys being punished, and presumably good guys being rewarded.

We, as a species, clearly want justice.

When we can't get it in our lives - which is inevitable, the world being inherently unjust - we use fiction to restore our sense of 'fair'. Especially when anyone who tries to get justice or fairness in life by imposing it is going to end up with megalomaniacal dictators making everyone else equally miserable. It's one of those nasty consequences of human fallibility. You can add it to the laundry list.

Since divine justice doesn't show any signs of manifesting in our regular lives (or at least, I haven't seen any bullying bosses/coworkers/politicians/used car salesmen/insert villain of choice being struck by random lightning lately), we have to meet our needs through - you guessed it - fiction. I'm sure it's dreadfully primitive and barbaric and all to want people who hurt others to be punished, but there you go.

And of course, we can rationalize ourselves into the most amazing places where someone can slaughter millions "for their own good". The last I heard no-one ever conclusively decided on the question of whether, if you sincerely believe that not belonging to religion X will condemn someone to eternal torment, it's justifiable to kill the people of country Y who will never, ever believe what you believe. (Not naming names, but certain people in the Middle East have decided that the answer is 'yes'. So do a few people elsewhere. One or two. And if you believe there's that few I've got a nice bridge in Nevada I'd like to sell you).

Certainly, the books I've enjoyed most have been when the bad guy - whether irredeemable evil (usually those are kind of unsatisfying once they stop being the shadowy figure behind the Bad Things) or one of the ones who's managed to twist and self-rationalize into evil - gets what I feel he - or she - deserves. And of course the heroes of the piece are rewarded appropriately.

My own writing has a funny tendency to spend a lot of time with the folk who walk the knife-edge between having - for whatever the reason - to do horrible things for a good purpose and doing horrible things for a not-good purpose. And of course, a lot of just what makes it good. Or bad. The Vimes's of the world and their darker cousins who can't keep the beast away, so they try to control the damage by aiming it at a greater evil. That's a question that fascinates me.

What about you? What are your most satisfying endings? Do you want the hero rewarded and the villain punished, vice versa, or something in between?

Come to the Dark Side, Writer

I know my colleague, Kate Paulk, has gone into the mind of the villain (come back, Kate, we have cookies. Besides, it’s scary in there) in a few posts, but one of our commenters asked about villains and it occurred to me there are other ways to tackle villains.

Unlike Kate’s, my landing bridge in character-land doesn’t fall naturally in the middle of the evil Lord’s palace, right behind the dark towers and forbidding fortresses. Characters who plot their next coup d’etat while imagining their enemies drowned in bouts of malmsey don’t populate my imagination. On the contrary, for the longest time – forgive me, children, I was young and foolish – I couldn’t really write an evil character. Instead I wrote “and then he suddenly goes mad.” (I said I was young and foolish. Put down your rotten eggs and assorted wilted vegetables.)

And then I found the technique that works for me. While I’m not one of those people who believe everyone is good at heart, I do believe that evil people don’t think that of themselves. They don’t usually walk around twirling their moustaches, rubbing their hands and going nyargh, nyargh, nyargh. And dark cloaks and SERIOUSLY out of fashion.

Put it another way, the most fractured people in our society can’t help having internalized some portion of the common morals and widespread beliefs – stuff like, you don’t kick someone when they’re down. You don’t hurt puppies, children, small defenseless whatever. And we simians are, by nature, likely to want to fit in with our group, so there’s a tendency to cleave to those rules.

But, but, but, you say, didn’t I just say I believe in evil? Am I now going to claim that the people who commit horrors are in fact “just crazy”? Or that society drove them to it?

Put down the rotten eggs again. No, I’m not going to say that. Stop trembling your lip. Here’s the hanky. Do not sniffle in that annoying fashion.

I’m going to say that in most cases – there have been one or two historical exceptions, but those are characters I simply couldn’t write – people do evil by convincing themselves it’s good. It’s either good for the or good for the common people, or good for some grand, imaginary future. (The greatest crimes in human history have been committed in the name of future utopia.)

In fact, a great villain – in books at least – often has the makings of a great hero, except for... some “little” thing. Yes, the bad thing might be a hatred of someone or something. Movies tend to go in for this sort of motive. You’re going to kill the man who raped your mom, or whatever, and your hatred distorts everything out of proportion. The thing though is that though this definitely happens, the scarier horrors are perpetrated out of love.

No you say? Perhaps I should let you sleep at night... Nah, you’re writers and you want to know. The worst villains are the ones who start with a goal everyone would agree is laudable. Say you’re going to rid the world of disease. You start by sending doctors (let’s assume you’re very rich and powerful) everywhere that doesn’t have them. You send enormous amounts of medicine. But little kids keep getting sick because they play in the dirt. And you can’t stand to see them suffer. So you have every toddler killed who can’t be physically restrained from playing in the dirt.

This is an extreme example, and there would be various steps in between, as you trespass more and more on the commonly accepted version of good, but all in the name of a greater ideal. In fact, “the end justifies the means” could be the motto of most villains.

There are the exceptions, too – those who are so full of self-hatred and hatred of others that they “want to see the world burn.” But my penchant is for villains who are doing what they think is for the best and go over a little more and a little more because reality itself – human nature; the way societies work; economics; nature itself – is against them. They see the glimmer of the perfect world before them and they’ll do anything to get there. And they do.

On the flip side of that villain is the hero who sees when he’s doing more harm than good, who accepts limitations and reins himself in no matter how passionate. One of the reasons I love Pratchet’s Vimes is that he is that type of hero. I love the Villains in Phillip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers because they are mostly like that.

What type of villains do you love? Can you see them being tragic heroes with JUST a little difference in their lives? What type of villain would you like to write? Can you make one of your favorite heroes just a little less constrained, a little more ardent and see him become a villain?

Being the Evil Overlord

Two weeks back I promised a piece on writing the Evil Overlord from the Evil Overlord's point of view - specifically, a character who is not merely opposed to the hero's goals, but is actively, deliberately evil. This is a heck of a lot more difficult than you'd think, not least because many of us were raised in an environment where no-one truly believes in evil.

Unfortunately, there's no shortage of examples of people who not only know damn well that what they're doing is evil, they choose to do it anyway. Usually the emergence of someone like this is accompanied by flurries of excuses ranging from the banal - "His mother dressed him funny" - to the bewildered - "But... he seemed so normal." That, or the all-purpose, "He's insane" comes out, allowing people to slide back into comfortable normality and forget that yes, evil really does exist. After all, there are plenty of insane people, and plenty of people whose mother dressed them funny, and even insane people whose mother dressed them funny, and very few of them are evil.

Mostly, they're rational, normal-seeming people, with one exception: I have never yet seen evidence of a truly evil person who does not consider his (or her, although so far most of them have been male) desires and needs more important than anyone or anything else.

Okay, so having got the generalities down - I'm not going into psychological diagnoses, since the goal is to write someone like this convincingly, not perform remote psychology - how do you write someone like this? What are their motivations, their goals?

In a word, power.

Everything I have seen and read indicates that an evil person always wants some kind of power. This doesn't necessarily mean political power, but it always means the ability to control what people do. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to work with the fantasy standard of the Evil Overlord ruling a large chunk of the landscape and trying to get hold of the rest. I'll even throw in all the usual cliches: the dark beasts that ravage the countryside, the armies of ferocious monsters, the works.

Okay, so. You can't convincingly write someone's point of view unless you understand how they think, and you can't do that without becoming them, in a sense - which is why I describe it as channeling the character. This is why some authors can do a wonderful build-up with a shadowy, distant evil, but as soon as said evil is brought into the open, it turns out to be a nonentity that leaves readers wondering why people spent so much of the book frightened of it. It's also why others never bring the evil on-stage at all, or simply opt not to have evil.

If you need the Evil Overlord, though, here are some ways to make him convincingly evil. First, you need to decide whether he's a pragmatist or an idealist. Yes, evil can be idealist. There is no rule that says ideals have to be good: as a rough guide, if it claims that any group of humanity is in any way inherently of less worth than any other group of humanity, it's probably not a good one (this is distinct from the achievements or actions of those groups - it's talking about the value of people as fellow human beings and nothing more or less). From "People with blue eyes are less human than people with brown eyes", the steps to "People with blue eyes aren't really human" and from there to "talking animals", "beasts", and finally, "need to be exterminated" aren't really all that large. (Some interesting commentary on this point can be found over at http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/03/29/the-man-in-the-mirror/)

An idealist Evil Overlord is likely to be utterly certain that his purpose in life is to guide people to the Truth, even if he has to kill them to do it. His Truth will include a perfect world, and an enemy group that isn't really human. It doesn't matter what the enemy group is: there has to be one to provide an external unifying force and a reason why the world isn't already perfect. Usually he will portray himself as an almost godlike figure leading the chosen few to paradise - and in fantasy, he may well be a godlike figure.

If he is able to empathize with others - which is possible - he will empathize with them no more than normal people empathize with animals, at best. Regardless, he will take intense, sometimes even sexual pleasure in the knowledge that their lives are entirely in his control. Their knowledge that he controls them and that they have no escape merely increases his pleasure. Should they fail to worship him appropriately, he will lash out with what seems disproportionate rage: disagreement, however mild, brings the same response. His will and his alone is the only thing that matters. If reality fails to meet his expectations, then reality is at fault, and must be changed to match his desires. Killing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people is at best a minor inconvenience - because he is the only person that matters. Everyone else is by definition of lesser value, and therefore expendable.

The true believer Evil Overlord is often intensely driven, using his kingdom as a proxy for his own status. Nothing less than conquest of everyone and everything that dares not to worship him will satisfy him - and probably not even that, although there aren't any examples of anyone getting quite that far to extrapolate from.

It's not possible to coexist with him: the mere existence of something outside his control and his ideals is sufficient reason to destroy it. No matter what ethical framework he uses, it does not apply to the enemy - and anything he does not control is the enemy. To the true believer Evil Overlord, "If you're not with me, you're against me," is the cry of the wuss. His belief is "If you don't worship me, I have to destroy you."

He won't think much, if at all, of his family. Every real-world case of this I'm aware of the family includes an absent father, a disinterested or marginalized mother, and minimal input or abuse from the rest of any extended family. That doesn't mean that everyone with this background will become an Evil Overlord - it does mean that the character flaws typical of a true believer Evil Overlord are not mitigated in any way. I know people who have had to remind their children that just because other people are stupid (these are children whose intelligence is literally unmeasurable - while IQ is a reasonable 'rule of thumb' measure of computing capacity and strengths in particular processing areas (spatial vs verbal vs logic and so forth), the IQ of someone who aces the test is unmeasurable. Someone who almost aces it is also off the chart - they aren't accurate more than a couple of standard deviations off the test norm, so when a 13 year old aces or nearly aces a test normed so that most adults will correctly answer approximately 25% of the questions, well... You might get one or two of those in a generation, and as far as that kid is concerned, everyone else in the world is dumb. If the kid is also short on empathy, you've got the makings of everyone's nightmare, the genius Evil Overlord. Fortunately, most people at that level don't want anything to do with other people - they're like Leonard of Quirm and will be perfectly happy with unlimited time and space to play with ideas) doesn't mean they aren't human.

If he's married, chances are it's mostly a marriage of convenience or politics, and any children he has are mostly raised by his wife (obviously if the Evil Overlord is an Evil Overlady, it's her children raised by her husband - it's just that almost all the examples in fiction and life are male). He will probably see them more as symbols and tools for his goals than as people to love, and if they disagree with him, he will see that as betrayal, and act accordingly.

He will be reasonably intelligent and perceptive - able to see the weaknesses of the people around him and use them to advance himself and his cause (though the true believer Evil Overlord says otherwise it's always in that order). Often the cause he follows will be something that has broad appeal, particularly to those without power when he begins his campaign. No matter which society you look at, those who have power are always a small minority. Something that attracts even a moderate percentage of everyone else will be able to topple or white-ant the ruling system, especially when led by an Evil Overlord who doesn't care who he sacrifices in the process. They can always become martyrs to inspire the next generation and remind them how much they owe to him.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of this kind of Evil Overlord (who is probably more difficult to portray well than the pragmatic sort who will use any ideology needed to gain and keep power) is that he can't understand why anyone would disagree with him. He knows that he's doing evil things but his goal justifies that - so any disagreement with him must be disagreement with his goal which is, to him, by-definition-good. Anything is justified in pursuit of it, so anything that is in the way must be The Enemy and destroyed. He thinks in broad sweeps of generalization: in his world there are no individuals other than he himself.

Is there enough to portray a believable true believer Evil Overlord yet? It's not a task for the faint-hearted. Writing them from the inside means thinking like them, albeit for a limited time, and that always leaves me feeling like I need to shower from the inside out. I'm still not sure whether I feel dirtier because being in the Evil Overlord's mind doesn't sicken and disgust me, or because I've been in the Evil Overlord's mind. It's a dark place to be.

Of course, me being me and having the hotline to evil bastard central in my head, a lot of my heroes tend to true believer Evil Overlord types with enough overrides that they don't or won't take that last step to true evil, and hover just this side of it in what turns into a quest for redemption. This may be why I can write the ones who are evil.

I'd give examples of well-written true-believer Evil Overlords, but right now I can't actually think of any. I can't even think of any good examples of the pragmatic type. Pratchett has quite a few characters who come close, like Lord Hong (pragmatic) and of course Lord Vetinari (also pragmatic and oddly likeable, which kind of disqualifies him). Who can give examples of really well written evil characters who take point of view?