Cardboard Cutouts

One of the earliest complaints I can recall reading about any literature was the characters were shallow. This was particularly prevalent in genre fiction. I generally read for plot and didn't mind much if the the guys and the girls wearing white hats were all alike and I didn't mind if the fella twisting his waxed handlebar mustache wasn't much different from the last guy wearing black. Provided the chrome was kept polished on the spaceships.

Or when there was a body in the library the puzzle of how it got there kept yielding satisfying surprises.

When I got a little older I started to notice and realized this was a Bad Thing. And when I started writing I figured this was a thing to avoid. How does the writer make a character out of cardboard? We don't run into cardboard characters in real life.

Take a couple Air Force officers that I know. She isn't all spit and polish when I see her camping. Or her husband who she outranks who flew a fighter-bomber. He's a lot more of a dairy farmer in him than warrior. In fact, if you didn't know he was retired Air Force you might just think him another Ag prof at Moo U.

Cardboard characters do one thing. The detectives detect; the cowboys cowboy; the pirates pirate.

The people you know in life do more than one thing. It's human nature. And we remind ourselves, "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."

Take a look at your work in progress. Have your characters had a chance to get out and let their hair down? You should give them hobbies, families, and distractions.

Sure you've got this robot like guy in a scary black robe who sounds like James Earl Jones. He must have had a family and a childhood. OK, bad example. It's a bad example because none of that oh-so-elaborate backstory that Lucas built into Darth Vader shows up in the character's words or deeds. Except at the end. Luke is being killed by the Emperor to create a Dark Moment. Then something unexpected has to happen to save the day. Maybe Han Solo can come out of nowhere in the Millennium Falcon? No. Did that already. OK. We'll have Darth Vader act like a real father for the first time in the entire series. Dude, even when you're being a dad you're working!

It's contrived and lame because it serves the needs of the story.

A story has needs as it progresses through its arc. Along the way it raises problems for the characters and raises questions in the reader's mind of how to solve them. Put your characters to work solving those problems. But all work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

Like I said, s/he can have a hobby. Or a family. Or a distracting neighbor. This makes the character of an archetype and more like someone you'd meet in real life. Your characters should be just like the folks you'll meet in the next campsite. Or know from PTA. Except they're in your story.

You need to give your characters a break. They need to take off time from advancing your plot to deal with a kid who's home sick from school. Or catch up with their macrame. Just put them in a situation where perhaps they WANT to be advancing the plot, but cannot. These breaks in the action are the most scaffold-like prose you can write that you can put into the narrative.

Scaffolding should hardly ever make its way into a your writing. No, you shouldn't write a prequel--or three--just to establish a black-clad robot guy's backstory.

I'm not suggesting you bloat your work with a bunch of irrelevant rabbit trails you send all your characters on. You have to be a bit intentional here. The plot has needs, and so has the reader's perception of the characters. If I've convinced you to give your characters a break, you should think about why they're taking this break in the middle of your plot.

Perhaps it is to establish a key attribute of the character's nature. Maybe she's fastidious, or maybe he's kind to animals. These are excellent little fillips to add without bloating your work. These are easy fixes you can add after an editor tells you that a character is in some way lacking a desired attribute.

Another reason for your character to take a break is to insinuate some trivial detail that you're going to use to unlock the Big Problem at the work's climax. Let's say your detective has to drop off her kid at a friend's house for a sleepover. Your detective may be trapped in a boring conversation with the friend's mother. As her attention wanders she notices barbed wire mounted on a display. The dad collects the stuff. Perhaps the solution requires the detective know something about barbed wire. Now we know who she's gonna call.

The trick is in making it not seem contrived. If the ONLY thing your detective does that is not detecting is that barbed wire scene, then your reader will think, "we'll see that again," and she'll be right! Your detective will have to do more than one kid task. And your detective will have to notice more than one oddity. Perhaps in those instances, she'll have a cell phone in hand and be advancing the plot.

The more seamlessly you can mix plot-advancing and character-deepening the better. Life does not come to us neat, but is a cocktail of diversity. We work, we play, and we have extraneous obligations all mixed up. If you make it that way for all your characters, nobody will complain that they're made of cardboard.

Stupid Villainy

Unhappy events in my life have reminded me that criminality if far more plausible when it is stupid than when it is genius. We like our detective fictions to be chess matches between masters. We want to see Holmes contending against Moriarty, Spiderman against Green Goblin, James Bond against Ernst Blofeld--the list goes on. But villainy in real life is far more often perpetrated by idiots.

I tend to forget this. I've complained about the villain who feeds minions to his sharks when they displease him. Why would I go to work for the guy in the monocle who kills off his minions? That's moronic.

Consider the movie Fargo. This movie is hilarious. William Macy plays a feckless loser who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. The criminals are hilariously stupid as you can see in their various interactions. Their madcap antics turn this comedy into darkest black when they start murdering innocents.

This illustrates something significant. You may need to be smart and/or good to make it through life, but you can be both stupid and evil to create a great deal of mayhem. The best crime writers know this and they can make the reader laugh at the stupidity of enterprising criminals who end up re-enacting Wile E. Coyote pratfalls and Darwin Awards. This can add some comic relief to some rather heavy reading. And then you can make your readers feel guilty for laughing.

Unthinking villainy can affect well-educated folk, too. Let's suppose I were a High School Chemistry teacher with cancer and neither money nor insurance for chemotherapy treatment. Sure, I could start cooking meth, but that would entail scary work with scary colleagues. OR I could saw off the end of a shotgun, walk into a bank wearing a Barak Obama mask, and demand the contents of all the registers. The feebs would pick me up before dinner time, and after my conviction on bank-robbing & weapons charges, they'd ship me off to the Mayo Clinic to get my cancer cured at public expense. That's a lot smarter than what Vince Gilligan's villain came up with in Breaking Bad.

Let's face it, you don't have to be Darth Vader to choke the life out of your girlfriend. And you don't need to be Gabbar Singh to toy with the victims of your cruelty.



I think stupid villainy is something like Mr. McGregor's veggie garden. You've got a nice, tidy little garden going on. Then some pestilent little bunnies come along and take what they want and cause damage much greater than whatever value they could derive.

These criminals may aspire for the "big score," but they are seldom capable of more than venal enterprises. Their misdemeanors reflect the lack of trust they inspire. Smart people do not leave high-value items unprotected. They do not entrust high-value items to lame brains. The protection afforded high-value items is seldom penetrated by numb-skulls. The criminal who is a dunce must settle the scrap-metal value of a cast-iron antique he steals because he lacks the sense to take it to somewhere besides a junk-yard. They feel they've put something over on you when they lie about matters inconsequential.

This mindset is what I think lies at the heart of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He has the role of constable, he's not very bright, and he tells himself he's not a criminal by affecting the intelligence he does not possess.

Of course, the cretinous villain does not realize his disability. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. This makes him ripe for manipulation. Which I suppose is something the super-villain with a monocle knows. S/he can promise the dimwit shiny things. "After we hold the moon for ransom, you'll be right there at my side."

More likely, the smart villain can set up the blockhead villain with a "big score" to the end of getting him caught, whereupon the smart villain can steal the lolly from the evidence room. (This scenario does not even require a super-genius villain.)

So, next time you're up for some crime writing, or want to put together a mystery, consider putting some addle-brained imbeciles on the chessboard.

A Few Bad Men

I've griped about how I think Dr. Who and BBC Sherlock failed when it came time to depict their protagonists' nemesis. In the case of Dr. Who, it is another Time Lord called "The Master," and in Sherlock Holmes's case it is Professor Moriarty. Every Batman needs his Joker and every Superman needs his Lex Luthor.

Thinking through your antagonist is as important as your protagonist and his/her love interest.

My complaint with BBC Sherlock is that Professor Moriarty seemed exactly like The Master who seemed like a nasty schoolboy. True, nasty schoolboys personify evil, but they needn't be taken that seriously. (Unless putting one over your knee and spanking him is not an option.) I guess that's my complaint: If the villain is just like someone you've spanked, s/he falls short of being taken seriously.

Likewise, fellas with monocles and long-haired cats don't work for me. But instead of enumerating what's wrong with other villains, I'd like to say what I think is right with one. I seek a Specification for Antagonist Design.

In one sense, anything that's to your hero's advantage should have a corresponding advantage in your villain. The Doctor is special because he's a Time Lord. Then the Master is a Time Lord, too. Sherlock has mad deductive skillz. So does Moriarty. But they needn't be the same sorts of advantages. They can be formidable, but different. Maybe your villain cannot shoot webs from his wrists, but he has robotic arms coming out of his back instead.

In World War II, the Japanese Zero was a superior aircraft in several key aspects. Nevertheless, the Americans learned how to avoid its strengths and exploit its weaknesses. Avoid a turning fight against a Zero, and if you can't, get outta Dodge. That's how conflicts work in real life and that's how your stories should work.

Stories without conflict suck. And where conflict is concerned, it takes two to Tango. Thus you want to think carefully about your protagonist's dance partner(s). The best villains have several admirable qualities about them. Sure, Gabbar Singh is evil, but he's got a sense of humor and irony and he loves to laugh--before he shoots them. Darth Vader was a sensitive soul easily disturbed by his co-workers' lack of faith--before he choked the life out of them. The Operative was motivated by his faith.

Most Westerners share a cultural heritage of the Greek/Persian conflicts of antiquity. We relate to the independent-minded Greek hoplites who are vastly outnumbered by a host of Persian slaves, but win because they are free men who can seize the initiative on the battlefield while their opponents await the commands of their masters. Thus your story will resonate better with Western audiences if you have a feisty band of Rebels outmaneuvering the giant Empire.

The circumstances needn't be martial. You can write the same conflict between Preston Tucker versus the Big Three automakers with the same asymmetry.

Because companies are generally larger than readers, it's common to make some Corporate Type the villain. Given the amorality of common corporate governance, this is not a stretch. But Big Labor and Big Government work just as well in the role of Persians waging a war of attrition. And since the only good politicians in Washington are Whigs (and long dead) you can show bipartisan villainy. If you want to make Big Religion the villain, choose one that is not in the habit of chopping people's heads off.

That's where I'm at right now. I'm putting together a villain who's motivation is money. He won't blow up the world, because that would destroy all the shops where he spends money. He won't kill everyone, because then there would be no one left to be minions. He doesn't feed his minions to sharks, because it reduces minion-morale. However, his minions are well paid, they have full health insurance with dental, and a generous 401k matching plan.

In other words, he's exactly like me, but with a few billion dollars.

Well, he's different from me in one regard: I'd waste time in the third act gloating about the details of how my nefarious plan works. This villain would just kill the hero and move on to the next item on his Things To Do Today list.

Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. This means you should show the stuff on the good side of the line in the villain's character. Once upon a time, that might have meant being a pious, church-going man, but the Hollywood stupid tax has made religion a telltale of villainy.  In choosing the good you put into a villain, you risk making him more sympathetic than your hero.

So, what good attributes do you think should inhere within the character of a villain?