Sickness and Evil

I recently saw a TED talk about psychopaths and I came to think that a lot of normal people are wrongly identified as psychopaths. At the end of the talk the speaker says he refused the offer of lunch with a fellow who'd been released from an insane asylum after many years of perhaps wrongful incarceration. He posed it in "what would do?" kind of way.

The presumption in my mind when I heard the talk being that we should not shun a person with a mental illness. It's not contagious. But then I got to thinking, there are other reasons to decline a lunch invitation with someone.

I would not decline lunch with Elmore Leonard because I think he is a wonderful writer. I believe he has a real understanding of criminal motivation and it comes out in his writing. I've complained elsewhere about the bogus motivations of some villains. But truer words have seldom been spoken than,"In Elmore’s world, death stalks the land disguised as money.” I love the lines of dialog Mr. Leonard puts into his characters' mouths.

Elmore Leonard writes about criminals who have a crystal clear motivation: money. Criminals motivated by getting money are fun characters to read and write about because most of them are stupid enough to get caught, but they think they're smarter than they really are.

"No, dear, you just THINK you're Professor Moriarty."

I don't think we can ever write about a villain motivated by insanity. Let's suppose the fella thinks he's an emperor simply because some moistened bint lobbed a simitar at him. No crime in that. But let's suppose he proceeds to behead his girlfriend for treason when she deprecates watery tarts as a basis of government. His crime is motivated by preserving power, not by insanity. Insanity is a means, not a motive. Likewise, when a woman drowns a kitten because she thinks it's a demon, her motivation isn't insanity, it is purifying the world. This is a twist on the mistaken-identity, misunderstanding conflict between characters.

After money, Revenge is an effective motivator for both villains and heroes alike. When the Hebrew prophet said "an eye for an eye" he limited the damages that can be lawfully sought by an aggrieved parties to just an eye. He did this because it is common to amplify slights into major insults.

Revenge motivates the villain most villainously when it is disproportionate.

Suppose you lost you job as a school treasurer--an elected position. And suppose further that your home was in default and about to be foreclosed upon by the bank. And you hope to revenge yourself against the voters who insulted you by voting for the other guy and the bankers who want to take your house away. What to do? It's altogether reasonable for someone angered in this way to seek revenge and do so in the largest way possible.

This could be done, if you're evil enough, through a number of purchases of explosives over the course of months and the placement thereof in your home and the local public school--the site of your humiliation.

Nothing particularly crazy about seeking revenge is there?

In Bath, MI on May 16th of 1927, an evil man did did exactly that killing several dozens of innocent children and adults. The mind recoils at such evil. Rejecting it, we think he had to be sick. No, he was evil.

In the decades that have followed, other feckless losers have perpetrated similar crimes and the phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads," is part of the news cycle. So much so, that the Revenge motive is supplemented by the Notoriety motive.

This brings us to the legal, but evil acts of news outlets who profit from the pain of disasters like this. You can sell a lot of newspapers displaying the image of the feckless loser and endlessly asking "why?" Give us dirty laundry.

This is legal, but it is evil. Legal-but-evil acts are the Original Sin of the businessman. For this reason Hollywood can easily and believably paint the manufacturer, the employer, the producer as the villain.

Criminals motivated by getting money are stupid enough to get caught. The ones that are smart enough to NOT get caught find evil-but-legal means to enrich themselves by impoverishing the rest of us. They aren't criminals because they never get caught. We are all a little less safe whenever the media makes the feckless loser mass-murderer into a pop-star.

So let's return to the fellow who was incarcerated for several years as a supposed psychopath. When you consider the sane acts of this person, you realize the man is amoral. He regards other people as mere furnishings of his life. Maybe he's sane or maybe he's crazy, that's questionable. But there is no doubt the fellow is a little more evil--he has less regard for his fellow-man--than most others.

Thus, I would have no qualms about declining a lunch invitation, not because he's sick, but because he's evil.

Does Bad Writing Exist?

This seems a ridiculous question until asked to define bad writing.

Months back I was reading about how John Locke sold a million books and his response to his critics is unique. He doesn't engage any assertion that his books might be poorly written. Instead, he shrugs and says the haters are simply not his market. There's some virtue in this way of thinking and it is a paradigm shift.

Yet I think this paradigm has its limits. I've tried to follow two commandments in my writing:

• Thou shalt be interesting.
• Thou shalt be clear.

Honor those two commandments and I have no quibble with John Locke. Otherwise, I suppose bad writing does indeed exist: It is writing that is unclear and/or uninteresting.


Give Catnip To Cats and Dognip to Dogs
So, are you cool with a writer interrupting a narrative with an extended treatment of discrete mathematics complete with equations? No? Would that constitute bad writing because it's uninteresting? Doesn't Neal Stephenson do that? Or how about an extended political monologue? Didn't Ayn Rand do that?

Mathematics and libertarian politics are--to some readers--what Elmore Leonard calls "the stuff people skip." To other readers the stuff is pure catnip. Some people are bored to tears by that which titillates others. This makes the first commandment of being interesting an audience-dependent thing.

The writer needs to know who's going to be reading his work before he can know how to keep that first commandment. Thus, if you are in any way inclined to read my work, please tell me about yourself.

Don't Make Enemies

 I may surprise you, but less than 100% of the people reading this supporter the Whig Party, belonging instead to the parties of Lincoln and Jefferson. Reflect for a moment on your response to someone writing something that's identifiably from the other side. The contradictory politics distracts from the writing and from the story. There is absolutely no good reason to alienate the 50% of the book buying public who belongs to the other party. (Or in my case the 100%.)

In addition to politics there's religion. Not that many of you are Zen Baptist Puritans, and if you make your book into a tract for Something Else, I'll probably toss it against the wall. Good and evil are concepts that are non-denominational and non-sectarian. C.S. Lewis wrote from a Christian perspective, but nobody would call Narnia a heavy-handed tract because he engaged his readers at the level of good and evil as it runs through the center of human nature. He didn't engage in Bible thumping because it would alienate everyone who doesn't think the Bible to be God-inspired.

There are zero-sum games. I can think of a few topics of conversation that always end badly, because no matter what position I take, the issue is so polarizing and the passions so strong, that someone on one side or the other will be so angry, I'll create an enemy. The only way to win these games is to not play. I just won't go there.

Don't Be Evil

There are some things that warrant nothing less than complete, unequivocal condemnation. Period. Pedophilia? The Ancient Greeks may have tolerated it, if so they deserve whatever hell they're burning in. Nazis? Only Mel Brooks can joke about Springtime for Hitler.

Sometimes you can be ambivalent about gray areas. People of good faith disagree about whether such and such is acceptable behavior or not. That's not the case here. The writer needs a moral compass that's magnetized enough to sense when there is a consensus that a thing is wrong and must not be treated ambiguously.

A friend was deeply offended by a "romance" novel that depicted rape and pedophilia with too casual a treatment. I'll take my friend's word for it that the work stunk. I thought it unworthy of the time and bother of condemning it. But my friend grabbed hold of it and brought every cannon to bear in deprecating the work in the harshest possible terms. If the work was merely bad, she would not be so motivated to badmouth it, but the work was evil, and my friend felt a moral obligation to condemn it as evil--like Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick.

Personally, I noticed this a couple years ago when I revisited Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter stories. Since these are all in the public domain, I reformatted them to look good on my Sony Reader (This was in my pre-Kindle phase.) I read a few of the novels and then ran into something I hadn't noticed when I first read the books when I was a teen. John Carter's son--the protagonist of whatever novel I was reading--owns slaves, and the antagonist insinuates himself into the young man's household as a slave. Who should I root for? I don't approve of slavery, even fictional slavery on another planet. I put the book down and haven't read anything else by Edgar Rice Burroughs since. 

Don't Be A Writer

Shakespeare said, "the play's the thing." Same goes for the narrative. Your reader is not going to want to read beautiful words. S/he wants to read a story. The words of a story are like the wires holding up Flash Gordon's spaceship. They have to be there, but it's better if nobody notices them. Clear writing is like clear spring water: It is transparent. It is invisible.

I've goofed around trying to write in a style or voice that's congruent with the time and place of the POV character. This is a mistake. Yeah, it's cool to write like a Victorian. I rather like the old stuff better than I like the new stuff. And this lets me write like what I prefer to read. But I hear people remark about the words and I realize they're not thinking about the lifeless body hanging in the locked room . Fail.