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	Good Guy--Bad Guy
	by Susan Molthop

Revised August 3, 2007

The idea for this article came to me while studying the movie classics -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5, and Star Wars! One example also came from a real world newspaper. The point of the exercise is to make our characters more interesting and get our readers involved in their lives--regardless of the source.

Let's start with Buffy. The character in question is Angel. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? At first we didn't know the answer -- he was a mystery. Next we found out he was a bad guy, but a sympathetic one. Before long, he crossed over to good guy status. Then he became a real bad guy. Now he's back to good guy again.

So, what's the point? As with the real people in our lives, loving or hating Angel requires getting involved. We can't just write him off as a flat character and move on.

Okay, on to B5. Garibaldi, Londo, and G'Kar all switched sides at some point in the original series. This definitely made Londo and G'Kar more interesting characters.

Please beware of the "evil twin" cop-out, however. IMHO, that's what happened to Garibaldi (and also to Angel, in Buffy). When we decide that a character is bad or good, it should be a decision based upon the character's own free will. When someone brews up a potion or uses mind-control to convert a character, it doesn't have the same impact. When the spell wears off, we're stuck with the same old 2-dimensional character again. I'm not saying "don't do it," it just isn't as effective as having the change be the result of a character trait or past experience that surfaces after we've formed our judgment of the character's true nature.

Anakin Skywalker is a perfect example of this tool. We already hate him as Darth Vader and love him as a little boy and a young man. Do you think anyone will buy a ticket to the movie that tells us what makes him change? Wouldn't this same device work in your next novel?

My final example comes from real life. An article came from my clipping service last year, about a journalist who wrote a very important article involving medical research (I don't remember the details). The following day, information leaked out that the writer had signed a book contract for this subject. She went from hero to goat, overnight, when it appeared that her article was self-serving. In the next development, she refused the book deal, which made it appear that her integrity was beyond reproach, returning her to hero status. Finally, she was accused of shoddy research, which put her back in the bad guy column. I never heard what happened after that -- she may be a hero again, now, but the point is -- WHAT A GREAT CHARACTER SHE'D MAKE FOR SOMEONE'S NEXT NOVEL. In just a few paragraphs, I admired her, felt sorry for her, hated her, then wondered if she'd been framed!

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