Writing in the Gray

Posted on 18 September 2009

If there is one thing I am fascinated with, it is the gray space between good and evil and what it means for characters.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy the black-and-white high fantasy as much as the next person.  I love Tolkien and Eddings and Jordan, but there is something that just keeps me on the edge of my seat when you can’t really tell who the good guy is.

To this effect, much of my writing is like this.  I don’t like having villains that twirl their mustache and plot evil for evil’s sake.  I don’t even like having a divine power or backing that is represented by gray characters.  That is to say, I love gray universes.

Now, part of this comes from my own lack of religion and belief that we truly do live in a gray universe, but some of it comes what I think just makes a good story.  Who is the villain that is more terrifying: the one who knows he is evil and enjoys it, or the one that thinks he’s doing good, and you can see where he’s coming from?  And I’m not just talking misguided good, I mean that villain has a legitimate point and perhaps even a noble cause, but it just happens to conflict with the protagonists’ points and causes that are just as noble.

On the flip side, which is the more believable and empathetic hero/heroine?  The person who, while able to do wrong, always is striving for an undeniably just and noble cause, or the person who is maybe not 100% in the right, but is still trying to do the “right” thing given the circumstances.

Robert Jordan once said—and I’m paraphrasing cause his blog is giving me database errors and refusing to let me search for the exact quote—that he thinks the entire reason people read fantasy is to be able to escape the harsh and gray world we live in.  They want an absolute good to root for, and I can see his point.  After all, as I said, I do love my high fantasy.  But I don’t think that’s the only reason people read fantasy, especially now that it is being more warmly embraced as just another facet of science fiction and thus birthing the “speculative fiction” genre-label.  After all, we have amazing and highly acclaimed books like G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and its sequels, and even Jordan’s own world is facilitated by a cast that is massively gray and muddled itself.

So, yeah, those are the characters and worlds I like.  If there are gods, they are not divided in the Judeo-Christian sense, but more in an Eastern or even early Mediterranean sense, and the villains, while still villainous from the point of view of the protagonists, could very easily have been the heroes of their own story had things turned out differently.  That kind of stuff makes a person think, and if that isn’t want a speculative fiction is about, I don’t know what it’s for.