Somewhere, my English teachers are sobbing over that headline.
Vine Gillian, creator and showrunner for Breaking Bad, recently argued that writers need to write more good guys. That the last couple of decades of anti-heroes has warped the impression of people who watch their shows. Gillian would know, of course, having created one of the best bad guys in television history. But, in part because he was the shows protagonist, in part because some people will see only what they want to see in a piece of art, the character was hailed as a hero. Gillian doesn’t like that, and I don’t blame him. But a lot of people seem to.
Some people argue that Gillian is asking for non-complex characters. Some people seem to think that good guys have to be rule-followers, defenders of the status quo or institution and so therefor can never seem as interesting as people who tear things down. I don’t think either is true, and I don’t think Gillian was asking for either.
Good characters can be as complex as bad characters. The idea that someone good lacks complexity demonstrates a lack of imagination. There is no reason that good people cannot have complex motives, cannot struggle with what the right thing to do is. Take Superman.
I know it’s a cliche, but it’s an image. many, many writers (looking at you Zach Snyder) have said that he is too simple, too good, boring. But Superman is close to invincible. He has the power to impose his will to a large extent on large portions of the world if he really wanted. But he doesn’t, because he does not believe that would be correct. What is the cost of that belief, of holding back from taking action he could but does not believe he should? How does he handle people who resent him for what he doesn’t do? How does he handle people who resent him for what he does do? How does he balance the ones he loves against the values he loves? How does he handle the guilt when his morals lead to people being hurt?
I am a hack (note the Failed Writers Journey on the door, please), and I already have a ton of interesting potential storylines. Imagine what a good storyteller could do (sit down, Zach.) If you cannot see the complexities, the difficulties, in being a good person, then I don’t know how to help you. There is just as much complexity in trying to do good as there is in being bad.
It is a truism in modern life that revolutions are always bad. That they always lead to more suffering than the regime they replace and that they are ultimately just about replacing one set of bad guys with another set of bad guys. You can’t do anything so why bother politics brought to the page. It is nonsense, of course. People act as if the slaves of Haiti would have preferred their enslavement to the problems of running a free country — problems caused by their former enslavers, by the way. Or that the problems of the anti-colonial revolutions are the fault of revolution rather than great power meddling, mismanagement, and the Cold War power politics. If you want to break things, there are plenty of stored where braking things in the name of good can be made to work with characters just as hell for leather as any bad guy you care to name.
But that also assumes that the choices are blow everything up damn the consequences and tweaking the tax code slightly in the hopes the bad system will magically reform itself. Look, things are fucked up and bullshit, especially these days. It is no wonder that a society where the institutions have largely failed looks with at least a little admiration on people who break things. But building things can be just as fraught, just as hard, just as exciting as tearing them down. A good writer can and should be able to tell a story about people trying to build something better, even if they are trying to minimize pain and chaos instead of causing them.
And that doesn’t even get into the smaller stories about how to live as a good person in a bad system. Take Gillian’s show. (Yeah, yeah, spoilers. The show is old people, keep up.) Frankly, it seems lazy to me to make Walter the main character when you had Skyler right there. I would watch a show that was focused on Skyler trying to survive as a good person in Walter’s shadow, where her difficulties and hard choices are centered instead of Walter’s. Bluntly, the best of the show is Skyler and her struggle to be good and protect her family at the same time in a terrible situation. Seems fairly relevant to today, for some reason.
Gillian was not asking that people write boring or flat characters. He was asking, I think, for writers to stop being so lazy and equating bad with complex, and really think about the complexities of being good, and how to bring those complexities to life in the same way that they have brought the complexities of bad guys to life. Because, honestly, how many more “complex” bad guys do we need to see? Wouldn’t it be more interesting, better storytelling, to focus on what it takes to be good, rather than what it takes to be bad?
Weekly Word Count
Six-thousand, one hundred. All in the abortion tech privacy novel (jeez, I need an elevator pitch for this fast) Like I said last week, very much settled into about six grand per week.
The words themselves feel terrible. I am pretty much convinced that I deserve to be a failed writer given the crap I am putting out now. But I console myself that this is a first draft, and that I already think I know how to fix some of the issues. But first — finish the story and then correct it. Otherwise, I think I will spin in it over and over again, never finishing, always improving. And while it definitely needs improving, improving one portion of it does not help if the entire story is never finished.
Oh well. At least my good guy is dealing with the complexities of being good.
Have a great weekend everyone!