Choosing the right bad guy (or gal) is very important. Don’t believe me? Would Luke be Luke without Lord Vader? Would Clarice be Clarice without Hannibal Lecter? No, they wouldn’t be quite the same. A bad guy isn’t just the resistance your good guy runs up against. That would be like losing your change in the soda machine. Enough to make you angry and cause you to kick the machine a few times, Sure! Enough to make you fly around the galaxy relentlessly hunting down the imperial change steeling machine… probably not.
After sketching out the basic background for Marcus Dresden (the protagonist in Waves of Deception, Book One of the Marcus Dresden Thriller series) I turned to fleshing out the bad guy. I loved the process… admittedly even more than coming up with the good guy. Maybe that says something about me as a person, I don’t know. Anyway, my favorite bad guys are complex characters with what I think are real motivations to be the people they are. Like Moriarty of Sherlock Holmes fame. They are intelligent, cunning, likable, conniving and of course a little bit… or a lot crazy. But the kind of crazy that is hard to root out and be sure of at first blush.
It’s their version of crazy that makes them, the bad guys the antithesis of our good guy. But not so much so that our bad guy couldn’t be the hero. Hero? Yes, the bad guy that rides that thin line between good and evil. That teeters, hopscotching from one side of the line to another leaving us in doubt of his true intention. Giving us hope that he will redeem himself and turn towards the light… and not go to the dark side forever. Then with one fail swoop crushes every hope we ever had of him (or her) like a ship on the unseen rocks in a storm.
Or what at about the guy (or gal) who is outright evil through and through. No doubt about it. But whose logic spins us round like a top. Let’s say, Negan. After all Rick and crew have been through, they were lucky they met Negan towards the end (and not the beginning). A man so evil it just poured out of him every second he was on the screen. Yet there’s some kind of logic to his madness. Some sort of Thanos-esq – I’m helping to right the world (or galaxy) by eliminating half its population… logic. Negan too is riding that line, bouncing back and forth if only to toy with our emotions. Our sensibilities. But Negan is Ricks opposite… or is he? Because Rick is not Rick anymore. Nope. Not one bit. Rick teeters too. He plays hopscotch too. Negan had to be both logical and evil to remind us Rick will never again be too far from falling off the edge and sinking into the abyss of his mind that is wracked with evil.
Yes, it is especially important to pick the right bad guy (or woman). For without them we will have a very lopsided story and that’s no fun. So, I hope you read Waves of Deception and enjoy the bad guy/s!!
Go read it, Waves of Deception (due out in September 2020) and let me know what you think. You can leave a comment here or email me at brian@bgroganbooks.com. Better yet join my Newsletter and get all the updates and promo’s, including becoming part of the exclusive Pre-Reader Club. The only way to do that is to subscribe at bgroganbooks.com.
Thanks for reading. Now go take out the trash!