Love Thy Enemy...and Write Better Characters

At one time, story bad guys were mostly one-dimensional. Pure badness, usually with dramatic monologues and an evil laugh. It was easy. You don’t have to expend effort to try and understand someone who’s truly evil. You don’t have to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, listen or consider a different perspective. You don’t have to dismantle your carefully built fortress of opinions and beliefs. You just send in Captain America to take out that evil guy and the world’s a better place.

It still works with the right story line, but the antagonist that interests me the most is the one truer to life. We all know people we don’t understand. Sometimes they frustrate the ever-living bejesus out of us and we want to slam their rock-hard heads against a wall until they see things our way (grin). We don’t understand why they do the things they do. And when that person is someone we care about, it can be heartbreaking.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the film A River Runs Through It (based on the book of the same name by Norman Maclean), where a pastor speaks of his son with this quote: “Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true, we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.”

That quote has often guided me in the way I write my conflict characters, and so some of those characters have become personal favorites. Like Elaine, Thomas’s mother in Rough Canvas. Elaine is a devout Catholic. At the beginning of the book, she genuinely believes her son being gay will result in the damnation of his soul. Many things in that sentence might hit an off switch for people. Bad feelings toward the prejudice that can exist in organized religion, assumptions about someone who doesn’t believe being gay is okay, etc. We throw up a wall tailored by our own experiences and feelings, paste a bigot label on that person, and move on.

I dislike the word bigot. It’s a way of reducing a person to one thing so that no one looks at anything else about them. By doing that, intolerance not only becomes a two-way street, we miss so much about that person (or character, if you’re looking at it as a writer). Elaine loves her son, deeply. She’s a generous and selfless member of her rural community, the type of person who is the first to arrive at a neighbor’s door when they are in need and quietly help without asking for recognition. She is a protective and loving mother to her three children. She has suffered the loss of her husband and grieved deeply for him. That loss is recent, which only increases the burden she feels toward shepherding her adult children.

She gardens, she laughs. She has favorite TV shows and music choices. Like all mothers, she lies awake at night sometimes, worrying that the paths her children are choosing might bring them pain. What she wants for them are lives of happiness, safety and love. Like all mothers, sometimes her idea of what that looks like and what her children think it looks like are entirely different. Who hasn’t had arguments with their parents about choices we make in life or the paths our hearts are compelled to take? Sometimes those paths end up being the right choices for us; other times we really wished we’d listened to Mom, lol.

So when I wrote Rough Canvas, I had to think about Elaine from inside her head and heart. I thought about what I would do if I believed in the Christian concept of Hell, and I genuinely believed my son was on a one-way road there, his soul sentenced to eternal damnation because of a path he was following. How helpless I'd feel, knowing he was a grown man and that every day that chance of calling him back to the right path was getting slimmer. Her fear and worry for him results in a tremendous conflict for Thomas that almost tears him apart from Marcus, his art, and his nuclear family.

But the same love that drives her fear is what brings her and Thomas back together. She is a good woman, who knows she raised a good man with a gentle heart, an artistic soul. She can clearly see he’s inherited her husband’s stubbornness and her own iron backbone to handle life’s bumps and breakdowns. She has to reconcile that with her belief that he’s taking a wrong path, and that reconciliation isn’t a good fit. It’s in those cracks where change has a chance to plant seeds and start to grow.

One of those first seeds is planted near the beginning of the book, though at the time neither Elaine nor Marcus is aware that has happened. It comes back to them later on, and influences them both. During a volatile argument, Marcus expresses his feelings for Thomas in a way Elaine recognizes, because it is how she has felt for her own children, her husband and loved ones. Marcus talks about how one night, he was standing in their bedroom doorway, watching Thomas sleep, and…

“Those incredibly talented fingers were on my pillow. He did that whenever I got up at night, to know when I came back. I looked at him and I couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t even move.”

Marcus made a fist, pressed it against his chest. “I wanted everything for him. I wanted to see him achieve every dream, embrace every desire. I wanted to protect him from anyone who would cause him harm or a moment’s pain, tear them apart with my bare hands. Never let him out of my sight, even as I wanted him to stretch out his wings as far as they could go and soar. And at the bottom, top and middle of it all, I just wanted to stand there, just that way forever. Not disturb him. Just look at him and love him. Do nothing but simply love him for everything he is, a creation too perfect to be anything but God’s gift to the rest of us.”

Elaine takes an amazing journey during this book, almost as amazing as the one that Marcus and Thomas take together. Through simple moments of insight, as well as terrible catalysts filled with pain and revelation, they find their way. Ultimately, they find that path because of love. A mother and son’s love for one another, as well as the love Marcus and Thomas share.

I've always loved Elaine's character, because to me her journey is the journey each of us takes in life. Doesn't matter the issue. We all have something that's our line in the sand. Sometimes, something happens, then something else, then something else, and gradually we start to have a different perspective on that issue. And usually what helps move us in a different direction, like it did for Elaine, is love.

So when I write my books, I often have the pleasant experience of finding I’m writing more than one kind of love story. Which is yet another side benefit of writing antagonists who are not one-dimensional.

Being a good writer means not blocking a deeper understanding of my characters. Fingers crossed, I hope that also helps me be more open to understanding those hard-to-understand people in real life - and quell that desire to bounce their heads against a wall, lol.

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