I'm on Five Question Friday!

[Andre Jute]

I'm on Five Question Friday with Aaron Polson!

BTW, those questions are selected from a long list Aaron had the cruelest interrogators of all, his teenage students, think up. I avoided the hidden traps by deciding on one question and then willy nilly taking the next four in order. It makes for a slightly uneven interview, but then I've always taken the view that "even tone" is a synonym for "dully predictable".

Enjoy!

[Patricia]

Good interview, Andre. I was especially interested in your point about empathy and the need for some reader-identifiable traits in even the most evil characters. I agree. If the bad guys are painted as entirely evil, they come off as comic book characters.

There was a time when nearly all my reading was in the true crime genre. The best authors managed to portray sadistic killers as human beings. Doing that gave the books much more power than those presenting only the crimes and not the person behind them.

I'm not saying that evil characters should create warm, fuzzy feelings within the reader -- just that something about them should resonate with the reader, an aha! recognition that nobody is all bad. I can't believe in the pure-as-driven-snow character either. Give me a flawed hero and I'm happy.

[Andre Jute]

I agree. A reader saying with a shudder, "There but for the grace of God..." is a hugely desirable outcome for a writer. A reader shrugging when the bad guy gets what's coming to him is a flashing neon warning of a lost reader, and a lost sale for every succeeding book, and probably some bad word-of-mouth as well.

Literature is about shadings and subtleties. Absolutes have no reality outside comic books.