Writing about moral villains/vampires

Hi. Yep, it’s yet another post about writing humanistic villains. And you’re probably sick and tired of hearing all the reasons because it’s been done over and over again. But just hear me out this once.

Although I consider ‘moral vampires’ to be rather an oxymoron (I‘ll save my thoughts on that one for another post), I do write my immortals fairly human like and here’s why. First of all, I think it makes the story/novel more interesting if you write about sentient beings. Yeah, non-sentient creatures can be very scary (Zombies creep me out, yuck!) as they are coming at you to kill you but there they akin to being a ‘force of nature’, almost things rather than people. So, while you can write great action sequences, most of your story needs to concentrate on the humans and what they’re feeling. Because once you make your villains non-sentient, you can’t write about their personalities. And that makes can make your story less complex and interesting.

OK, so now you’ve got your sentient villains. But why make them ‘good’ instead of ‘evil’? Since I’m a math/science person in my day job, I’ll explain it first in terms of that. Statistically speaking, writing very human villains, you, as a writer, get more ‘degrees of freedom’ out of your character. So what does that mean? Simple. If your character is ‘good’ on the outside, you can still layer him/her with some interesting stuff on the inside. For example, as you probably know from reading my work (if not, please consider reading my first novel “Vampires at the Opera”, click link on my user page to buy), I write a very romantic and fairly moral Dracula character. His soul mate is Mina and he is both loyal to her and to her son, Quincey who is the biological son of Jonathan Harker.

However, I still consider Dracula to be Dracula in that most of the historical stuff written about him (killing all those people) really happened. So, in my work, I have the ability and the freedom/flexibility to slowly strip off the layers of my Dracula character (or pull them off all at once) to reveal some less moral sides of him. I can have him do some unsavory acts and it will be logical (and unsettling as well) to the reader for him to have done these things. Because yeah, after all, he is Dracula.

Some people write the opposite way, that is, they write a very evil character that every once in awhile shows a flash of good. But for me, I’d like my readers to be able to sympathize with my immortal characters and feel like they know them. In this way then, when the character acts badly, the reader will be left unsettled (which is not a bad feeling for one’s reader to have in my opinion at times) and will need to think further about different issues, philosophies, etc that are raised in the stories/books. I think one can get the reader to feel close to the characters (make the reader feel disturbed at what the vampire has done) if you start out writing the character as a villain. In other words, if you write the character as evil, there is no way to go but down. If you start off writing the character as moral, you get much more flexibility in your character and subsequently, in your universe as well since there are many directions he/she can go. Therefore, then, I believe that a ‘moral’ villain is a more complex one and can make your stories/novels more interesting to your readers. And you can also write about their relationship with their kids. Which is what my second and third books in my series will be about.

Take care all,
Christine