Of course they are for non-fiction as well, though that’s a moot point since I’m talking about writing new creative stories, not rehashing something real.
I was thinking about some of the trials my characters have faced, and which ones they should face in the future. And since I love adventures and such, that means some adventures will encounter bad people. But I had to stop for a second and wonder. I had somewhat noticed this in my first book, but have only really delved into the thought of crimes more recently. When I was first writing TLP, I had thought about making one character be misunderstood, and his misunderstood actions would be parallels to “the seven deadly sins.” I decided to shorten it later on when I realized that seven events would be too long for that section of the book, and the way I had been writing was good at the time, adding my extra ideas would have brought the section down in quality.
But as I write more stuff, I begin thinking about what a bad guy should do. And then I came upon a clear realization. Across human history there have always been three basic crimes. Now, I’m not talking about motives or methods. I’m talking about the basics that everything ends up boiling down to when you ask: what was the crime?
So keep it in mind when writing! The three basic crimes are Lying, Stealing, and Murder.
I could go on and explain each, but it’s better to think about it for a while and ask yourself whether you think you can dilute a crime into one of these three basic building blocks. So, when you need your bad criminal to do something to get in the way of the hero, don’t delve into the specifics until you clarify the usage of lies, thefts, and murder.
This goes into a second point about bad characters and good characters. How do you know a good guy is good and a bad guy is bad? You think you know? What about when both desire the same, exact same, overall end result? That’s used pretty commonly in much of the stuff I’ve seen over the years. Take the Gundam anime series for example. There’s always a war involved and humans (key point: it’s always humans) fighting. But several times both sides just want peace. Sure, one side usually wants to be the rulers, but the end result is peace. Every so often there’s a show that had a bad guy that just wants everyone else to die, but in most cases it’s something different, or it’s spun as the result of some great tragedy in the bad character’s past, or they are from another universe and want to kill off everyone in this universe and make it habitable for their people. You still, rarely, get pure carnage.
So, when the end result is the same, or even in both cases good, who’s bad and who’s good? For your simplified answer: the bad character uses the three crimes to get their way. The good guy does not.
How often is the good guy the one that lies, steals, and murders? Oh, quite often enough (faced any hordes of random innocent birds/mountain lions/bears/three-headed beasts to kill in the open field in an RPG, or how about stealing a crystal from a deep labyrinth, or tricking a guard to gain access to needed places), but you’ll notice the severity is always something different. Not just that, but even when the “hero” does increase in severity, the bad character has always also been doing things far more over the top. There’s this need to rationalize we have, that says that as long as you aren’t worse than the bad guy, you can still be counted as good.
So that’s part of the dilemma you need to clarify in your fiction. What crimes does the bad character do, how they are accomplished, and to what extent is your good character actually good? This affects the reader’s perception of your characters as well, of course. And sometimes the usage of only one of the crimes, solely, rather than mixing all of them, lends a sort of purity to the character. There are heroic thieves who refuse to murder, liars who wouldn’t dare steal, and so on, with various examples (plenty in both fiction and real history) for each case, severity, etc.
This expanded into more than expected, but it doesn’t change the fact that regardless of the method, the next time I need my bad character to do something bad, I’ll have to think of whether he’ll be lying, stealing, or murdering next time, and the severity and circumstances.
And of course, whether my good guy can stay good and refuse to use the lesser versions of the basic crimes as tools to combat a greater evil. It seems like more recently, modern fictitious good characters lie and steal more and more often. Though it’s not usually as bad as the bad characters, it’s still there, the basic building blocks of all criminal activity. It’s fortunate that motive plays a large part in determining crime… right?
