Daniel Joshua Rubin & Confronting Evil
This brings us to your responsibility as a storyteller. If you are going to confront evil in your story, you must have something to say about it.
27 Essential Principles of Story
by Daniel Joshua rubin
In almost every story ever written, there are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. There are the protagonists, the characters you are rooting for, whose perspective the reader is inhabiting, and antagonists, characters who do whatever they can to thwart your protagonists and keep them from being happy or getting what they want. These ‘bad guys’ can be as ‘evil’ as a bully on the playground to a bloodthirsty dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands — it depends on what your story demands.
But evil should never be presented in your story for mere shock value. For provocation’s sake alone. For a convenient plot complication.
If you are writing a story where evil, in any form, is being confronted, it is your responsibility as the storyteller to have something to say about that evil. There needs to be a point to it’s inclusion. Otherwise it’s just cheap sensationalism, and that does you, your story, and your reader, no good whatsoever. So think carefully about the ‘bad guy’ in your story, at least as carefully as you do about the ‘hero’.
LESSON LEARNED: GOOD VS EVIL IS MORE THAN JUST A CONVENIENT CONFLICT — IT’S A CHANCE FOR YOU AS AN AUTHOR TO MAKE A STATEMENT.