I don’t know if all of you are aware of this, but in my other life, away from writing, I dabble a little in things esoteric. On one of the sites I was lead to there was the Witch’s Psalm (see my Reiki website for the whole thing). One line in particular grabbed me, which is:
Evil is only misunderstood energy
To this I say, hmmmm. I’ve never seen evil as some unified force like Satan or the devil that wreaks havoc on humans. Whatever evil there is in the world we do to each other. A Khalil Gibran quote comes to mind:
Of the good in you I can speak, but not the evil, for what is evil but good tortured by hunger and thirst. When good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I’ll tell you. When you write crime fiction, especially if your characters are three dimensional, you have to have some theory as to how they got that way. Some folks like to say he was just crazy, or inexplicable motivated but I can’t go that route. I feel a compulsion to know and thereafter impart to me readers exactly what my villain is about. And since I don’t believe folks are born evil or tormented by un-manmade demons, their backstories need to be complex and plausible. As a reader, those are the types of stories I enjoy as well. As a mother I’m glad neither of my kids is out in the back torturing bunny rabbits of something. That’s not a good sign in fiction or in life.
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