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rudeness and his cocaine habit; Scarlett O'Hara's romantic delusions and brutally pragmatic actions; Rhett Butler's shady past and mocking attitude: All of these traits normally don't make us like people, but combined with all the traits that do arouse sympathy, the flaws only make us love the characters more.

CHARACTERS WE HATE

Getting your audience to hate a character is much easier than trying to win their sympathy. Have a character do something wonderful, and it'll fade in our memory if he fails to measure up. Have a character do something loathesome, and we'll never forget.

Sadist or Bully

To make us dislike somebody, simply show her deliberately causing someone else to suffer in body or mind. If she enjoys causing the pain, we'll hate her all the more. Remember the sadistic villain in William Goldman's Marathon Man, using a dentist's drill, without anesthetic, to torture the hero into telling information that he didn't have. Remember Elizabeth Bar-rett's father in TheBarretts ofWimpole Street, whose whimsical and arbitrary commands made him impossible to please, so that everyone around him was constantly tortured by guilt or terrified of punishment. Remember the queen alien in Aliens, who did not kill her human victims, but instead kept them alive, cocooned and in hideous agony, so that her young could feed on them when they hatched. Remember Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who kept up a cheerful, perky demeanor while deliberately subjecting her patients to degradation, making them less and less human. We hardly knew anything about these characters beyond their hunger for other people's suffering-yet it made each of them the most memorable character in the story. They became the embodiment of pure evil.

Predictably enough, the very power of this tool guarantees that it will be overused. How many times have you seen this scene: Good guy Pete is completely in villain Nora's power-only instead of taking a .357 Magnum and blowing him away, Nora spends ten minutes smearing him with flammable jelly, pouring gasoline over his head, and strapping butane lighters to his body-talking all the time about how she'll love watching him go off like a roman candle. At the end of those ten minutes, when the audience is so on edge they're starting to say, "So light the match already!" the police arrive in the nick of time and save Pete. If Nora hadn't been such a sadist, Pete would have been toast.

The James Bond movies made this cliche into an art form. Bond is forever getting captured, but instead of killing him, the bad guys always put him in a situation that will lead to certain death-and then walk away. Whereupon Bond cleverly escapes and lives to fight another day. Never mind that the sadistic villain has been overused and misused. You just have to be careful to make your villain's sadism believable.

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It helps to keep in mind that the root of sadism is not the love of pain-it is the love of power, the sense of control over someone else's body, someone else's life. Thus it doesn't have to be physical torture. The effect is the same whenever one character forces his victim to recognize that the victim has no control over her own life. Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo's Nest and Mr. Barrett in Wimpole Street never resorted to physical torture; it made their sadism all the more horrible-and believable. They were bullies; they used their power to torment the little guy. That's the worst thing a character can do in fiction-the unpardonable sin.

Assassin or Avenger?

By comparison, mere murder is nowhere near as powerful in making the audience dislike a character. Where bullying can never be justified enough to make the sadist sympathetic, murder and other crimes can. They are not surefire devices for creating antipathy. For instance, a character who is trying to assassinate Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin is likely to have our sympathy right from the start-if the intended victim is made evil enough, the would-be assassin becomes a hero. The audience is never fully comfortable with the idea of cold, calculated murder-but the assassin can still be a hero.

When The Godfather first played in American theaters, the scenes of murder at the end of the movie brought cheers and applause from the audience. Why? Because every victim of Michael Corleone's hit men had earned our hatred by betraying a trust or by making a cynical, cowardly attack on a character we liked. But The Godfather: Part II carefully did just the opposite-it showed that the Corleones used murder, not for the sake of justice, but to increase their own power. When Michael orders the murder of his own brother, a weak, pathetic figure, we understand why, but it's still a monstrous act.

A rule of thumb: Murder and other crimes will only make a character into a villain if he commits the crime for selfish reasons, and if the crime harms people who don't deserve to be hurt. But if your character is committing a crime in order to save others from suffering, or if the victim of the crime richly deserves to suffer or die, then the crime will actually make your character sympathetic. In the classic caper movie The Sting, the characters played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford perpetrate an elaborate hoax in order to bilk the villain, played by Robert Shaw, out of a large amount of money. The motive for the con, however, was not the money-it was vengeance for the villain's casual murder of a friend of theirs. Shaw, on the other hand, was drawn into the con by his greed and by his desire to bring other people under his control.

The villain's crimes made us hate him. The heroes' crimes made us love them. Redford and Newman played crooks-but in this con their motives were unselfish, and compared to Shaw's character, they were saints. Motive makes all the difference in assigning a character's relative place within the moral spectrum a given work of fiction shows to be possible. A con man is an honest man, compared to a cold-blooded killer.

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Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Matthew Harrison Brady is completely discredited by the fact that he has appointed himself as attorney for the prosecution and as an expert on the Bible. His final collapse begins with his admission of the ultimate hubris. "God tells me to oppose the evil teachings of that man," he says, thereby confessing that he imagines that his words are God's words. It leads to his opponent, Henry Drum-mond, ridiculing him unmercifully. "The gospel according to Brady!" cries Drummond, and he bows down before his opponent in mockery, crying, "Brady, Brady, Brady almighty!" Ordinarily, Drummond's bullying of Brady would have lost Drummond all audience sympathy-but Brady's usurpation of authority is so audacious that Drummond's ridicule is not seen as bullying at all. It is the restoration of the just order of things-exposing Brady and bringing him down from the high position to which he appointed himself.

How long does our resentment of or annoyance with a self-appointed interloper last? Until he wins an invitation. Even after Pete has made us dislike him by forcing himself into a place where he wasn't wanted, our antipathy isn't permanent. If he later proves that he deserves his new place, if he earns the respect of others, then he ceases to be an interloper. He belongs. This is, in fact, the subject of countless stories-probably because at some time in our lives practically all of us have felt like interlopers, and we long for reassurance that we will eventually win acceptance in that new situation. The only thing that can save an interloper is vindication-but then he isn't an interloper at all.

Oathbreaker

Nora grimly agrees to Pete's harsh terms. "All right," she says. "If you promise not to tell anyone about my involvement with Hiram Doakes, I'll tell you where he gets his funding. But my name can't come into it-it'll ruin my father's business and destroy my marriage."

"You have my word," says Pete. "I won't let this touch you at all." Nora tells all, and leaves. Pete immediately picks up the phone and has his secretary place a call to the editor of the Tribune. "I've got the goods on Hiram Doakes," he says. "If you want the story, you've got it. My source? His lover for the past three years. Nora Simms. N-O-R-A, S-I-M-M-S. Her father owns Simms Construction. Of course you can use her name-just don't tell anybody you got it from me."

From that moment on, the audience knows that Pete is slime. When a character breaks a promise or betrays a trust, the audience takes that betrayal personally-Pete has achieved villain status, and readers will be longing for his downfall.

Intellect

It's no accident that so many bad guys speak in very formal, precise language.

"Look, buddy, you can't get away with this," says the hero.

"Do you think not?" says the villain, raising an eyebrow. "Do you fan-

90 CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

cy you can terrify me -with your absurd threats?"

"There's too many people already on to you," says the hero. "Do you mean the police? Those pathetic bumblers?" It isn't just the villain's vanity that makes us dislike him. It's the fact that he talks in an educated manner, using big words. You can almost hear him dropping r's as he speaks. No doubt he attended Harvard-if not Oxford.

This isn't true in every culture, but certainly the American audience resents any character who is smarter and better educated than other people. Robert Parker can only get away with having his detective, Spenser, quote poetry because he works so hard to establish Spenser as a tough guy. For every line of poetry, Spenser has to work out half an hour in the gym to win our forgiveness for his erudition. We're afraid of and resentful of people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.