How to Write a Great Villain

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grohl, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is a creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Story Grid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, I bring Sean a question that I've been thinking about and some other people in the story grid community have been talking about, and that is the nature of evil and how to make sure that you are coming up with a really good and believable villain. So I bring this question to Sean, and he had some really good insight on it. So let's jump in and get started. So, Sean, a question came up in the Level up your craft community the other day, and we've been asked this a couple different times. And then I feel like I'm even dealing with this a little bit with the threshing. And it's this basic thing about the nature of evil and figuring out how to do a villain, especially when I'm thinking about action, right? Because the villain is what drives the action. That's who kicks off the story and all that kind of thing. But I feel like, you know, but then there's always like this speech and praise of the villain, right? So there's always a point where the villain gets to explain themselves and they know, make some good sense. So when you're thinking about stories and villains, how do you step into this idea of evil? And what kind of direction do you take? And then I guess, how do you make sure you have an actual compelling villain that is evil? But also, I don't know what the word would be like, sympathetic.

Right, right. Well, you know, here we go. I'm getting on my pulpit again here, but I think it's an important. It's a very, very, very difficult question. And it's probably one of the top one or two. It's, you know what? It's the top two reason why people want to write a novel to begin with. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. Let me look at this from a very, very, you know, how I always talk about levels of analysis, and this is my new, you know, sort of analytical tool that I've been piecing together for the past couple of years. Levels of analysis. It's all about sort of looking at the experience of the world from varying perspectives. So what I always do when I get these kinds of questions is they're very paradoxical, just like everything. Meaning they are. Everything has a level of positive and negative valence to it. So I'm looking from the level of analysis that it's extremely abstract. It's sort of like trying to put yourself in the place of the great creator, if there is such a thing. And the great creator has to look at the phenomena of life in a very abstract way. So I know I'm speaking very vaguely right now, but I'm going to get there. So if you look at the phenomena of life extremely abstractly, you actually have two ways of looking at the world. The first way is what has only been around for maybe, I'm going to say, a couple thousand years. And it really hasn't come to the heart of our existence for, let's say, the last 500 years. So in the terms of evolutionary time scale, this is very, very new. And the way of looking at the world through this prism is called the objective point of view, the objective landscape. It's the scientific way of looking at something. Right? It's the way we measure things and describe those things. It's what are the things in the world that we are experiencing? So that could be a coffee cup, or it could be, you know, house camping at the hotel you're staying at, something like that. So you have objects in the world and beings in the world that interact with the objects. So if you look at the world just objectively, you can say that person is this age, has this color hair, has this type of skin pigments, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you could say the coffee cup is 7 inches tall, 5 inches in diameter. And you could really go to town on giving an empirical account of what those things are. And it's just the material substance of the phenomena that you're observing. That's the scientific point of view, right? It's saying, what is the same for all of us? If you were to look at the coffee cup and measure the coffee cup and I were to do it independently, we would both come to the same results if we're using the same measurement devices. Okay? So that's one way of looking at the world. It's the objective, empirical, scientific way of phenomena right now. That is amazing, that way of looking at the world. And it's what creates the technology and the incredible world we're living in now. All the advances of taking care of fundamental needs like water and food and shelter and wi fi and all kinds of amazing things. That's great. But what it doesn't tell us is how do we live in this world? How do we interact with the objects in the world that we're living in a way that will what we're trying to figure out, what is it that we want? How do we behave? What is our sort of moral compass? I'm using the word moral in a very strict way of like, how do you behave to get something that you desire? What's the moral sort of value that we're constructing? To look at the world and the way we do that is called the subjective point of view. So when something's subjective, it's only really experienced by an individual. So the objective is for everyone and the subjective is for the individual. And the individual wants to know, how do I interact in the objective world such that things will be good for me? And now we get into the real hairy part, right? What does good mean? What is good? And this is where the morality and the subjective morality of the universe comes into play. Now, people who just say, there is no such thing as subjective reality. There is no morality. Everything is fungible. We just live in an empirical, objective world. It's random. Nothing has really any value, valence to it. It's all sort of, you know, dependent upon the X, the individual's frame of reference. And there's no universal morality. I don't really buy that because it's basically slicing experience in half and saying half of the experiential world doesn't exist. And it's a really super important part of the experiential world that the empiricists and the objective people want to throw away. It's the world of story. It's the subjective experience. Because subjective experience takes narrative form. This is how we experience the world is through story in our own minds. As we're walking down the street, we are living in a story that we have told ourselves that helps us get what's good for us. So let's get back to the fundamental issue of what does good mean? Because good means a couple of things. What it fundamentally means from just sort of like an objective, empirical, evolutionary point of view is that what good is is what keeps us alive, right? It's what keeps us surviving in the environment. So what's good is to survive for the longest possible amount of time. So that's, number one, good. The number two good is to leave a legacy for when you're no longer here, meaning having kids or creating something that only you could have created, right? It's a thing that we talk about and level up your Craft. It's the reason why I started that course to begin with. It's about creating something that lasts longer than you do and having the courage to say, yeah, that's what I want. And I think that's a pretty fundamental thing to accept about your own self. There is no shame in wishing to leave a legacy that lasts longer than you do, because that legacy is it can either be your children, or it could be a creation other than your child that lives longer than you. So Pride and Prejudice is an example of a creation that lived longer than the Creator. Okay, so that's good. Let's just sort of broadly define that as good. Now, what's evil? Well, evil would be the opposite of good. Okay, so if good is creation, if good is something is better than nothing. And if you believe that, and I believe something is better than nothing, I believe that something that someone creates and puts all of their heart into is better than them not have trying to create it. I think even if the creation isn't so great and nobody really cares about it other than the Creator, it's still something. It's still better than nothing. Okay? So that's what good is. Something, a creation. So if good is something, a creation, then the opposite of something, a creation, would be nothing or destruction. So in my estimation, just thinking about it in these very global, abstract terms, if good is creation, evil is destruction. So you might say to yourself, well, geez, nobody wants anything to be destroyed on the earth, do they? I mean, everybody is good. Everybody is born with the desire to create something new and fresh. It's in our DNA. We have sexual drives that want force us and drive us to mate with another person and create something new. So there is no such thing as a destructive force among people. Really. I mean, come on, that's ridiculous. And what I would say to that is baloney. We have both. Every single one of us has within us the desire to create something, and we have the capacity to destroy things. And sometimes the capacity to destroy things are in the service of betterment of the world. So it's very, very paradoxical that good can be bad and bad can be good. And this is the story of our life dealing with that very difficult paradox that everything objectively we observe has two capacities. It can be something that you can use to further creation, and it can be something that you can use to destroy something so evil. Okay, so how does this storyteller deal with the problem of creating sympathetic evil? How do they do these things that I say they need to do? How do they Create an evil antagonist adversary aligned against the creative human hero of their story in such a way that the reader goes, well, you know what? That adversary, you know, he's got some good points there. You know, I can understand that point of view. You know what, there are times when I would, you know, I would get behind that guy. How do you do that? How do you make evil convincing and reasonable and something sympathetic and understandable by the largest number of people in an audience? Well, the answer to that question is that you have to think about your own evil. You have to think about what drives you to want to destroy something. Now this is not very fun sometimes until it does become fun. Because what I have found is that people, and I think our culture is getting worse and worse at this, they don't want to really contemplate evil within themselves. They're fine sort of targeting other people as evil or other concepts as evil. But anything that they're sort of, that's in their story, it's difficult to, you know, take another point of view and describe it as evil. So the concept of contemplating evil is, is one of the top two problems that a writer must solve. You know, the other problem is creating the good in such a way that is not cheesy. So this is the dynamic at play in a great well told story is that the hero has the great capacity of evil and the evil has capacity of good. So nobody is one thing. Everybody is both things. But the important thing is to really clearly define which side your protagonist is on, which is, I recommend creation good, and which side the adversary is on, which I recommend is evil and bad. So what is. Let's define evil in a more practical way beyond destruction. Destruction's good. That's a good start. But we need to really sort of what is the motivation for destruction? Okay, well, let's think about that. The motivation for destruction. And what I'm going to do now is I am going to give you a subjective description of what I personally, Sean Coyne, believe is a motivation for destruction that could lead a character to a place that is believable and interesting. Okay, so let me spin this out a little bit because what I would tell every writer and everyone in the level up your craft course is that it's their responsibility as the creator to do what I'm about to do, which can be unpleasant, but it's important to do. So I'm going to talk about my global environment and where I came from and how I've sort of navigated a difficult situation. And everybody's in a very difficult situation. I'm not saying in the least that my situation is ridiculously painful or I think it's on a par with everybody, probably little less than most people. So let's go back to that abstract concept. There are objects and things in the universe, and what we want to do is figure out how do we engage with those objects and things in the universe such that I will prosper, Things will be good for me. So for whatever reason, when I was, I think, 25, I decided I wanted to get into book publishing. Okay? I didn't know why. And when people ask me why I did it, I'd give them some bullshit line that doesn't really work, but I just needed to. I just felt like I needed to go into it. And so I went with that urge. I'd been fumbling around trying to find something that I liked, and it got to a point where somebody said, you've got to make a choice. Now what is it? And I said, I like to read. I'll go into book publishing. And that was enough. And that's what I did. So when I got to book publishing, I had to get into the circle, right? There's a circle called book publishing, just like there's a circle called, you know, the Lions Club in Nashville or the football team in Schenectady or the Woman's Auxiliary in California. Everything is a club and book publishing is a club. So I had to get into that club. So I had to say to myself, what is it that I will have to do to get into that club? And I will do those things to do that. So I did. I wrote a resume, I went on a bunch of interviews, I put on my best suit, I polished my smile. I, you know, I held the hands of the interviewers with a tight grip, and I was very earnest, and I got a job. So they said, okay, outsider, you are now allowed to come into the fringe of the book publishing universe. And if you succeed, you will get to the core and the most powerful place in the book publishing industry probably in about 15 years. So now, of course, I didn't think of this when I was going through it. I was just trying to get a job, right? But, okay, so what I discovered I'm going to flash forward very, very quickly is a lot of things didn't go very well for me. And I discovered that things went well for other people who did certain things that I didn't think were, quote, unquote, morally or ethically proper. And so I was faced with a choice. Do I sort of do the things that I didn't think were morally or ethically proper. Not that they were killing anybody or doing anything like that, but they were the slow, small little sacrifices of the creative spirit in the service of the fruits of the creative spirit. So if you were able to do certain things, you could become a high level executive in book publishing. And I was confronted with whether or not I should do those things to get to that place or not. And sometimes I did, sometimes I did do those things, and sometimes I didn't. But it became very confusing. And the more confusing it got for me, and the higher I rose in the hierarchy of book publishing, meaning the more promotions I got, the more power I got, the more money I got, the more confusing it started to become for me. And so what happens when you get very confused and you know that you've done things that you aren't all that proud of to get where you are is that you can do one of two things. You can convince yourself that you did everything the right way and that this is just the way the world works. Or you can say, you know, this world's a little weird and maybe if somebody changed things, it could be a little bit better. So you kind of hit a place like that and then you move forward or you stay where you are. So it's at this time that the person who continues on the path of compromise doing the things that everyone else does to get the carrot at the end of the stick, they start to get a little resentful. Right? I knew I did. I started getting a little resentful, like, oh, geez, I'm. I'm sort of doing what's necessary to get ahead and, and I'm not getting ahead. And this other person is, that's not fair. That's wrong. This whole thing's messed up. This whole thing is terrible. And you can slowly get to the place where you go, this shit should be torn to the ground. This is wrong. This entire industry is corrupt. Everyone in it is a liar. Now, I told you I was going to tell you a subjective story that would illustrate how one can get to a place where you form destructive thoughts. So I was really, you know, playing up the drama here to make a point. And my point is, is that you substitute book publishing with being a bee farmer in Australia. It doesn't matter. Every culture, every mini culture has a similar progression of little tiny things that you either accept or don't accept in order to make your way through the world. So that's how you can sort of construct an evil character. What you would say is, what is the universe that this character has been involved in? What little tiny things did they learn over time that revealed to them that the order that they were in was corrupt? And when they did confront the corruption of the order, and guess what? Every order has an element of corruption in it. It's just the natural state of order. It's never perfect. It's never going to make everyone happy. It's never going to be amazing. There's always going to be lousy, crazy, corrupt, dark things in everything. There's dark things working at Starbucks. There's dark things working in a hospital. It's just the way it is. So when you confront the darkness of the environment in which you are living, you have a choice. You can say, I'm going to burn this shit down to the ground. I'm going to destroy it for the sake of destroying it because it's wrong. Or you can say, you know what? I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to create a different way. I'm going to update this order. I'm going to try and make this order better. I'm not going to rip it to the ground. But what I will do is courageously explore what's wrong with it and do my best to create a solution to that problem. I can heroically confront the darkness. I can step outside of my comfort zone and have the courage to say, things are what they are when I see them, and then offer solutions to make those things better. Now, that's a great heroic story, and it's a story we all need to hear. But we also need to know the cautionary side of that story. We need to know the evil. What compels a person to actually go to the dark side, to the place where they go, you know what? That guy who's trying to make things better, he's a chump. He's a loser. He can't figure out the way the world works. The only way the world works is if it works just for me. I'm the center of the universe. What I think is the only thing that matters. My vision of the universe is total. That's where you get totalitarianism. That's where you get tyranny. That's where someone says, if everybody just did what I told them to do, everything would work the right way. Now, I don't know about you, Tim, but I say that to myself every time I'm in line at the grocery store. I say that to myself every time I'M in line at the movie theater or when I go into a public bathroom and someone has peed all over the floor, I go, if people would just behave like I do, everything would be right with this world. And that is the. The early stages when resentment and anger, an aggressive, just complete rage at the state of the universe, can begin to rear its ugly head within yourself. Now, that doesn't mean that people should go to the bathroom on the floor. That's. You know what I'm saying?

That's not the point you're trying to make.

That's not the point. My point is that if you explore these thoughts and these ideas within yourself, how might I become the person who would imprison somebody for having a different idea than I did? Is there a road that I could go down that could actually get me there? I wonder what that road would be. And then guess what you do. You go, I'm going to take that, that big fat package of darkness that I just constructed for my own life, and I'm going to change the details, and I'm going to give it to my adversary, my evil force in my novel. And guess what you're going to find when you do that. You're going to write some of the best things you've ever written in your life. Because we all are barely holding it together. 99% of the time. We're barely holding it together. I read somewhere like someone had done some sort of ridiculous calculation and they said, we're. I think the line was, We're 13 meals away from chaos. Like, if all of the, you know, supply lines into your community were cut and you only had the food in the supermarket that was in the supermarket within 13 meals, everyone would be so jacked up with desire for food that it would be just crazy. It would be chaotic. I mean, this is what, you know, the preppers are all about. It's like worrying about that. And we can go crazy worrying about that. And I'm not suggesting that we. We do, but what I am saying is that we live in a very delicate ecosystem, not just with the people around us, but within ourselves. And it's not saying that we're losers for being so dynamically, psychologically difficult. That's just the nature of it, right? We all have the things that are present in a novel. We have the good, we have the bad, and we're constantly struggling with the choices that present themselves to us every freaking microsecond of our day. Do I yell at the person who's doing their best job behind the checkout counter because they can't read the barcode fast enough for me. Is that really necessary? And all of us would say to ourselves, no, calm down. What's your problem? Person's obviously doing the best that they can. But an evil person who had gone over to the dark side, they would take that and they would go, that's evidence. There's another piece of evidence of how stupid everyone is. And us as readers will go, that's right. That is infuriating. Every time I go to the store, they can't read the barcode. What's with the barcode anyway? What genius came up with that? You can see how you can quickly go down that totalitarian point of view. So when you say, how do you write the speech in praise of the villain? I'm telling you right now, Tim, once you lock in, you're going to write 3,000 speeches in praise of the villain. Because the villain is just gonna say the shit. That's true. And then your audience, when they read it, is gonna go, you know what? That villain really makes a lot of sense. That hero really is an idiot for being the chump who's trying to protect the corporation that's destroying the universe. Why doesn't he just rip that a corporation apart? You get it? Yeah.

So does that apply? So when I'm thinking through, like the threshing, I mean, I can. That's pretty right down the middle of what you just said, right? Everything that's wrong, everything that needs to be protected, if people would just do what I say, everything would go better. But what about like the villain in a love story or that kind of stuff where it's not so. I mean, it's not like an action thriller or a post apocalyptic where everybody's, you know, fighting over the last thing of bread, you know, whatever it is. Like, how do you apply that when the villain isn't so villainy, I guess?

Okay, great question. Here's the $64,000 answer to that question. Really focus on the lie. What's the lie? The villain is all about the lie. They're liars. They misrepresent. Now, when you say, who is the villain in Love Story? Okay. One of the great love stories that's also a family drama and also all kinds of things. And I recommend everyone read this novel and watch the film is Ordinary People. I think the woman who wrote it was a woman named Judith Guest. She may have only written this one novel and it was brilliant. I mean, just if everybody listening to this does one thing, just watch that. Or read that book. Okay, now, there's a story where the villain of this story, she is the prototypical, archetypical, perfect mother. She makes French toast in the morning for her family. She goes to the country club and plays golf with her husband. She runs all the committees for the pta. There's always a hot meal. There's always the right sheets on the bed. Everyone is taken care of with a detail and perfection that is beyond anyone's. It's sort of like Martha Stewart to the nth degree. So what she presents to the world is perfection. Perfect mother, the loving and caring and wonderful person that is the heart and soul of her family. But there's a truth that lies underneath that. And the truth is, is that that entire Persona is a big, fat lie. She's an evil person. She's a totalitarian tyrant. She hates her son so much that she's driven him to try and kill himself. So the beginning of the story is the kid has finally, after he was saved from his own death, he was taken to a place that helped him rebuild himself. And now he comes home and there's his perfect mom and his dad. And now he's going to be okay because he's gotten the right attention and the right psychiatric care, and he's back in the devil's lair is what he is. And so the way this woman torments this guy and the other thing that's really, really difficult to accept about this story is that you can really sympathize with this mother. You can understand her point of view because her kid's kind of irritating, kind of soft, kind of a baby, a little bit. He's always looking to the father to bail him out. He just needs a little bit of discipline to get his act together. And if everybody wasn't coddling this kid in the way that they were, then maybe, you know, he would seize his potential and become a real person, a real man. So you can't help but, you know, have a little bit of that feeling when you're. When you're with her and she's doing all the personal things, right? She's. All of her actions seem to be culturally good. She cleans the dishes. She does all this stuff. But what she's doing is a lie. She really hates the kid, and she doesn't want to be around him anymore. And in fact, she doesn't really have all that much respect for her husband either. So what she's doing is getting them to make a choice. Will they live in the lie that she is telling them to live, or will they leave her or force her out? And that's what the story is all about. Will the father finally confront the big fat white elephant in the living room that his wife hates his son and drove him to kill him, try and kill himself? And will he confront her about it and say, you know what? This shit's got to stop, Honey, I love you, I married you. We had this son. You know, we're all in on this kid. You can't treat him like that. And if you do, you got to get the hell out. You know, is he going to be the hero to do that, or is he going to be the loser who's afraid of confronting the evil and let that evil destroy his son, an innocent person that he brought into the world and is supposed to protect? So the way you craft the adversary and the evil force in a story like Ordinary People is to really focus on what lie is the. The adversary showing the world? What are they really after?

Is it the. What lie do they believe? Or what lie are they trying to get other people to believe? Or both.

It can be both. And this is the difficult thing about not just writing fiction, but navigating the world, right? It's the concept of gaslighting. So gaslighting is when what I call plausible deniability. So if you get a feeling from somebody that they're really, really not happy with you and they just want what's worse for you because they want to destroy your soul. But what they're doing is like, hey, how you doing? Would you like to, you know, do this thing? And. And you go there, and it's the worst experience of your life. And they go, hey, did you have fun? And you go, actually, no, it was really upsetting. And they go, oh, upsetting? Really? Well, geez. Everybody else had a good time. I'm not sure why you didn't have a good time. Gee, well, let me think about that. Anyway, I'm sorry if I made you upset, but I was just trying to do something nice for you, right? And then you say to yourself, oh, my God, I'm such a jerk. You know, why. Why can't I have a good time when everybody else is?

That's the get you to ask the question, am I the crazy one?

That's right. And if you find yourself asking yourself that question a lot around someone, they're probably gaslighting you. Now, the difficult problem is how do you know if they're intentionally gaslighting you or if they're just not really all that self aware, you know, maybe they just don't know what they're doing. And making that judgment is extremely difficult. So that was what that drives. The narrative drive of ordinary people is that when you're reading the story, you're not really sure if the mother is really cognizant of what she truly feels about her son or what you're not sure. She's gaslighting everybody. And she may even be gaslighting herself, which is even worse. Because people who won't accept that they have negative feelings about somebody else, it's just part of being a human being, they're very dangerous. So when somebody says, I don't hate anyone, I don't feel negatively about anyone, I really try and be positive and happy, run away from them.

Because they're lying to themselves. It is impossible to navigate this world without having negative emotional responses to people. Your biology will not allow you to go through the universe only feeling positive things. It's a lie. In fact, the only reason why we are actually alive right now is because our bodies were built with negative, negative, negative. Your initial response to everything is negative. Because you know what? It could kill you. Stepping out of my apartment could kill me. So me not wanting to step out of my apartment makes sense. I could die. But you know what? So what? I got to get out of the apartment anyway. So the only way to get over the negative feelings is to take positive actions, to take creative steps, to act creatively. So if you start to act destructively, if you start to believe the lie, then you're going to spiral into the depths of sorrow and suffering to a place where you get so angry about where you are in life that you want to act out and hurt other people. If not, you know, or hurt yourself. And you may even extend to other people and maybe the community you're in. If you're in books publishing, maybe, you know, you want to write some nasty blog post about how everybody's an asshole or in the Lions Club or, you know, in the Knitting Circle. So the great thing about dealing with complex adversarial characters is whenever you get confused, say, what lie are they projecting to the world? What lie do they believe? And had they turned the corner where they have accepted their role as executioner of all that don't, do not believe what they believe, that's when the adversary turns the corner. Now, for example, the Joker, played by Heath Ledger in the Batman, he was a. He was the ultimate adversary because all he was on the planet to do was to destroy things. So when Batman tried to say, hey, man, what do you want? Or other people tried to be like, hey, we'll give you what you want. What do you want? And he's like, what I want is everything to be destroyed. Well, geez, I can't give you that. Well, that's what I want. So it's this holy guacamole. How do you deal with that? So the only thing you want is the destruction of everything? Yeah. Well, how do you get to that place? Well, these slow soul, you know, crushing examples that I've been laying out for the past 40 minutes are the way you get to that point where you say, you know what? There's no such thing as good. There's no such thing as evil. Everybody's a jerk. Human beings are terrible. We're destroying the planet. Everybody's a jerk. Let's just blow the whole damn thing up. Because there's no such thing as beauty. Creation's a myth. Let's just blow it all up. And that's when you get to nihilism. That's when you get to, let's blow up buildings for the sake of blowing up buildings. Let's kill people who are innocent, who have nothing to do with my rage. Just because it's going to blow up what I think is meaningless. That's evil.

Okay, so let me. I feel like that's good. What about who's the villain in Pride and Prejudice?

The villain is an internal villain. In the Two Lovers, it's an internal lie. Like on the story grid spreadsheet. You'll see that. I think I have. The way I represent the conflict is in a concept called cognitive dissonance. And what cognitive dissonance is, it's when you believe one thing to be true, but you act the other way in public, that is a very, very difficult state of existence that will either drive you to choosing creation or choosing destruction. So what do I mean by that? Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, what she believed was that her family was good and proper and authentic and wonderful, and that the upper classes represented by Mr. Darcy were corrupt, evil, bad. They're bad, bad people, those rich people. So what happened to Elizabeth Bennet was when she discovered, and she was forced to, to confront the fact that, you know what? My family are kind of low class. They're kind of doing things that are really inappropriate. They're not what I think they are. They're rude. They're being kind of destructive to other people in parties, and they don't really have any moral fiber. And this is Kind of bad. And then she has to come to the realization, so that cognitive dissonance is that her view of the world is not true. When she discovers her frame of reference, her worldview is not true, that causes her to confront the evil within her, which is believing a lie. When we believe a lie, when we believe.

So now we're back to the lie, right? So not all talk a lie.

You cannot live a lie. The only way to live a lie is to be a totalitarian. So people who are confronted with the lies that they told themselves have. Have a choice. They can either correct the lie in their brain or they can say, bullshit. The way I look at the world is the way I look at the world. And the way I look at the world is right. So everybody else is wrong. I'm right. I'm the totalitarian leader. I'm the tyrant. My view of the world is correct, and everybody else is an asshole. That's evil. But when you get evidence that your worldview is wrong, and it's very easy to get that evidence if you're looking for it, then what it forces you to do is to correct the lie that you've been leading. And that's what a hero does. A hero, when confronted with a lie, corrects the lie within themselves. And it's painful because when you start correcting lies within yourself, the people that you've surrounded yourself with don't like it.

And the villain is the one that, when confronted with that, doubles down on the lie.

That's right, because the lie is pretty exciting, right? The lie is. Look, our cultural lie is this. Make a shitload of money, buy a lot of stuff, get on television, post perfect pictures of yourself, and you're made in the shade, right? That's it. Yeah, that's the culture.

You're happy now.

Yeah, you're happy now. That's happiness. And everyone who, who approaches that and gets near that, they find out it's a lie. And then they can either double down on the lie, like, you know, billionaires do who try and get more billions, or they go, huh, maybe I need to correct that. Maybe that's not meaningful for me, just me. Maybe for me that doesn't work. Maybe I need to find something else. Gee, what am I going to do now? Why don't I try and create something? Maybe creating something will make me feel better. Well, it's hard to create stuff. But you know what? When I'm doing it and I'm really doing it, I feel better. I'll just keep creating crap and I'll, you know, I'll do my best to make sure I have enough money to feed everybody and take care of myself. And I'll just keep creating stuff because that's the only thing that, you know, seems to be meaningful to me. And that's what a writer is. That's when you know you're a professional. Because guess what? Amateurs give a shit about getting on the New York Times bestseller list. Professionals probably have gotten there and know it's all meaningless. And they're like, well, that. Yeah, I don't care about that. What I care about is writing something new, coming up with something fresh, looking at the world in a different way. And that's what keeps Stephen King banging out a book every year. How does he do it? Well, he can't do anything else. That's why he does. That's why Steve does it. And so that's what a professional does. Stephen King, his money has lost meaning a long time ago to him, right?

I mean, if it was the money or the New York Times or any of these things, he would have stopped a long time ago.

Of course, and there are plenty of people do that. They write a big hit and then they're gone. And, you know, maybe they're out doing another creative thing. They probably are. But the writing wasn't, you know, the release. It is for Stephen King. So, you know, all the power to them, you know. But it really comes down to when you get stuck in your novel, you go, what? What's the force at play here? My adversary needs to be the force of destruction. My hero needs to be the force of creation. My hero needs to suffer for being that force, and my adversary needs to benefit from being that force. And then I've got to bring those two forces together and have them wage war against one another. And what do I want to win? Let's see, do I want the creative force to win or the destructive force? And, you know, my recommendation is to have the creative force win, because that's a nice message. To give people.

Something is better than nothing is a good message.

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