How can I establish the nature of a person/group without action?

If you are writing a screenplay, you'll have all the visual and auditory resources of film at your disposal: Ominous music, a dark palette, etcetera, which is what Star Wars uses. However, please be aware that many of the old tropes used for "evil" are ethnocentric at best, and racist or otherwise discriminatory at worst. They can also come across as horribly cliched.

If you are writing a book or a story (despite what you may have heard), it is perfectly fine to "tell" not show:

John James was a completely evil man.

Pretty unambiguous, right? As the author, your word is law (unless, of course, you're speaking through a first-person narrator).

posted about 7 years ago

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Chris Sunami‭

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You could use what I would call "hearsay". Basically secondary or tertiary characters of the story providing information without giving too much away through common small talk. Example:

• Protagonist: I heard that the Fluffy Munchers were heading into town.
• Random Person: Oh those nasty munchers always mess everything up around here. No good has ever come of them.

No mention of specific actions, but the sentiment is still expressed. Lace this into multiple "small talk" conversations and you will impart to the reader that this group is disliked by the general populace and are most likely up to nefarious things behind the scenes.

posted about 7 years ago

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mascoj‭

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Star Wars differentiates good guys from bad guys in the opening sequence in two ways: Soundtrack, which you can't very well do, and by presenting them as a stark, inhuman force in the middle of raiding the rebel ship (an action that we're likely to see as evil).

You don't have to show your group killing anyone to emphasize that they're evil, they can perform a much smaller evil. Much as you can cause readers to sympathize with your hero by having him pat a dog or save the cat, you can have one of them just kick a dog, or chuckle while a bully gives someone a wedgie.

Of course, that's still an action. If you really must avoid actions, instead you can show them gathering at their Sanctum Malificus, decorated with goat-head banners and flickering red candles. You can describe their dress sense: skin-heads with racist or profane tattoos; dye jobs with anarchy symbols on their leather jackets. You can show one picking his teeth with a switch-blade, or just have them greeting each other with a whispered, "Hail Hydra."

Cliches abound in the above, but without knowing more about your evil group, there's little I can do to be more specific.

posted about 7 years ago

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IchabodE‭

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Be aware that Star Wars, as most fantasy fiction, relies strongly on tropes and cliches. This means that 1) you expect a villain at some point 2) the villain's traits are obvious: dark, grim, hunchback, speaking softly, etc.

This is getting more and more difficult as we go afar from the usual cliches. For instance, if you want to subvert a cliche or create a surprise effect, this doesn't work.

First of all, you need to establish the rules of your world. If I have a nazi swastika tattooed on my neck, today, is quite likely that I'm not a good person. So visual symbols or identifiers can help.

Beyond that, I must confess that I don't know how to help. Every character is always described by their actions (words included) rather than the look. And this is for a good reason: how lame and boring would be a character described just by the look? And how more interesting and complex and tridimensional can be a character who speaks with his actions?

Don't rely too much on anything beyond actions - that is the advice I struggle to follow in my writing, and that I give to you as well.

posted about 7 years ago

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FraEnrico‭

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The best way to show a character is to get in their head. If your writing style permits it you can let us know what they are thinking. What qualities do they consider virtues? what qualities are flaws?

Do they look at a poor person and feel pity or disgust? Do they see a battle on the news and think glory or needless slawter?

If you can't get into their head you can do the same with dialog. A character can tell another how they feel about world events, places, and people.

I always like this approach because it let's you combine character development with world building. It helps if specific readers may find one or the other boring.

posted about 7 years ago

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Andrey‭

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What is throwing me off is your "Without action". Do you mean without having an action scene? Without the heroes fighting directly against the villains?

Here are some random ideas.

• Tell of the group's past, including their history, and their beliefs. A character may watch tv/ read a pamphlet that describe that. Through the character's thoughts, we (readers) would be able to get the idea and know they are evil.
• What about if your character comes across something that is already done. I keep thinking of those soldiers who "discovered" the concentration camps...
• Perhaps someone tells the character of something. "You know, those Soviets really aren't bad because [pov]" and the character reacts to this.

Going to your Star Wars analogy within the first 10 minutes. Vader kills those he interrogates. The Princess tells us Vader is a baddie because he is not following the Senate.

Thus, without having a full understanding of the situation, we know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

posted about 7 years ago

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JP Chapleau‭

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Referring to history, as noted in other answers, is a good way. You don't have to depict the action to have it come up -- in conversation, when a character reads about something online, when a detective turns up disturbing evidence, etc.

You can also convey a lot by other character's reactions to the character. If every woman in the room instinctively cringes and backs away when your harassing lech enters the room, that's a signal. If police, soldiers, or security guards reach for their weapons when your serial killer (who got off on a technicality) appears, that's signal. If your protagonists see someone being forcibly removed from a school with authorities shouting "we've told you over and over to stay away from our kids!", that's signal.

None of this is giant-neon-sign-pointing-to-the-bad-guy levels of signal, but it's still signal, and it shouldn't take too much to get your point across. How much depends on how closely you're sticking to the tropes of your genre.

posted about 7 years ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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In dialogue, either from the heroes perspective or from the villains perspective, discuss the resolution of a prior problem and dismiss it.

You can use that dialogue to prove callous psychopathic violence taken and accepted in stride by the villains, or "unnecessary" violence by the evil group causing empathic sorrow for the heroes. Children killed, a hospital bombed, a general lack of regard for civilian human life. e.g. causing an airliner to crash and kill 125 passengers in order to eliminate one witness. Or better yet, make three airliners crash, because the good guys disguised their route and the villains could not be certain which airliner the witness was on. Easy solution, kill everybody on all three.

Brutality, torture, and the killing of innocents is evil, the more innocents (or the more innocent) the greater the evil.

But you don't have to SHOW it, you can just refer to some past evil in a conversation of a few lines. Business as usual if discussed by the villains, and "remembered trauma" if discussed by heroes.

posted about 7 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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