Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A 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 ...

posted 6y ago by Chris Sunami‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T07:32:57Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32094
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Chris Sunami‭ · 2019-12-08T07:32:56Z (over 4 years ago)
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](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/25706/why-are-writers-so-hung-up-on-show-versus-tell):

> 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).

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-12-20T18:41:57Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 2