Tag: morally gray

After creating Mordrek Willets, I really caught the morally gray bug. His exploits in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten sparked a fascination with how to make a character just insane enough to be “not good,” but redeemable enough to be “not bad.”

This deeply informed what creative decisions I made in Absent All Light (coming June 23), which features the Bremish cast, and allowed me to create a richer story.

But morally gray characters are very hard to do. Just a few years ago, I published an article admitting that I had never done a morally gray character because I didn’t feel up to the challenge. It was only after 15+ years of consistent study that I decided to take the plunge. I’d like to share what I have learned so that you, too, can find the exciting in-between of a shady character.

Why are morally gray characters so hard to write?

The answer comes from the careful balancing act involved in crafting an individual with murky morals.

Most real humans are somewhat morally gray. We make unethical decisions sometimes. We care about things we know we shouldn’t – or don’t care about things we know we should. Catch a great person on a bad day and they may be a total asshole.

However, a morally gray character in fiction is often involved in things that the average human would refuse to do. Their lives are grander and stranger than ours, which is why we want to read about them in the first place. Someone being a bitch on Facebook isn’t enough of a hook in most cases; we can just scroll through comments on a contentious post and derive satisfaction without paying a dime.

With these greater decisions come greater downfalls and more heinous acts. We can make a morally gray character do something genuinely evil, but if it is balanced with introspection, then we understand the tradeoffs.

So let’s get into it now and see what really makes morally gray characters tick.

We must be deeply embedded in their head.

The reason why a morally gray character is not a villain to the reader is because we understand why they do the things they do. From an in-universe perspective, they are almost always a total asshole who ruins peoples’ lives for selfish gain.

Mordrek Willets’s actions in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten are objectively Not Good. To someone living in the world with him, he is a bad person, no question about it. He works for a tyrant, kills people without remorse, ghosts dozens of lovestruck women, sneaks into unauthorized territories, burns houses down.

We see other characters reacting to his awful behavior in an appropriate way; they hate his guts, even if they don’t know everything he has done.

But we, the reader, have access to information that fellow characters don’t. We see his good acts that would be downplayed by others; we see his crises of conscience, his hopes and fears and dreams. We know that he doesn’t always agree with the things he does but privileges survival over ideals, even when he doesn’t want to.

Because of this, he becomes more sympathetic. If we didn’t have this deep understanding of him, we wouldn’t like him as much. So your morally gray character is almost always going to be written in first person or in third-person close. Omniscient POV will not cut it; they will seem terrible.

If they aren’t the POV character, then we still must gain enough insight into their world to recognize that they’re not a villain. Often, this means that they are friends with the MC, who gets to see their multiple sides. It is this closeness to their perspective that makes them morally gray.

Morally gray characters are typically charismatic and superficially charming.

There’s an “it” factor that comes with being morally gray. A loser incel could be morally gray by definition, but they’re not as interesting and will be cast as a villain instead.

Charisma makes us forgive the character even though we know we shouldn’t. In many cases, the charm comes from wittiness and confidence. They leap off the page because they believe they are special. Doubt and rumination are likely going to come from external factors, like fear of consequences, their position in society, or the impact of their actions on people they care about.

When building a morally gray character, ensure that they believe in their positions and decisions. Let them crack jokes to relieve tension. Make them woo ladies (common morally gray tactic) and charm more innocent characters who don’t see the dangers.

Common patsies for morally gray characters are gullible, naive characters and those who also have a slightly dented moral compass. People with strong moral convictions will not like someone who challenges those, but people who like to bend the rules will.

Their bad behavior must be truly reprehensible.

Here’s a common issue with some characters that are packaged as morally gray: they do bad things only to people who deserve bad things. They hunt down a puppy kicker, or they financially ruin the landlord who was stealing from a single mom through obscure but ultimately legal means.

Those are, for most people, just slightly tarnished heroes. They’re doing things that most of us would want to do in a world without limits. In many cases, they won’t murder anyone who hasn’t done anything truly vile.

But a morally gray character can take a mildly bad situation and go overboard. Their murkiness comes from the fact that they have disproportionally violent or maniacal responses to things when a normal person would not do that.

The morally gray character has a personal ethos that is in contrast with societal mores or objective morality.

Mordrek Willets lays out for us exactly what his personal ethos is: survive at all costs. He is, at least in the beginning of the story, an atheist who doesn’t think he’s going to be judged at the end of his life, so he’s not concerned with salvation. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and he’s going to feast.

This is a pretty standard worldview for morally gray characters. They wouldn’t make the same decisions if they were thinking about the fact that other people have the same deep feelings, hopes, and fears that they do. In a way, moral grayness is also about objectifying others and dismissing their concerns.

But, like many other morally gray characters, Mordrek does feel things, and he does get attached to people. Those individuals become extensions of himself who also must be protected at all costs – sometimes to his own detriment (but not often).

This means he picks and chooses who he shows kindness to and who he will kill without concern. And sometimes he just finds people interesting and wants to see what they will do next, so he shows them a basic modicum of decency so he can keep observing.

It must be clear that a morally gray character’s personal opinions aren’t aligned with what a person “should” think, but are internally cohesive. As such, they live in accordance with their own desires, and this makes them objectively murky.

There is solid internal justification for their terrible behavior.

A morally gray character is, in most cases, a pragmatic individual. They do think about the consequences of their actions – mostly so they don’t get caught. If they just did whatever they wanted, and those happened to always be bad things, then they would be a simple villain.

As such, they make tactical decisions about what level of evil they will personally accept at this moment in time. Sometimes the most appropriate thing to do is also the most moral one, and sometimes it’s not.

But, and here’s the catch – they don’t always choose the morally wrong thing to do. Sometimes they allow emotion to overtake them. They may spare a child because that child reminds them of themselves as a youth. They may help the love interest because they like them or want sexual access to them in the future. They may refuse to defame an ally, even when everyone else is, because they know that person will likely be helpful to them.

Morally gray characters are often morbidly curious.

I’ve discussed before how good characters are nosy characters. They have to be invested in the plot or we aren’t, either.

But there are different motivations for curiosity. The timeless example of Bilbo Baggins is the “good” kind of curious, the one that spurs the adventure and leads to mishaps. I doubt any of us would characterize Bilbo as morally gray because the plot doesn’t portray him that way, and his actions don’t either.

So the difference between a morally gray character and a hero is that they are morbidly curious, like a child beheading a frog because they want to see what it looks like when an animal dies. Morally gray characters want to see how things work – including when they stop working to catastrophic effect.

Later on in the Eirenic Verses, specifically Poesy, Mordrek joins the main characters for a quest. He doesn’t really do anything terrible during this quest, but he also doesn’t have much of a reason to join other than “why the hell not? I don’t have anything else going on.”

He withholds crucial information from the MC because he wants to see them work it out themselves. He’ll avoid providing his theories, which leads to greater calamities, because he likes the domino effect of things falling down.

Morally gray characters will often decide when to intervene and when not to based on how interesting the outcome will be, not whether it is positive or negative. In most cases, the bad outcome is more interesting, so they choose that one.

This gives them a sense of twisted whimsy that is fun to read about, even if it would make them absolutely vile in real life.

Other people react badly to them.

Moral grayness doesn’t necessarily come from the actions themselves, but how others respond to those actions – both inside and outside of the narrative. The reader may feel disgust and fear of the character, but so do other characters.

And different characters will have varying levels of unease and distrust based on their own moral compass. Upright and honest characters may be revolted by the morally gray character; they can tell that something’s off about this person.

In the seventh book, Shadow and Sword, we see Mordrek meet Irith Druidinn, who we already know to be a very moral, very peaceful woman. And she despises Mordrek immediately. He hasn’t even done anything, but she senses he’s bad news and doesn’t want him around. She chases him from the meronym and tells him not to come back under any circumstances – all without him actually exposing his misdeeds.

In fact, a lot of the High Poets don’t like Mordrek despite not knowing much about him. Except Cerie, who knows firsthand how violent he can be. That probably tells us a lot about her.

This makes sense, of course. People don’t like those who break rules and get away with it, or who flout societal expectations about morality and decorum. If everyone around the morally gray character is totally okay with them or even complimentary, then they are not really morally gray because they’re not really going against social norms.

Note particularly those of high status, who will likely have the strongest reactions to a morally gray character. If they themselves have mercenary mindsets, then they won’t be so upset; they’ll think about how they can use this person for their own ends. Those who see themselves as upholders of morality and social cohesion will be far less complimentary.

I regret that I didn’t try out a morally gray character sooner. They’re fascinating, and perhaps I would have gotten further on my writing journey in a shorter timeframe if I had taken the plunge.

You can rise to the challenge if you understand the balance between good and evil. Don’t be afraid to go “too far” with your character; memorable fiction breaks the rules and wanders places where others don’t want to follow.

And I think you’ll find that these characters are a hell of a time to write. They’ll stick in your head long after you’re done with the project. More likely than not, you’ll want to play with them again – probably more than with your heroes.