I think I disagree, because in real life, a good person confronted with a bad person still has to struggle not to retaliate in the same way as the bad person. The question becomes: how do I deal with this, how do I cope, how do I defend myself without resorting to the same evil tactics that will make me as evil has he is? There is room for a compelling and realistic struggle even with a evil flat character.

I looked at buying the McKee book last week, but even used it was still more than I wanted to pay. I guess I need to slap down the money.

Or you could just keep posting about it…

And Jonathan, I think you’re right that the best genre fiction still requires complexity and ambiguity, and a character like Gandalf is a great example of this.

And thanks, Kerri! (Promise I wasn’t fishing .

I think I love you. In a totally fraternal, non-gay, wow-you-just-complimented-my-book sort of way. It’ll probably even last–right up to the point where you tell me all the things I need to fix…

Sometimes genre can undercut realism. Writing my master’s thesis about Tolkien, I realized that because of the genre, readers don’t take seriously just how much doubt Gandalf is in about the course he advises everyone to pursue. He’s the Wise Old Man–of *course* he knows everything will turn out okay. As a result, readers undervalue the act of incredible moral courage it takes for Gandalf to allow an utterly unqualified hobbit to take the most dangerous weapon in the world right into the stronghold of the enemy who could use it to destroy them all.

And (I’ll say this, even if it sounds like sucking up) Bound on Earth.

But I think Clark may have just been having some fun w. his comment, so my apologies if I read too much into it.

As to didactism, heaven knows I’ve been guilty of it myself. My first credits were with Church magazines. And egad, just yesterday I reread a story of mine that Irreantum had published many moons ago, the first time I’d read it since it was published, and I wanted to crawl under a rock. The thing had originally been sold to the New Era, but the correlation committee squelched it. Too controversial. It never did lose its New Era didacticism. And yet I also know that, while it wasn’t good fiction, it meant something to some who read it because I was so told. Maybe that’s enough. I’ve never been one who would condemn all didacticism. (Though I want you to shoot me if I ever pop out something like that again.)

What I’m getting at is that didactic does not, in itself, remove tension. Flat characters do. Predictable characters do. Characters who don’t evolve. And while most didactice fiction feels tensionless, it doesn’t all. Whatever we think of the _Work and the Glory_ series, it did have sufficient tension to pull characters along.