: Re: Thoroughly Despicable Characters I'm midway through a Masters in Creative Writing. My tutor recently told me (something like): each character deserves a chance to be liked by the reader. I didn't

@Odierno164

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I am not sure what "under what circumstances..." is supposed to mean.

Whenever you want!

IRL violent psychopaths are perhaps 0.1% of the population, one in 1000. With about 3 billion adults on the planet, there are about 3 million of them in the world, and unfortunately for us their IQs follow the same bell curve as everybody else. So about 1% of that 3M are are also extremely intelligent violent psychopaths, smart enough to get away with their crimes. That is 30,000 of them in the world.

Naturally the chances of some random individual encountering such a person are rare, they are 1 in 100,000 people. But we do interact with hundreds of people in our lifetimes, so there is a chance, and these 30,000 adult, smart, violent psychopaths are all going through life victimizing one person after another for their own personal gain or pleasure.

Focusing a story on ONE of them is not implausible, and they ARE irredeemable! Recent plausible medical explanations are they are born with brain malformations that simply cannot be corrected, they are missing the linkages that make empathy, sympathy and guilt possible at all. Their behavior does not have to be founded in some childhood trauma, a violent psychopath is born that way and no amount of love or kindness can change them.

Your creative writing professor is wrong (and as a university professor myself I have no problem questioning the reasoning of another). People like stories of irredeemable evil, they recognize it in their own lives (generally from afar) and know it exists IRL. Some are terrified of it; some have experienced it or personally know someone that has (I know at least two).

Go ahead and write it. Make them strong enough and clever enough and ruthless enough to scare the crap out of readers, it will make their demise that much more deserved.

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