I have learned something today that I wanted to share.  Anyone else who reads this may say, “Well, duh!” but it is a revelation to me.

When last I posted, I was preparing to write an angry character, and I was whining about the fact that anger is hard for me to express both on the page and in real life. That was not true.  Turns out, anger was not what I really needed.  I wanted this character to be bad, a truly bad person.  Being angry does not make you bad.

Duh.

I have known a lot of people who have done bad things when they were angry, myself included.  This can be described as “seeing red” or “blood boiling” or “seething.”  This is a very hot, spontaneous emotion, sometimes justified, and often results in unfortunate reactions that would never occur with a cooler head.  See, “cool” is the operative term.  A bad person, a truly bad person, “has ice in his veins;” that is he/she is fully aware of what he/she is doing, the crime is well-thought out and executed (pardon the pun), and afterward there is no remorse or apology.  To call such a person “selfish” or “self-centered,” is to offer an excuse for his actions just so we can understand them.   To be selfish or self-centered is more a product of immaturity than anything else.  Little children are self-centered because they have to be.  For them, for the young of any species, their primary directive is survival.  As a person becomes older and less threatened by every day occurrences–for example when you learn how to make your own sandwich instead of having mom do it for you or else you starve–most become naturally more empathic to the feelings and needs of others.  Some people never grow beyond that little child phase.  These people may cause us problems, but they are not generally malicious.  And usually you can see them coming because their reactions to things are fairly predictable.

So  a bad person is not selfish or self-centered in any way that most of us can understand.  A bad person has no heart, no compassion, no sympathy or empathy.  He does not act to make himself “feel better”  because “feelings” are not a part of who he is.  Often anger has no part in what he does–he only “sees red” when someone upsets his plans in a way for which he had not prepared.  This person is very dangerous because, once he calms down, he will plot revenge, and “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

Suddenly my bad guy is more than just angry.  He left his anger behind shortly after Meg’s transgression.  He has had months to plan how she would pay for the trouble she caused him; all he has needed is opportunity.  Suddenly he is dangerous.  Suddenly I have a very different story.