Transcending the evil twin meme

I hate, hate, HATE the Evil Twin Meme. The point is not for one to defeat the other, but for them to unite to fight the real bad guys. How do I avoid making this completely trite?Iapetus999

For those of you who’ve been following this advice column since the beginning, this question will make perfect sense. For those who haven’t, you can catch up with us.

Avoiding making your plot devices trite is a really excellent goal. And I’m going to point you toward a children’s movie first off: Ponyo.

We just saw this last week. We don’t stay up on children’s movies much. But I was struck by the way the filmmaker took the standard good guy/bad guy meme and altered it to remove the bad from the ersazt bad guy. No, we do not have to raise our children in black-&-white worlds.

The answer to this question is: multi-faceted characters. And setting one twin up as the “good” twin and the other as the “bad” twin and then revealing in the climax how the behavior of the “good” twin could be interpreted as “bad” behavior and the behavior of the “bad” twin could be interpreted as “good” behavior is a heck of a way to throw your reader in a jujitsu move that’ll land them on the moon. <--I say this as a GOOD THING. Remember that every single character must have powerful, believable motivation for their actions. What they do makes sense to them, in the world in which they live. This is character development. If you want to know how to do it really beautifully, read yourself some Dostoyevsky. The Brothers Karamozov aren’t bonkers for simply no reason at all.