A graduate school advisor, Martine Leavitt, asked while I was in process of revising my senior thesis—in this case, a novel—“How do you love Diana?”

Diana was my novel’s antagonist, and she was absolutely awful to my main character, but that was Martine’s point. Diana was far too two-dimensional, a stick figure personality with no background and therefore no motivation for playing the part of vindictive nemesis.

I didn’t know Diana well enough, and the more I got to know her, the more that I dug into her past and her upbringing and learned why she did what she did, the greater my compassion was for her. It didn’t necessarily change the choices she made in the novel, but those choices made more sense.  It lent the story an authenticity it didn’t have before.

I get it.

I wish every car on the road had a flashing sign tethered to its rear windshield that explained why they had just cut me off, or were too intently texting to notice the light had turned green, yellow, and then red again. It might help me to love them more.

Might.

Once we understand that everyone has a past and upbringing, most likely heads and tails different from our own, might we be just a tad more understanding? Sympathetic even?

We might.

Loki is hands-down my favorite bad guy in all of superhero fiction. All the way up until the moment he died, and then died again, I never quite had the heart to hate him. He was conflicted and unpredictable. You never knew whether the good or the bad in him would win out in any given situation. What he was, was human.

Diana doesn’t exist in that particular novel anymore. I’ve since re-envisioned her out of it (the subject of my next blog post), but I’ve never forgotten the question, and what it means in my writing, but more importantly, in life.

How do you love Diana? (Insert nemesis’s name here)

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