A Line in the Sand

I am working on a kids' fantasy book that I have been toying with for a while. My kids read it--and love it--and I get to have an awful lot of fun as a writer. And in a key scene, because the clan in the book has their lineage through Russian history, the hero of the book shows my heroine, a 12-year-old girl, where the family tree broke off--and Rasputin is part of it. At some point, that part of the clan went to the shadows and became a different sort of clan entirely. There's a visual--a burnt-out tree. It's very obvious where the people who went to the shadowlands departed the good part of the family. The burnt landscape SHOWS you as reader. But in adult books, the line of demarcation is more slippery.

I wonder then, about the nature of evil. If you could trace it in a character, like unraveling a loose thread in a sweater, could you find THE defining moment. At what point does someone make not a leap of faith but a leap of another kind.

We all have defining moments in our lives. If we're lucky, those moments make us stronger and move us more toward good. I know I had a defining moment on New Year's Eve, 1994. I was in a hospital bed, really, really sick and in terrible pain. The person I had once been was slipping away day by day--and a person in my life did a cowardly thing. At that moment--and it was indeed a single MOMENT--my world changed. There was me before that moment and me after. Shortly after this event, though still very sick, I picked up stakes and moved hundreds of miles away and made a new life somewhere else with my child. I was a lot stronger for it. I learned something about the nature of people. And I learned what I was made of.

Villains must have those moments, too. But in a different way. At what point do people stop being human to them and start being target practice? At what point is rape OK to them? You can ask the questions and never get the answers, but I think as writers it serves us well to figure out that point in our characters.

Thoughts?