good vs good

The Top Ten Ways For Two Good Guys To Kill Each Other

10) Forced to ally until end of mission, and then they go after each other.

9 ) Begin on opposite sides and join up.


8 ) Two guys trying to prove different theories, and will do anything to sabotage the other.

7 ) Start on same side, but different motivations force them apart.

6 ) Clones. They end up killing each other's clones.

5 ) They are in conflict, but don't realize why. When they are forced to talk, they team up.

4 ) They've been conned to work together, but when they start talking, they find that they aren't actually working for the same ideals.

3 ) One of them is a monster without knowing it; they work together well, but then the monster comes out and one must slay the other.

2 ) One of them has ulterior motives for what he is doing, and needs to keep the other in the dark about them.

1 ) One of them needs training from the other, but the other doesn't want to train him.

If it helps...
FR

Look up Roald Amundsen vs. Captain Scott. Or something more recent, Captain Rafe McCawley vs. Captain Danny Walker. Two "good" characters who want, and compete for, the same thing. As long as the audience understands their motivations, you're halfway there. All you have to do then is write an interesting story and sprinkle in a couple of lines of snappy dialogue.

-Derek

You might want to read the original 'Rambo' book. I can't recall the author, but a quick check with google should help you find it.

Unlike the movie, both Rambo and the cop were war heroes, one from Korea, one from Vietnam. Both 'good' guys, their ideals still clashed to a disastrous end.

It's not much like the movie, and far bloodier.

The wonderfully inventive and Oscar winning screenwriter and playwright Ted Tally (Silence of the Lambs) wrote "Terra Nova" which I was in years ago.

This is a great tale of good v gooder. Scott and Amundsen. Very moving and tragic and certainly worth reading.

There's a lot of this on TV lately. Heroes. Lost. Battlestar Galactica. Oftentimes they end up in situations where everyone is right, they just have different opinions.

Take a look also at Gone Baby Gone. That's Good vs. Good.

It'll be helpful to stop viewing your antagoinist as a "bad guy". They are the protagonist of their own story.

I agree with Whistlelock's point.

Might I also suggest Marsha Norman's stage play, 'Night Mother? It was shot as a film with Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek.

Spacek's character calmly informs Bancroft (playing her mother) of her plans to kill herself that night. I remember it being in an hour or so, as a clock is placed center stage so the audience is watching it count the minutes. A battle of wills with two sympathetic characters and the audience doesn't know who will succeed until the final moments of the show.

aceinc1 said:

it is easy to have a bad charater and a good one and create conflict. I try to use good vs good and try to create conflict and have ended up sounding monotonous. can you guys give me some suggestions on working with good vs good and not sounding monotonous?

regards,
Aceinc1

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Watch the films of Sam Peckinpah. The two main characters are protagonists but they have different methods:

My favorites:
Ride The High Country
Major Dundee
The Wild Bunch
The Osterman Weekend.

Just look at politics. Both sides think they're right and good, but people from one side view people from the other as aligning with the devil. It's crazy.

The fact is, though, that one of them is going to have to turn out bad, at least in the eyes of the other. No?

aceinc1 said:

it is easy to have a bad charater and a good one and create conflict. I try to use good vs good and try to create conflict and have ended up sounding monotonous. can you guys give me some suggestions on working with good vs good and not sounding monotonous?

regards,
Aceinc1

Click to expand...

I think that your real problem is this underlying idea "good vs. bad."

Okay, you say -- I'm not going to have a bad guy. So it's going to be "good vs. good."

You've only gotten rid of half the problem.

You've gotten rid of the bad guy.

You still have to get rid of the "good" guy.

If you want to achieve what you're after, you need to stop thinking of stories in those terms.

Characters in stories embody *ideas* -- aspirations, needs, weaknesses, conflicting desires -- aspects of people.

Watch a movie like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" -- the story of a young girl growing up poor in turn of the century Brooklyn -- the father whose a dreamer and a charmer but also a drunk who can't live in the real world, the mother who needs to be the realist even if it means destroying the dreams of her daughter -- who's the "bad guy" -- nobody.

But who's the "good guy?" Neither of them, really. Because it's not about that. The brilliance of the movie is that as we make our way through the story, we can see both sides of the story -- sympathize with the dreamer father and the mother who longs the fairy-tale world he lives in, but knows that if she doesn't keep her feet on the ground the family won't be able to survive.

Sometimes, it is the nature of the story that characters come into conflict and yet no one is clearly wrong, just as there are questions that we face in our lives for which there are no right or wrong answers.

Do we take risks or do we take the safe course?

Stay home with those we know and love or leave and seek adventure?

Family or country?

When do you quit?

In drama, these questions are *embodied* in the form of characters that express these questions -- these conflicting ideas -- and since there are no right or wrong answers to the question -- no "good and bad" answers, the characters that embody the questions can't be "good" or bad -- however the question is ultimately answered.

NMS