When I was in the 7th grade, my uncle Jerry came to live with us. He was a huge fan of old black and white westerns—Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Randolph Scott. You knew the bad guy the moment he came on screen. He was the one with the black hat.

Young Dave was more of a Star Wars fan. Luke Skywalker could have cleaned up that town.

But the older I grew, the more I found myself drawn to characters in shades of gray. Conflicted souls. People who made the wrong choice and were just trying to live with it.

I used to argue with my friend Mark about whether bad people think that they’re bad. He insisted that they did—that they knew they were villains but were just fine with it. Black hat theory all over again. But it never worked for me. How could you live inside your own head and not see yourself as the protagonist?

Learning to Love the Gray

An early formative book series for me was The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I learned early that my favorite plot was seeing old enemies forced to work together. If a grudging respect or loyalty developed between them, even better. Not the enemies-to-lovers trope favored by modern romantasy writers. More enemies-to-mutual-grudging-respect.

The Timothy Zahn Star Wars books rocked my world. Heir to the Empire was a revelation. But I found that the chapters I couldn’t wait to read involved villains or people in that morally gray area. Mara Jade offered a complexity I hadn’t found in Jerry’s old westerns. Could someone be trying to kill the hero and still be redeemable? What about people fighting their own demons?

Just out of college, I wrote my first novel, still unpublished to this day. I think there’s only a single copy in existence and I haven’t read it in twenty years. Regret’s Crossing. It was a western about a ranch hand returning to Colorado after two decades to face the daughter that he had abandoned as an infant. It was a world populated by reformed outlaws and broken people. No white hats in sight. I found that the scenes that filled my heart were the ones where someone finally made the right choice after years of traveling the wrong road. There was so much hope on those pages.

A Changed World

The world feels more divided to me now than it did in my twenties. There’s a lot of rhetoric and fear in the national media. People are quick to draw that line and say that anybody on the other side is evil. It feels like we are getting farther and farther from connection. We see black hats everywhere.

But I see people hurting.

I teach theatre. Middle school and high school. Kids that sometimes remind me of the bullies that wrecked my early teens. I see the mornings that they come in without breakfast. I see the complicated entries under “parent/guardian.” I hear about the deaths in the family.

I see the humans. Trying.

And I find that I am drawn to their story. The same way that I was drawn to Mara Jade or the Mord-Sith in Terry Goodkind’s novels. I’m invested in who they might become.

And at the end of the day, that’s why I write conflicted souls.

Voice From My Past

My former boss Eric Hollenbeck wrote a poem about trees and people. He said that the world needs all kinds. There are some trees that get lots of water and sunshine and grow to have straight grain. Some trees face harsher conditions and grow to have great strength.

And some trees grow in the cracks on a mountainside, constantly buffeted by wind. You wonder how anything could possibly survive there. Twisted grains and knots and a world of complex beauty.

Those are the trees that I love to write about.