Tagged: villain

Making Ourselves Believe the Make-Believe

A hallmark of well-crafted fiction is when readers effortlessly suspend their disbelief. Creating good fiction calls for writers to suspend their disbelief as well.

For instance, to write our ghost story we need to convincingly portray a world in which ghosts exist, so we have to embrace that alternate reality. In our Divided Man series, it was extra-terrestrials, nanotech, and psychic powers. In the Music series, it was something else (which you will not be able to guess, ever, we guarantee that), and in the Science series it was immortality. Each story we tell gives consensus reality its own unique twist, which on a certain level becomes “true” for us also. That immersion is crucial for us to bring richness to the setting, and to keep its physical laws consistent.

And that’s the easy part. Writing a novel calls for the author to see the world through potentially disturbing eyes. Could be a cult leader, a mad scientist, a serial killer, or a televangelist. If you’re a nice person — which we’re sure you are — the behavior of such characters seems unthinkable to you. Then again, you’d probably make a rather dull bad guy. Every villain is the hero of their story. They believe in what they’re doing. So the writer must be able to believe in it too, at least while they’re writing. This is still true even if the villain isn’t a POV character! Like an evil marionette, it’s relying on you to pull its strings.

A writing partner is someone who encourages delusional ideation, but only when you’re on the clock.

Letting Your Villain Spread Those Villainous Wings

r-avatarStill outlining the second sequel to the Science Novel, but we think we’re past the midpoint in devising a plot. It should get easier from here on out, although we’ll inevitably hit a few more snags.

One of the key moments this week was when we gave our primary baddie a little more latitude by having some of the other evil characters target a different victim. The way we’d initially blocked things, Main Bad Guy was lured into a trap but then turned the tables. The new setup makes him proactive rather than reactive, which is good (even though in this case it’s evil). Another benefit of the change is that it brings back someone who would have otherwise retired from the story with hardly a scratch. The outlook is a bit more complicated now, which is usually a sign that you’re doing it right.

This proactive-vs-reactive concern applies to characters in every part of the moral spectrum. You might have been advised to make sure your protagonist isn’t just the person stuff happens to happen to, and what we’re saying is it applies equally to the antagonist. Look for plot nodes where any of the major characters become the object rather than the subject and take them apart to find a better move.

This is a great illustration of why we like to do such detailed up-front work. Had we been flying by the seat of our collective pants, this minor change would be a nightmare to implement. This way we will be able to concentrate on the characters’ voices, and vividness of description, and sentence rhythm… the parts of novel writing that are actually fun.