Tag Archives: villains

Don’t Pokémon Your Monsters: An Interview with Robert Ashcroft

12 Apr

Seven years after the Hollow War decimated Earth, only 50,000 humans fight for survival in Los Angeles. Theo Abrams is sent on a mission to destroy the enigmatic being that initiated this apocalypse.

There’s a quote that pops up now and then, usually in reference to Star Wars, though it can be applied to a lot of great films and books: Great villains believe they are the hero of the story. It’s a useful line because it forces an author to give villains their own narrative arc. At their most poorly written, villains have the same qualities as the bad guys that used to wait at the end of stages in the old Super Mario games: no context or motivation, existing only to provide a bump on the road of the hero’s journey.

There’s another danger that villainous characters run into: we see them too clearly. In so many great horror films, the monsters remain on the periphery for a long time, cloaked in shadow, glimpsed only fleetingly. When we finally do see them close up, it’s with a turn of the camera and BOOM, the monster is right in front of our faces, almost too close to take it all in. This is why villains so often wear masks; to see and know them clearly is to reduce the fear of not seeing or understanding them.

Great villains, then, often lurk just off the page, seen mostly through the hero’s anticipation and dread. Robert Ashcroft gets this in his debut novel, The Megarothke. In it, an apocalyptic war has reduced humans to a small colony in the remains of Los Angeles. The creature responsible for that war, unheard of for several years, has begun to be whispered about again. In this scene, the novel’s main character, a police officer, is talking to one of his superiors:

Looking out the window, she asked, “What do you know about the Megarothke?”

A loaded question, to be sure. The secret shifted within my stomach. It rose and lay upon my tongue. I’d long learned that no one suspected anything, but I felt the secret scream from every pore whenever the Megarothke’s name was mentioned.

Back when I’d awoken from the coma, I’d had some very definite theories. I’d been convinced that I’d witnessed the creation of the Megarothke—even aided and abetted it to a certain degree.  Unlocked it. But I learned very quickly that this sort of talk was seen as “mentally unsuitable” and would get you removed from the force.

“The Shadow King. The Spider-Creature that kidnaps kids…” I said. “The first few years he was the very incarnation of the enemy. But then he disappeared. Vanished.”

Aria nodded.

“I can’t remember the last time someone told me not to touch a cobweb,” I continued. “The question should really be, ‘What happened to the Megarothke?’ I mean, the last incident was in…what? 2047? HW3? No one’s really talked about him since.”

Of course, the Megarothke is back, and the police officer will eventually face it. The book, then, depends upon readers wanting to see that encounter, on their curiosity about the monster building and building. To that end, notice how Ashcroft keeps the details vague: The Shadow King, The Spider Creatures that kidnaps kids. These are not precise character traits so much as descriptions of the monster’s legend.

Ashcroft also introduces the suggestion that a true understanding of the monster is dangerous to one’s health, both professional and literal. Someone out there doesn’t want you to know—and even that threat is vague, which is crucial to the story. Vague threats with specific outcomes (death, end of the world as we know it) provide the opportunity for characters to solve a mystery, and it’s that search for truth that usually provides the structure for the entire book.

Robert Ashcroft has worked as a State Department contractor and was recently mobilized to serve abroad with the U.S. Army Reserve. He is trained as a cryptologic linguist (with experience in Korean and Spanish). His first novel is the dystopian military thriller The Megarothke.

In this interview, Ashcroft talks about world building, writer dialects, and the challenge of creating so much suspense that it’s difficult to give readers a pay off.

Michael Noll

The book builds an entire world (post-apocalyptic LA with only a few thousand people protected by a police force that keeps back animal/human/AI hybrid beasts trying to kill them) and also a save-the-world quest, and despite these very large elements, the novel has an intimate feeling, focusing as it does on one character and his family (even as he embarks on the quest). How did you balance the need to build the world and also craft a story that revolves around relationships?

Robert Ashcroft

Back when I was majoring in creative writing―around ten years ago―genre fiction didn’t receive as much respect as it does now. I felt like in order to “deserve” to write in science fiction/horror, I had to prove that I could use what I had learned. Stories like, “Coming Attraction” by Tobias Wolff, or “For Esmé―with Love and Squalor,” by J.D. Salinger, really left a big mark on what I wanted to do with words.

Great fiction, but especially great short fiction, has to tear at the heart of human struggle. In “Coming Attractions,” this girl tries to drag a bike out of the pool for her little brother and she can’t quite do it. The story ends with her catching her breath, laying on her back, looking up at the stars. She’s freezing. All of your senses are wrapped up in the moment. The image is crystal clear. You understand how much this bicycle means to her, to her brother, to her concept of family and responsibility. It’s no longer a bike, it’s a young girl desperately fighting to grow up and be a better person.

I would love for my science fiction to be able to approach this magic.

The main goal within the Megarothke was to make sure that any action scene included both a personal and a thematic aspect. So, in the first chapter, the final scene touches on the memory of his lost daughter and the central question of what it means to be human.

Or later, in the standoff where a Korean guy has a knife to the girl’s throat, I wanted Theo to have to struggle with questions on multiple levels: his career, his custody battle, his fear that society might accuse him of police brutality―and on top of all that, you’ve still got a life or death situation.

Michael Noll

You’re working within an established genre with a few titanic writers working in it. Aspects of it reminded me of William Gibson and others, even though it’s not space opera, reminded me of M. John Harrison’s work. How did you approach putting your mark on a story that’s been told so well so many times?

Robert Ashcroft

I’m a big fan of retyping, which helps you get a sense of punctuation and flow, but also forces you to take ownership of their vocab sets and preoccupations. Every writer has a dialect of sorts. William Gibson will mention a word like “wetware” in several different stories of Burning Chrome, and you get to see the context in which it’s introduced each time. Then there were entire passages of The Megarothke where I would retype a section of Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer, and then go back and revise my work. More than just descriptions, he’s the master of unspooling an abstract concept in a character’s head while physically tracking their motion through an equally strange landscape.

In terms of the Megarothke, while the concepts aren’t new, I wanted to juxtapose two dueling misinterpretations of Evangelical Christianity and Nietzschean philosophy. The wrong view of Christianity forsakes our current life for the afterlife. The wrong view of Nietzsche ends up sacrificing everything for the ubermensch. These both blend with the age-old science fiction question: will some new form of technology replace humanity? And should it?

I should be clear here that I really respect the overall messages of Christianity and Nietzsche, but just like with ISIS and Islam, problems are usually created by a misinformed reading of the original text.

Michael Noll

The novel features a monstrous villain who, until the end of the book, is an unseen source of fear. We’re not told what the Megarothke looks like, which sets up a challenge for the story: when the Megarothke shows up, it needs to be as monstrous and terrifying as we’ve come to expect. How did you approach creating that character?

Robert Ashcroft

This was actually really difficult for me. I probably rewrote that page of description twenty times. I read it aloud, pulled it apart, and debated with people about word choice. I vividly remember fighting to keep the word “auroch” during the early critique group meetings.

If you boil the Megarothke down to his baseball card statistics, he’s really nothing we haven’t seen in a million video games and movies. But when wrapped up with his mythology, his goals, his undefined powers, his detached cruelty―I hope that he transcends your average first-person shooter entity.

The description is also integrated with the setting: the staircase, the metal turn style, the speakers on the walls. And then you have the state of Theo, our protagonist at the same time: is he still really alive? How long was he unconscious? How close to arriving are his peers? All of these things have to be factored into the description to produce the maximum effect.

There’s a real danger, largely due to the video game and toy industry, to remove the context and seek firm definitions for any given monster. I call it the “Pokémon-ization” of characters. Each power needs a name, a range, a strength, etc. For me, this is the death of good fiction.

Michael Noll

Sections begin with quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. How did that book inform this one?

Robert Ashcroft

The short answer is that the Megarothke is an attempt to create the ubermensch.

But as a writer, the book means a lot more. I first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra when I was twenty, living alone in Mexico. I wanted to be a writer and I didn’t know anything about Nietzsche, but I knew the book was on all the right lists. This was during a time when, even if I didn’t comprehend something, I would still power through it. Sort of like when I read Ulysses as an undergrad. I had no clue what was going on, but I knew it was important.

And, this is going to be a digression, so I apologize, but I’m going to launch into it:

I heard once, I think Glenn Gould said it, that all great art is about the distance the artist feels between himself and the world. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there are these quotes that reach out and grab you. They encourage, implore and goad you all at the same time. Things like, “Go into your loneliness,” or “They hate you because you have gone beyond.” Zarathustra is arrogant and self-loathing but also really inspiring. He hates everyone but he wants to save them. He’s not sure how, but when he gets an idea, he presents it ferociously. There’s a truth―a charisma―that’s really breath-taking.

These are things that every writer has to embrace at some point. You have to isolate yourself, to cannibalize your own personality, to go really deep, because that’s where all the marrow of the best fiction resides.

Is the Megarothke the Ubermensch? Is Theo the “last man?” Do they represent the master/slave morality, respectively? Does Mathew go through the stages of the Camel, the Lion and the Child? I don’t think it can be boiled down so simply, but I want these ideas to play out in the reader’s mind. What allegiance do we owe to a creature with far greater physical and mental capacities than ourselves? What allegiance do we owe to God? To each other?

Michael Noll

I believe I saw you write on Facebook that you worked on this novel for years, printing versions for your friends to read at times. How do this published version differ from those earlier versions? What problems did you have to solve or figure out over the course of revision?

Robert Ashcroft

I’m a huge fan of printing your own work. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars at this point just to be able to read my own writing in a paper book sized, spiral bound format. You can give it to friends. You can read it and see how the pages work. It’s really rewarding, and given the incredibly long time it takes to get published, I think every writer owes it to themselves. These days it should probably cost you 15-20 dollars to do a decent version, but it’s still quite possible. I’ve done it in Mexico, in Korea, in Texas―the staff is always really curious and helpful. It’s kind of an unusual request.

The biggest difference between those versions and the final print is length. At the very end of the final version, there’s a single chapter, almost more of an epilogue, where we meet a different character. In the previous version, that character had about five chapters of case notes, describing his investigations. Then there were newspaper articles, folk songs, and editorials as well, sort of like in Watchmen.

I workshopped four versions of the book through Critters.org. I also had a bunch of friends and acquaintances read it, and I was part of a weekly critique group for over a year. The biggest problem I solved was streamlining the story. There was just too much going on. It felt like pulling teeth but eventually it was the right move. I hope the story carries people smoothly from start to finish, and even if not every detail gets explained, it should be a fun ride!

April 2018

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories and author of The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction.

Tags: , , , , ,

An Interview with Steph Post

19 Jan
Steph Post is the author of the novels Lightwood and A Tree Born Crooked.

Steph Post is the author of the novels Lightwood and A Tree Born Crooked.

Steph Post is the author of the novels Lightwood and A Tree Born Crooked. She is a recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship for creative writing from Davidson College and the Vereen Bell writing award. Her fiction has appeared in the anthology Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics and many other literary outlets. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for The Big Moose Prize. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

To read an excerpt from Post’s story Lightwood and an exercise on creating villains, click here.

In this interview, Post discusses how story cannot be separated from point of view, the moral center of her crime novel, and its villain based on a Pentecostal preacher Post knew as a child.

Michael Noll

This is a crime novel, and one of the genres that closely associated with crime is the detective novel, which tends to have a single point of view that follows the detective. This novel, however, is told from many points of view, and I wonder how you found that structure. When did you know that the novel wouldn’t have a character that provided the central gravity of the story?

Steph Post

Lightwood was a novel comprised of many points of view from the very beginning. I write straight through, from first word to last on a first draft and so I switched points of view as a I wrote. When I write, I imagine the novel cinematically as if it were a film or a television show and the multiple point of view structure comes naturally. For me anyway, point of view is everything in story. A scene written from Judah’s point of view is going to be very different from one written in Ramey’s, even if they are in the same room, trying to accomplish the same objective. Point of view gives you insight into a character’s thought process, but also provides a lens for which to view the different characters. Sister Tulah is a different character when viewed from Brother Felton’s eyes as opposed to Jack O’ Lantern’s. I think not having one central character who anchors the point of view in Lightwood is a risk, but I believe the style fleshes the story out in a necessary way.

Michael Noll

Almost everyone in this novel is breaking the law. The characters who push back against the criminals (like Felton) are doing so out of an immediate concern for particular people and not some moral code. As the writer of this world, where do you look to find the moral or ethical center that holds it together? 

Steph Post

Steph Post's crime novel, Lightwood, tells the story of a released convict who, upon his release, must face his powerful family, a vicious Pentecostal con artist, and a biker gang.

Steph Post’s crime novel, Lightwood, tells the story of a released convict who, upon his release, must face his powerful family, a vicious Pentecostal con artist, and a biker gang.

I think the moral center comes in the form of the personal responsibility each character feels and how they act on that sense of responsibility. Most of the characters are thrown into situations that immediately force them to make complicated and, yes, usually unlawful decisions. Some of the characters, like Sister Tulah and Sherwood Cannon, are acting out of deliberate malice and this makes them the obvious villains. Others, like Judah and Ramey, are making choices which come with various degrees of consequence. They are guided by an ethical code that extends to their families and those they care about, even if this hurts outsiders to some degree. And I’ve always felt that Ramey is the moral compass of the novel. While she may not always be following the law, she does have her head more on her shoulders than anyone else.

Michael Noll

You’ve written a great villain—Sister Tulah—a con artist and preacher, and what I found so interesting about her is that her sermons are clearly designed to manipulate her followers, but she also seems to believe them in a way, and we get long descriptions of them. What inspired this character? 

Steph Post

Sister Tulah is loosely based off of a real Pentecostal preacher I knew growing up. While I was not raised Pentecostal, my mother was and so I was aware of and fascinated by Pentacostalism. Most followers of charismatic religions believe in their faith to a degree that may be hard for outsiders to fathom. Sister Tulah, while obviously evil and clearly manipulative, believes in the force behind her religion. She is hypocritical, yes, but she also believes very much in the power she holds and that it comes as a divine right to her. Sister Tulah is so much fun to write because of her extremes and in the sequel—due out next year—I really explore where she comes from and what makes her tick.

Michael Noll

In Chapter 10, you change up your chapter structure and begin with a series of paragraphs that tells us what different characters see when they wake. Was this opening created out of a particular narrative need at that point in the novel? What inspired you to change the structure like that?

Steph Post

The opening of chapter 10 serves to give the reader a moment to breathe—Lightwood is a very fast novel—and also to take stock of where all of the characters are, both physical and mentally. I like the idea of all of the characters waking up on the same day, perhaps even at the same moment, but with very different experiences ahead of them. The characters of Lightwood are so tangled up in one another and I wanted to take a pause to see them all individually. Chapter 10 marks an important turning point in the plot that changes the outcome of the story for all the characters as well, and I wanted to make it clear, especially for Judah Cannon, that his life would no longer be the same after.

January 2017

Michael Noll Michael Noll is the Editor of Read to Write Stories.

Tags: , , , , ,

How to Ground Your Villains

17 Jan
Steph Post's crime novel, Lightwood, tells the story of a released convict who, upon his release, must face his powerful family, a vicious Pentecostal con artist, and a biker gang.

Steph Post’s crime novel, Lightwood, tells the story of a released convict who, upon his release, must face his powerful family, a vicious Pentecostal con artist, and a biker gang.

My 7-year-old is obsessed with Percy Jackson and the stories of the Greek gods and heroes, which means that I’ve gotten obsessed as well. One thing you quickly learn—or relearn, as the case may be—about these stories is that the villains are often far more memorable than the heroes. I’m willing to bet that almost everyone knows about Medusa and the Minotaur but not the guys who killed them. In both cases, the heroes had their own interesting, compelling backgrounds, but they became memorialized because of the monsters they played. The villains defined the greatness of the heroes. This continues to be true, which is why the best and greatest character in Star Wars was—and continues to be—Darth Vader, not Luke Skywalker.

Lightwood, the new crime novel by Steph Post, continues in the tradition of creating great, memorable villains. You can be introduced to her in the opening pages here.

How the Novel Works

If we use Medusa and the Minotaur as models for villains, we discover a couple of essential qualities that villains possess. First, their very identity is memorable. We all know that Medusa had snakes for hair and that looking at her would turn you to stone. We also all know that the Minotaur was half man, half bull. You cannot overstate the importance of catchy, easily-described characteristics. It’s true of pretty much every great villain, but cool details aren’t enough on their own.

You also need a backstory, even if that backstory isn’t known yet or ever learned. For example, Darth Vader looks cool (check), but we don’t ever learn his complete backstory in the original three films—but we’re given glimpses at it: the fact that he once studied under Obi-Wan Kenobi, that he turned to the Dark Side, and that he’s Luke’s father. The same is true of Medusa and the Minotaur. Medusa started out beautiful but made the mistake of ticking off the wrong god, and her punishment was to be transformed into a monster. The Minotaur was the result of god-induced royal bestiality and then was trained to be a killing machine the way that some people train dogs to fight. These backstories matter because they ground the villain in the world of the story. Without them, you get stories like the ones I used to tell in third grade. Ninjas or aliens were always showing up, no matter the world or story, because they were cool. The problem was that they didn’t make any sense in the stories where they appeared. So, it’s crucial to ground the character in the narrative world.

Post does both of these things with her villain. We’re introduced to Sister Tulah in the first chapter. We find her standing outside her Pentecostal church, staring at the sky and listening to her followers sing as she waits to make her grand entrance:

Sister Tulah took one last look up at the black, gaping vastness overhead and decided that if she was ready, God must be also. She straightened the lace collar on her long, flower print dress and smoothed back her hair, once dishwater blond, but now a sharp steel gray, making sure that it was pinned in all the right places. She rubbed her pudgy, age-spotted hands together and then licked her lips before pursing them tightly together. Without turning to look over her shoulder at the awaiting sliver of light, Sister Tulah replied. “It’s time.”

We don’t yet know that she’s one of the novel’s villains, but I suspect that most readers will sense that she is. Why? Because she’s a tough woman preacher with great descriptive lines (“pudgy, age-spotted hands”) who clearly wields a lot of power. Though we sense that we’ll learn some unsavory things about her, we don’t actually see them yet. Instead, we see her as a part of the world: working class, rough-and-tumble Florida, a place with bars and ex-cons and motorcycles and Pentecostal churches. She becomes an even greater villain because we buy into her existence in the first place.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s ground a villain, using Lightwood by Steph Post as a model:

  1. Give the villain cool details. Go crazy with it. The Greeks gave a woman snakes for hair and a guy a bull head and torso, and those stories have lasted for a few thousand years, so it’s safe to say that subtlety is not necessarily a virtue when it comes to villains. The same goes for more realistic stories. The best character in the TV show The Wire was Omar, the whistling, shotgun-wielding Robin Hood of drug corners in Baltimore. Release your inner third grader. To do so, you might try two different strategies. First, take a normal character and add something weird: snake hair or an unusual weapon or weird habit. Second, start with the wild detail and attach it to a realistic motivation and behavior. Before we learn why Darth Vader wears the cool suit, we see him wanting something simple (to capture the droids and the plans to his weapon) and behaving in understandable ways (getting frustrated in a meeting and choking a guy to death).
  2. Give the character a backstory. In short, how did Medusa, the Minotaur, and Darth Vader become the characters they are? For all three, there was a transformation. They weren’t always evil monsters—or, their evil and monstrosity was not always their dominant feature. What happened to your character and transformed him or her?
  3. Locate that backstory in your fictional world. Think about the character pre-transformation. What was he or she doing before things got wild? Or, find a moment post-transformation when the character is just living life, not being evil—or, at least, not immediately evil. This is the approach used by Post. We don’t yet know Sister Tulah’s backstory, but we see her standing outside her church while her flock sings. It’s a moment portrayed as part of the Florida landscape. How can you make your villain part of your story’s fictional landscape? Which details about the villain are noteworthy or possible only in your particular setting?

The goal is both to create a memorable villain and make readers buy into the villain’s existence.

Good luck.

Tags: , , , , , ,

How to Create a Villain

3 Jun
Jennifer Ziegler's new middle-grade novel, Revenge of the Flower Girls, is set in the Texas Hill Country and features triplets as narrators.

Jennifer Ziegler’s new middle-grade novel, Revenge of the Flower Girls, is set in the Texas Hill Country and features triplets as narrators.

For a reader, one of the most satisfying parts of a novel is the presence of a villain. We want someone to root against—this is true for books as well as films, sports, politics, and often everyday life. And yet as writers (especially literary writers) we’re often reluctant to create characters of pure malicious intent. We have a tendency to attempt to view the situation from the villain’s point of view, if only briefly, if only to make the character a little bit redeemable. In real life, this is probably a virtue. But in fiction, it’s often necessary to behave worse than our real selves.

A great example of the appeal of a villain—and how to create one—can be found in Jennifer Ziegler’s new middle-grade novel Revenge of the Flower Girls. You can read an excerpt from the novel here.

How the Story Works

The problem with creating villains is that the word usually makes us think of characters like Sauron from Lord of the Rings or Darth Vader—i.e. characters whose evil exists on a grand scale. Most stories simply don’t have room for that kind of character. Imagine dropping Darth Vader into the stands of a little league baseball game. In almost every scene I can imagine, the situation overwhelms the character. In other words, Darth Vader will not remain the dark Imperial lord but will instead inevitably become simply another cranky parent. So, the key to creating a villain is to find opportunities for villainy in your story’s particular circumstances.

Ziegler has created an occasion that often brings out a certain kind of villainy—a wedding. But rather than writing a bridezilla, which would be both predictable and understandable (wedding planning being slightly less than relaxing), she creates a character for whom things should be easy—the mother of the groom. In this scene, watch how she gives this character, Mrs. Caldwell, opportunities to play nice, to reach consensus, and then lets the character play the villain instead:

“Well, then,” said Mrs. Caldwell, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “I think it’s obvious that these meatballs would be best, along with some salmon-topped canapés and bacon sliders.”

“But…Lily doesn’t eat meat. She’s vegetarian,” Darby said, louder and more slowly than when she’d said it before.

“Yes, but Lily isn’t going to be the only person eating at the wedding,” Mrs. Caldwell said.

“Yes, but Lily is the bride,” Delaney said.

“Yes, but this wedding also includes a big strong boy who needs nourishment,” Mrs. Caldwell said.

Darby, Delaney, and I exchanged puzzled looks. “What big strong boy,” I asked.

“Why, Burton, of course.”

“Yes, but this is Lily’s house, and she needs nourishment, too,” I pointed out, my voice rising a little. “Burton can eat vegetables, but she can’t eat meat.”

“Yes, but the meat eaters who will be attending the wedding will far outnumber the vegetarians.”

Over and over again, the novel and the other characters give Mrs. Caldwell the opportunity to give in, even slightly, and not only does she refuse to do so but her refusal becomes pointedly selfish. Her villainy may be of a lesser scale than Sauron’s, but it breaks against so many commonly held conventions about civility that the reader roots against her. If a reader is wishing ill toward a character, then it’s probably fair to say that the character is the villain.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s create a villain and give him/her opportunities to act maliciously, using the passage from Jennifer Ziegler’s novel Revenge of the Flower Girls as a model:

  1. Create an occasion. Though villainy can happen in private (sabotage, vandalism, theft), the most dramatic forms tend to happen in public, in front of an audience. So, create an opportunity for people to come together. You can use an event (wedding, funeral, birthday party, holiday) or something more practical (meeting, dinner, classroom, workplace team). You should also flesh out the people or type of people who will be at the occasion.
  2. Create an opportunity for compromise. You’ve brought your people together. Now, make them come to a mutual decision about something. The decision can be mundane (what to eat, where to go, how to proceed). Anyone who’s ever sat through a meeting knows the frustration of dealing with somebody who obstructs for no good reason.
  3. Create the villain. Approach this from the character’s action, not personality or motive. So, don’t worry about why the character does the malicious thing. Just find the malicious thing and figure out motive later. In truth, motive isn’t that important. For instance, in Othello, we know that Iago is angry at being passed over for a promotion, but that’s really just a way to get the reader on board for the incredible, unexplainable evil that he causes. So, figure out how your character could obstruct the decision that’s being made. What contrary position could the character take? Or, how could the character delay the decision-making process?
  4. Give the villain chances to do right. Notice how Ziegler’s characters give Mrs. Caldwell plenty of rational reasons to abandon her position. They appeal to ethics (“Lily doesn’t eat meat”), authority and privilege (“Lily is the bride”), and finally to necessity (“she needs nourishment, too”). In other words, Mrs. Caldwell is given plenty of opportunity to give in. But she doesn’t. If you keep reading the scene, you’ll see that her mind is changed only by force. So, let the other characters try to persuade the villain to do right or change his/her behavior. Try different approaches: ethics, authority and privilege, necessity. If you’re rhetorically inclined, you can try the pyramid of ethos, pathos, and logos. You can also offer the villain compromises that are continually rejected. This isn’t so different from what parents do with kids, pleading with them in various ways to do some desired thing. And when the kids resist all overtures, they often seem like villains. Your villain can act the same way, resisting all overtures until their behavior becomes so unreasonable that the reader begins to wish him/her ill.

Good luck!

Tags: , , , , , , ,

%d bloggers like this: