McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Attachment to characters.

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ihatepeas:

--- Quote from: neurovore on August 23, 2007, 06:03:22 PM ---To my mind, that just makes it a more interesting challenge. Protagonist of my current primary WiP is going to be a fun sell on that account, because he is a highly trained, highly motivated person, committed to making the world a genuinely better place, and vehemently anti-democratic; he reckons a feudal system just needs people to keep their word in order to work, whereas a democracy needs them to be wise as well, which seems less plausible to him.

But do flat and completely boring have to go along with not likable ?
--- End quote ---

No, that's just how it happened for me. It was just this whiny girl who never did anything except react. The fact that I didn't like her either certainly didn't help. I have another main character who is extremely abrasive, just grouchy and sarcastic and not very nice. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with her in real life, but she is oh so fun to write about.

[quote[
I mostly write murder mysteries, and when I read other murder mysteries, it drives me crazy when the writers tries to get inside the villain's head because most of the time they don't get it right.


In what sort of ways do you feel they get it wrong, then ?

[/quote]

Well, if a villain is a flat character, it's just not going to work to try getting inside their head. I think that's the case in Mary Higgins Clark mysteries (which I mostly like--don't get me wrong). She has this bad guy who is a very minor character and has little dimension or backstory, and then when she writes from that person's point of view, it's just cliche after cliche. I think if someone's going to spend the time writing the villain's point of view too, they should spend a little more time making that character three-dimensional enough to warrant his own point of view.

I've been trying to think of books written strictly from the villain's point of view, and I'm not coming up with much.  The ones I do think of, the villain could arguably be seen as the hero, such as Elphaba in Wicked, or Dexter in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Yeah, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, but she's kind of the hero of her story. Same with Dexter.

I'd love to know if anyone has any examples of stories written from the villain's point of view. Undoubtedly someone will mention something totally obvious and I will feel stupid, but I can take it.

--Sarah

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: ihatepeas on August 23, 2007, 06:22:42 PM ---I've been trying to think of books written strictly from the villain's point of view, and I'm not coming up with much.  The ones I do think of, the villain could arguably be seen as the hero, such as Elphaba in Wicked, or Dexter in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Yeah, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, but she's kind of the hero of her story. Same with Dexter.

I'd love to know if anyone has any examples of stories written from the villain's point of view. Undoubtedly someone will mention something totally obvious and I will feel stupid, but I can take it.

--- End quote ---

I really don't know how many people see themselves as the villains from their own POV, though.  Have met a couple in reality, and they are worth staying well away from, but I'm not sure they have the protagonist nature.

I also have the feeling there are obvious examples I am missing.  Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory is really as far as I can remember reading of an anti-hero being pushed into villain ground; both Dexter, and Bradley Denton's Blackburn in the novel of the same name, are a) applying some sort of stringent moral standard such that their victims are even less sympathetic than they are and b) lightening the impact of the brutality with humour.

I suppose there's the demonically possessed Max the Assassin in Gerard Hourner's The Beast that was Max and Road to Hell, but those are not overly deep nor unmitigatedly successful at what they are doing.  The Wasp Factory is brilliant, though.  In first person, too.

Nessus_Wyndestrike:
Oh gosh, my own characters are my children, metaphorically speaking. I kind of see myself as their God [no, not in a conceited way]. I create them with a basic image in my head and they take their own shape and shape their own personalities as I write. One of my characters, who I described as an all around good guy in the beginning...well, by the end he had the most unstable, secretive, possessive, power-hungry personality of the bunch.

And then there's my Incubus Prince, Salen. He went in an entirely new direction. I tried to keep to the fact that he is a Daimon [an alternate spelling for daemon; Greek origin meaning more of a demi-god than an evil entity] in mind as I wrote him. Daimons, as it were, care little about lasting emotional attachments and whatnot. Sure he's not one for any type of romantic relationship [aside from bedding someone once and feeding off of their lust-energy], but he is a loyal friend to the main cast. Which ended up surprising me in my third draft.

I also like to sit down and discuss my ideas with my characters. And if they do not like the direction of the story, they usually either change it or change something else along the way. It's fun.

But, anyway, that's my input on the matter.

~N.W.

Erlkoeneg:
As a roleplayer, and writer, there are characters that I am intensely attatched to. Often these are the ones with the histories of terrible things that happened to them.
and, as many have said, it is much easier/ often better to write/play a character you are attatched to.

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