Skip to main content

The Villain Takes Over

 
    How did my villain become who he is?  I felt like I needed to know.  I followed his story back to the beginning, which was, I found, a few years before his birth.
    Pretty soon, I became fascinated with him.  He has qualities that I absolutely love about him, and many of his flaws I can relate to.  It is just that both his qualities and his flaws have been twisted to a point of creating evil.  As I have said in an earlier post, time and again he has been given opportunities to turn to good things, and he instead chose the wrong.  By the time the story of BB starts, he is a very bad man with little to like about him.
     With my fingers flying across my keyboard, I traced the story of how his mother became queen.  I followed my villain as a little boy, watching scenes from his life.  This was all very interesting and the flashbacks began to be incorporated into my current tale.
     And suddenly I realized...my villain was taking over my story.  There was too much of him and too little of anybody else.  He is NOT my main character, and if I want to talk about him this much I simply need to write him his own story.  But he is not allowed to take over this one.

     "Bad villain!" (author scolding her character)
 
Well, yeah, duh...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Goodbye and God Be With You

It's rather fitting that some things come to a close on this day -- the last day of the year. I submitted my last entry into the Rooglewood contest this morning.  I can hardly believe it took me until the day of the deadline to send it in because I'm usually earlier than that.  And, even with the extra time I took, I still felt a little bit like maybe I could have done better if I had more time. But there was no feeling of regret when I hit "send."  Mostly it was just a prayer that Rooglewood would hear the heart of the message when they read it and that maybe, if I win, they could help me bring the full potential out of my little story.  And there was also a feeling, after working on these stories for more than six months, that it felt good to close that chapter and move on to the next one. I did it.  I wrote them.  And I'm really proud of them. Last year, the act of hitting "send" on my contest entry catapulted me into an anticipatory state....

The Countdown: Eight Days

Eight days.  Do you know what that means?  Barely over a week.  Tomorrow will be one week from the announcement date. Are you excited? I am. So, today, I want to talk to those who wrote something for the contest, whether or not you entered it in the end. What made you start writing your story?  What was the first inkling of an idea that tickled your brain?  What was it that you liked about your premise?  As you wrote, did you have a favorite character or a favorite scene?  And are you glad you wrote it down?  Do you feel like you learned and grew in your ability as a writer as you tried out things for this contest? And, if your story isn't included in this year's Rooglewood anthology (either because you didn't submit it or because it didn't fit with the other four stories selected), what will you do with it?  Will you market it elsewhere?  Or will you lock it away in a drawer?

Rooglewood Countdown: 12 days

     For the next 12 1/2 days, as we do our final countdown until March 31st, I'm going to do 4 posts asking about something you would like to see in the Snow White collection.      There are so many ways all of us, writers and readers alike, can win in this contest.  Maybe a familiar name makes it into the final five -- hurray!  Maybe a story in your favorite genre ended up in the collection this year -- woohoo!  Maybe you finally get to read a winning story about an evil king and his Snow White son -- how awesome!      So, in celebration of all the many things we can root for, I want to know some of the things that you think would be cool to find in this year's set of winners.      Without further ado, here is my question for the day: What is a point of view you would like to see in this collection?  Would you like a story written from the prince's perspective?  A story from Snow White's p...