villains

I’m finishing up revisions on my Blaze-targetted manuscript and recently had a conversation with my CP Marley about the plot. Meltdown was my second manuscript, and though in many ways it’s the book where I found my voice, it’s pretty obvious to me that I was still learning a *lot* about storytelling. I first submitted this book in January of 2003 and when I finally got a chance to work on it again, my entire skillset as a writer had changed. In the interim, I’d written half of another Blaze, a novella, a single title romance, and a full-length, heavily plotted action adventure. I had the following issues that seemed to add up to a pretty insurmountable list:

1. A “big misunderstanding” plot

2. A heroine with a whiny and juvenile internal conflict

3. A sagging middle that was little more than a series of temper tantrums on the heroine’s part.

4. A textbook central casting slut villainess

How was I supposed to fix this? this wasn’t a revision, it was a complete overhaul. It was turning this sow’s ear with a rather nice trim (must be what the editor saw in it) into a something resembling a silk purse. I needed to downplay the “misunderstanding”, to beef up the IC, to totally rewrite the middle, cutting the temper tantrums and replacing it with meaningful dialogue, interactions and sex, and to fix that villainess.

Now, having come straight off of Lost Girls, in which the villains were heroes, the heroes were villains, the dead villains were heroes (well, according to my CP) I was used to writing complicated bad guys. I prided myself on it! I scoffed at central casting bad guys I saw in published books. And then I — gulp! — read my manuscript.

Oh, crap.

How did I do this? How did I think it was acceptable, back in 2002? Half of me wanted to just write the editor and tell her to forget about it. But I dug in, and I fixed, as far as I’m concerned, three out of the four of those problems.

As for the villainess, she’s the devil incarnate. If anything, I think I upped her vile level, her evil quotient. In my first draft, she’s a jealous slut ex girlfriend, shallow and fame hungry, who dumps the hero at the most vulnerable time in his life. In my final draft, she is all these things, plus, she holds a grudge that the hero managed to put his life back together without him, and seeks to sabotage him and his new girlfriend.

I really couldn’t see any other way around it. For the plot to hold together, she NEEDED to be an unredeemable bitch. I figured, of the 4 problems I saw, the villainess was the one I could live with most. Marley spent a long time comforting me, telling me that readers love to hate characters like this, that if I wrote her to be incredibly hateful and mean that it would bond them to the hero and heroine even more deeply. But I still had my doubts. Was my evil incarnate villainess just an easy way out? In my mind, these guys just need to be understood. I was sure they were perfectly justified and righteous, we just don’t understand them.

Boy was I naive. In the months since, I’ve learned that there actually ARE people out there who seem to live to make your life miserable. You have never done anything to hurt them, you are just trying to live your own life, which would in no way hurt, affect, or even involve them, and they still take every opportunity they can to hurt degrade, and yes, even sabotage you (just like my villainess) for some imagined insult.

And so, in doing my final pre-postal read, I found that I didn’t have such a problem with my villainess as I thought. Is Courtney over the top? Hell yeah. But it’s okay. I feel it’s much more realistic now than I did when I wrote it. Sad, huh?

(Oddly enough, another writer blogged about villains today, although she dealing with an entirely different issue. Something in the air? However, she got me thinking about the whole Dorian Gray thing. I want to know where these RL villains keep their “ugly” portraits. )

So what do we all think about villains? Can they be straight unredeemable Wicked Witch of the West villains, if it’s right for the story?