Guest Stacy-Deanne: Crafting the Perfect Villain

Ever since I was a little girl I loved mystery and suspense. I remember curling up with my mother on the couch watching Dial M for Murder and being in awe of how brilliant Hitchcock was. People have often asked me why I love writing mysteries.  Well, I love being surprised as well as evoking thrills and taking readers on wild twists and turns just to shock. But one of the things I love most about writing mysteries and crime fiction is villains. Why?

Villains provide tension and move the story. They put readers on edge and shake things up. Sometimes the villain is the only reason I keep turning the pages when I read. I don’t care if your mystery is hardboiled or cozy, you've got to have an enthralling villain and villains are more than just bad guys and bad girls.

The trick to a good villain is he or she has to be three-dimensional. I’ve seen too many villains in movies and books that were just bad and nothing else. Well this is unrealistic. No one is all bad or all good. In order to make your villains shine you must create them as a persons with depth.  Making a person all bad just won’t cut it and is not an effective way to form a true villain.

Below you’ll find crucial things to remember when constructing villains.

1. Villains are Real People

The worst thing you could do is make your villain predictable. No character should be all bad or all good. You should put just as much thought into creating your villain as you do your protagonist. The most unforgettable villains evoke different emotions in readers. They make you sad, mad, and afraid and even pity them.  Norman Bates and Dorian Gray are my favorite villains. Both were crafted with depth. Norman is a brilliant character that makes the audience bleed with sympathy despite being a killer. We know he’s a bad person yet we can’t help but pity him. Hitchcock does a wonderful job drawing different emotions for this character. Dorian Gray comes off as heartless and vain and maybe he is but as we see him fall victim to his sins, it makes it harder to dislike him. Both are brutal killers but human at the same time. That’s the perfect combination for a top-notch villain.

2. Villains Have Emotions Too

Strive to show different sides of your villains the same as you would the protagonist. Show their more vulnerable and weaker sides. This helps readers to relate. For characters to be powerful we must see some of ourselves in them. Readers should be able to embrace the villain’s emotions; that heightens the impact of the character.  Maybe you’re writing about a female serial killer who chops up male prostitutes and sticks their remains in her freezer. Yet she loves animals and often leaves food for the stray kitten who wanders her neighborhood.  Maybe your villain is a man who poisoned his wife to get her money yet he loves his new wife so much he’d die before ever hurting her. Show sympathy, real emotion. This jolts the audience and keeps them on their toes. This is needed if readers are going to relate to your characters.

3. Ditch Carbon Cutouts

Think and be creative when you’re creating your villains. Come on, you’re a writer. Give them circumstances and challenges the same as you would your protagonist.  Don’t make your villains from a box of clichés.  Show what they do when they aren’t being bad. Let the reader inside the character. Say you have a serial killer. What kind of job does he have? Is he gay or straight? Does he have any kids? What are his hobbies and what does he like to do? Of course you don’t have to sit there and include all of these things in your novel but you should sit down and learn about your villains enough to be able to write them. Know them inside and out and don’t rely on their just being the bad guy to carry the story. There has to be much more than that.

The key is to always remember your villains are people too. Put in the same character development you would for your protagonist and you’ll have a page-turning villain readers will not soon forget.

Thanks Novel Spaces for having me! I enjoyed it!


Stacy-Deanne (Dee-Anne) is an award-winning novelist of mystery, suspense and crime fiction. She’s been writing professionally since she was 19 and her work includes Everlasting, Melody and Giving up the Ghost. Stacy is profiled along with notable authors in the NAACP-nominated 2006 book, Literary Divas: The Top 100+ African-American Women in Writing. Her 2011 release Giving up the Ghost was nominated for a 2011 African-American Literary Award and is a 2012 Black Expressions Best Seller. Her upcoming novel, The Season of Sin will be released April 2012 from Peace in the Storm Publishing. Read more about Stacy and her releases on her website, and find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Dedications

On March 16, Dayton wrote his post about the support that he gets from his wife. In his post on Sunday, Charles resigned from NovelSpaces to free up his time to focus on family issues. I thought that I would round March out with a family dedication of my own.

This week I had the distinct pleasure of writing a poem with my dad. This was something we did since I was a child, Sunday afternoons whiled away giggling ourselves silly while we composed alternate lyrics for songs. Nothing was sacred and "Weird Al" Yankovic had nothing on us. We haven't done it for a long time; teenage years, college, marriage, babies meant not so much time for giggling until last week when I challenged him to fix a poem I was writing to include in a book of short stories. He rose to the challenge brilliantly and I cannot wait to release that book with both of our names on the cover.

Resignation

Writing is an important act. I believe that. But it's not the most important one in life. And sometimes you have to take a step back from writing. I'm at that point right now. I'm not quitting writing. It's too much a part of my daily routine. I wouldn't be able to fill my time. But for a while I need to focus on other things.

I will continue to post occasionally on my own blog, and I've actually got quite a bit of stuff written that I hope will eventually be released. That will depend on many things.

I want to thank my fellow Novelnaughts for inviting me here in the first place, and for your support. I've enjoyed very much getting to know you and getting to read your work. And thanks to all those who have visited and commented on my Novel Spaces posts, as well as those of my fellow writers. I hope all of you will continue to support this great site.

Take care.
Charles Gramlich

Indie publishing follow up: Coming up for air

In Taking the Plunge on December 7, 2011 I discussed my decision to start a micropress to publish some of my own fiction as well as the work of a few other authors. The initial plan was to launch in December 2011, but since I had a file full of books about the process to read, covers to design and execute, formatting to learn and intricacies of Smashwords/Kindle etc. to explore, I figured a more reasonable time frame would be January.

Stuff kept happening, though, and I pushed my self-imposed deadline further and further away. I vacillated with decisions: publish through Smashwords or go straight to Kindle and take advantage of the KDP Select programme? Do the formatting and covers myself or shell out some cash for these services? Most unexpected of all was my own resistance to taking this big step. I am grateful to Vaughn T. Stanford, author of the first three stories in my lineup, for his patience as I responded to his many enquiries as to when the venture would get off the ground with just one word: "Soon."

Vaughn had planned to make February 19 a double celebration: my birthday and the launch of the press. As we sat in a restaurant on the water enjoying my birthday lunch and discussing the project, I offered up another "Soon". His response was, "Are you afraid?" I could not even summon indignation that he should ask me, the great adventurer (snigger), about... fear. At that moment I resolved to have the first book live on Kindle in time for his birthday, March 6. I was inundated with other work but I spent most of the evening and night of March 6 formatting, writing descriptions, tags and the lot, and at 2AM I finally put the book to bed. I watched the status go from 'In review' to 'Publishing' and finally to 'Live'. Two to Tangle had been born, with The Letter and Desire following hot on its heels. Wordtryst Press was (finally) up and running.

I cannot begin to describe the euphoria that hit me once I completed that first crucial step. Next in line are my second romance novel Café Noir, an erotic short story by Nyx and a short story by Nnande Aku, the pen name I've decided to use for some of my non-romance genre fiction. Once those covers are ready I'll click that 'publish' button - and then the journey will really begin.

Why Anthologies Make Good Markets

If you write speculative fiction but have never submitted to an anthology, you should consider it. I've found anthologies to be good markets.

• Anthologies get fewer submissions than equivalent-paying magazines, so your chances of acceptance of higher.
• Personally, I'm more creative when I have boundaries. An anthology provides a topic, usually an approach, and maximum and minimum word counts. I can come up with several ideas for an anthology story while watching a TV show, while I have a hard time corralling ideas, characters, and settings into something coherent when I have the whole of time and space to work in. 
• Editors of anthologies sometimes arrange booksignings, increasing your name recognition. 
• Editors sometimes arrange readings at bookstores or sf/f cons, increasing your name recognition.
• Being in an anthology is an automatic conversation topic when you meet other authors in the anthology at sf/f cons and meetings.
• Anthologies have deadlines. You can't put off writing your story or keep revising it; if you want to submit, you have to meet the deadline. If you write for anthologies, you get more stories out.
• Sometimes I write a story that doesn't match the guidelines of any magazine. A few times, I've sold such stories to anthologies, where they were a perfect fit.

It's easy to find out about anthologies. Start with Ralan.com's list of open anthologies at http://www.ralan.com/m.antho.htm. This summary briefly lists genres, word count, pay, and other important matters. When you see an anthology that interests you, click on its name. A new window will open—sometimes it will be the page with submission information; other times, it will be a publisher's home page and you'll have to look for the submission instructions.

Another source that I have not used often but other people swear by is Duotrope. Its search page is at http://duotrope.com/search.aspx. The fewer items you specify, the more hits you'll get. So to review all open paying anthologies in all genres, go down to the "Payscale" box and choose the minimum pay you want, go down to "Anthologies" box and click, then click "Search." Click on the title, and you'll go to Duotrope's summary. From there, you can go to the publisher's or anthology's Website.

The only bad experience I've had with anthologies is that they seem more likely not to respond if they're not interested.


I'll be blogging again at Novel Spaces on April 6. Hope to see you again then.

—Shauna Roberts

Unveiling Your New Book Cover - How Soon is Too Soon?

How soon is too soon to reveal your next book cover, posting it on social media and your website/blogs? Some say hold off until a few months before the pub date, at least until review copies are mailed out. I was told by one publisher that if you reveal the cover too soon, readers will get use to seeing it, and then if they see it again some months later around the time the book actually comes out, they'll associate it with an older title. There are some authors who have not unveiled the actual cover until pub day, even displaying a generic cover on Amazon and other sites. Others say it's best to debut the cover early on and get it set in a reader's mind so that they bond with the visual and look forward to the on-sale date.

What's your opinion? How many months prior to release date do you unveil your new cover?

Also, here's a great, informational blog post on the same topic by author Jody Hedlund. She gives several important pros and cons that I found to be very helpful. http://jodyhedlund.blogspot.com/2011/02/when-should-authors-release-their-book.html

Pay Attention to Your Point of view

If you're a white, heterosexual male, you probably don't realize most media assume everyone is a white, heterosexual male. This is particularly true in film, as any woman who has had to sit through interminable views of other women's breasts between the good parts of a movie will tell you, but it's pretty much a constant throughout all western-influenced media. World-wide media if you leave out the 'white' part.(All men are not dogs, btw. Our biology is hardwired to pump adrenalin and endorphin at the sight of attractive women. Back when fire was dismissed as a passing fad and fighting other males tooth-and-club to win females' favor was de rigueur, this made us aggressive and impervious to pain. Now it makes us logic-impaired and spendthrift.)

Most folks my age have had the experience of revisiting a story or movie we enjoyed in the 60s or 70s and cringing at the sexual and racial stereotypes that we missed at the time and didn't remember forty years later. (Or, if you're younger, you may have wondered why people didn't protest - or even mention - the racism or sexism of some old 'classic' movies when the films were new.) The flipside of this is of course is films in which historical characters have modern mores and worldviews, usually fighting against the injustice of what really happened.

Unfortunately many historical novels - particularly historical romances - are equally anachronistic. I will cheerfully go along with a bit of historical rewriting to tell a good story, especially when it's clear the storyteller knows what she's doing. I even recognize that some sanitizing of the past is a prerequisite of the genre - few readers find leading men who regard hygiene as satanic and women as property romantic. It's likely anyone who wrote a 'romance' about how women were actually treated 700 years ago would run the risk of being roundly decried as a misogynist. But I cannot abide an accuracy-less tale of the hero and/or heroine, wearing gorgeous period costumes, using their 21st century values to overcome the intolerance of their 10th-through-19th century society.

As readers we tend to not recognize a writer's point of view as a point of view when it's similar to our own, it's when the writer's point of view, the underlying assumption of her narrative, differs from our own that we notice. For example: The majority of my fellow science-fiction writers fall somewhere along the agnostic-rationalist spectrum. Assumptions that faith and intellect are mutually exclusive, or that all religions are scams are common. While fantasy writers acknowledge intelligence and belief can coexist, most would agree with the characterization of formal religions. Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in which lovable waifs save the world by hunting down and killing God, is probably the most extreme example, but the prejudice runs through much of both genres. Our younger daughter is a fan of anime and was initially hesitant to share some of her favorites with me because she wasn't sure how I'd react. The Japanese popular attitude toward Christianity is shaped by the Catholic Church's militant missionary efforts a few centuries back. When it's mentioned at all, any monotheistic religion is depicted as repressive, hypocritical, focused on profit/political control, and opposed to anything it can't control. (Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that non-Christians, particularly here in the USofA, are routinely beaten over the head by social conservatives who link patriotism, integrity, and faith to their cultural assumptions.)

As writers we like to think we don't let our points of view distract or offend readers, that our audience is certain of our goodwill and understands our intent. But. Things so innocuous to us as to be invisible can completely undo us. Let me use a couple of personal examples. Most of you know my humor runs towards word games and willful misconstruing of information, but you may not know I also enjoy roast-like insult humor. I once was quick with the snipe and the put-down (as I recall, Dayton's response to my first e-mail to him was "That had better be a joke.") but these days not so much. I learned to curb my barbed missives only after demolishing my relationship with a writer with whom I'd worked. In my published fiction I have had to mend fences with a friend of mine who's a Wiccan for a stereotypical depiction of her faith, and over the years have had to acknowledge unconsciously sexist, racist or USA-centric assumptions/depictions/word choices pointed out by readers.

I am not advocating that we edit our beliefs and worldview out of our work. The forces that shaped us shape our work. Even the most well-intentioned efforts - especially the most well-intention efforts - to avoid offending anyone can expunge everything of value from our work. By the same token, if we are to master our craft we must first master our tools. The intentional point of view of the narrator, seen or unseen, can convey texture and nuance to our reader; it's an important part of storytelling. By the same token, unconsciously letting our personal point of view choose our words can throw our reader completely out of the story.

Pay attention to your point of view.