On Villainy

So, it's November, and that means NaNoWriMo! National Novel Writing Month. It's a crazy concept: you have a month to write a 55,000 word novel start to finish. Sounds kinda fun, and i tried last year and fizzled out.
The thing i've realized is that i am much more of a rewriter than i am a writer. It is so much easier to go back and edit and rework something i've already written than to sit down and write it for the first time. I find that as i write, i try to edit as i go and so i get hung up on trying to find the exact right word, or whatever and i lose the whole train of thought and stop writing. I saw this with a play that i wrote. It took me over a year to get it to a point where i liked it, and it's only a ten-minute play! But i actually sat down one day and wrote it out, no matter how orrible i thought it was as i was writing it, i just kept going to the end. And then i spent months going back rereading it a thousand times, changing this word, that period, etc. until i really like it.
And so that is what i must do with my novel. I have been kicking around a couple of novel ideas (yes, that was a pun) for a while now and i just need to sit down and actually start writing, and keep writing. When it's done i can go back and make it amazing, i just need to get it down on paper!
And i'm hoping that NaNoWriMo will help motivate me! I know i'm starting late, ut let's celebrate the fact that i'm even coming to the party at all!

And so, i want to talk about Villainy! I mean, in my opinon a good villain is what makes a good book. I have always been drawn to those villains that i can relate to, they often make the creepiest bad guys. Villains who aren't just evil for the sake of being evil, but who have real motivating factors that the audience can understand. I love Richard III, who "since I cannot play a lover, i am determined to be a villain", he was never loved because of his deformities and so turned to evilness. Or Frankenstein's monster, same case, he was never shown affection or love by his creator and so he was only able to repay in kind, in villainy, in rampaging. He is a tragic figure and i pity him as much as i fear him.
That's the kind of villain i want to create. And i have thought long and hard about my villain and how to create him, why he went bad and so on. And i think i want to explore the villain as the direct opposite of the good guy.In German all evil words, like temptation, start with a prefix "ver" which means twisted or bad, it has connotations of being evil, and can be added to almost any verb or noun to make that word evil. "Leiten" is to lead, but "verleiten" is to lead astray, to tempt. "Achten" is to admire, respect, but "verachten" is to despise, scorn. You get the idea? And i want to creat a villain who is simply the good guy, but evil.
And how did he become evil? I really loved the play i saw a couple weeks ago about Lucifer before e fell and became the Devil, it portrayed him as an honest character, as a man with whom one could relate. And his reasons for falling, for rejecting God, were very understandable. I want to do that. I want a villain who maybe studied too much, learned too much and decided that Evil had to exist in this world in order for Good to exist. Without one there is no other, and so he decided in his twisted way, to become the Evil that needs to exist.

I don't know where else to go from there. But i think i wil simply start writing, now that i have some character ideas fleshed out a bit and i'll let them tell me wat happens next.

Stay tuned and i may post a few passages here!


Keep an eye out for my smashing Bestseller, The Twisted King. (title subject to change)


-Teeps