Villains, Redux

Last July, The Three and I talked villains. The Further Four and I just got around to this topic today, mainly because they didn't exist at the time. (Well, the girls existed, individually, just not as a writing group.)

Freewriting villains is fun, so we started out by using Rah's favorite random stuff generator to generate some negative character traits. The three traits the girls liked were rude, secretive and violent. The instructions were simple: Spend five to seven minutes writing a brief bio about a bad guy or girl with those three traits. Make her nasty. Tell me what kinds of horrible things she does.

Yummmmm.

As usual, we got some crazy diversity out of this group of girls who are all about the same age and come from pretty similar backgrounds: adult villains and teen villains and villains of indiscriminate age. Villains who like order and hate long hair; villains who eat bunnies for breakfast; villains who get grounded; and one evocatively named villain called Gobstopper Grasshopper.

After we had our villains firmly in hand, we chatted villainy. This was pretty high level and basic: We talked about how the villain's job is to oppose the main character and cause conflict. We talked about how villains aren't always evil. Sometimes, they're antagonists, like your mom when she destroys your hopes and dreams by not letting you go hang out with your friends because your room still isn't clean.

Most importantly, though, the villain is the hero of her own story. To write a great villain, you need to understand her as well as you understand your main character. You need to answer those three questions: What does my villain want? What's in her way? Does she get it?

To get inside the head of our crazy villains we wrote again, this time from the point of view of the villain. Two rules for this go-round: Write in first person. Don't make your character not evil all of a sudden.

I didn't want these villains to suddenly stop eating bunnies for breakfast; I wanted to know what made that bunny-eater eat bunnies? What had the world done to make him that way? How did he feel about the world being arrayed against him?

Cranky Rah knows how she feels when the world is arrayed against her: Irritable. Vengeful. And in sudden, desperate need of a clean house.

Here's Cranky Rah, her friend Quaker Ann and other
like-minded cleaniacs, power-washing the world.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Waxing Philosophic

Cranky Rah is in the throes of a winter malaise. She should be working on the next draft of The Work in Progress, but the brain is Decidedly Not Interested. This happens from time to time, and it is one of the few things in life Cranky Rah does not stress about. It will come back. She will write. That is what Cranky Rah does.

But it's had me thinking about big questions like Why Does One Want to Get Published? and Why Does One Write?

Abandon all hope,
ye who trespass in Rah's cave.

My awesome writing friend Cool J once heard an author say that you need to know why you want to get published—not judge that reason, just know it. For Cool J, it's the need for the visual artist in her to hold her words in her hands. For me, well, let's just say we're not going that deep into Rah's cave today. Beware the caution tape.

Sometimes when I talk to writers, though, it seems like that's all there is. There's a lot of talk about agents and editors and getting published and fretting about deadlines and working through another draft and, quite frankly, it seems like a lot of Work. The kind of work that makes you wonder why anyone would do it in the first place.

So I started wondering: Why do we write? Not how did we start writing or why do we want to get published or why do we write what we write about, but why do writers put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? What drives the creation?

Phones hung on walls and had these
things called cords, which basically
handcuffed you to the phone.
I had a bright yellow one.

I don't remember exactly when I started writing, but it was sometime in middle school, when I met Jobie. She wrote stories, and I thought that was neat, so I started writing stories. We spent all summer writing and reading our stories to each other, and I mean that pretty much literally. This was the Age of Atari (an epoch of the Stone Age), before home computers or the Internet. Heck, this was before Call Waiting—and there was the rub: My mom worked part time, and she wanted to be able to get in touch with my sister and me if she needed to. So she required that I not be on the phone for the 10 minutes before and after the top of the hour (like 9:50 to 10:10 a.m.) and for the 10 minutes before and after the bottom of the hour.

Jobie and I spent the 20 minutes of each phone ban writing, and then we spent the next 20 minutes on the phone, reading to each other. Then 20 minutes writing, 20 minutes reading. Over and over. All. Day. Long.

What did we write about? Well, let's just say that within the Age of Atari was the Period of The Lost Boys. Jobie was into vampires way before Stephenie Meyer. I was more into rock stars and this one black-haired boy from school, but they could be vampires, too. Anything was possible.

That's when the populating of my brain started, I guess. I don't write because I have some Great Deep Lesson I want to share with the world or because I want to explore the Big Questions of Life. Maybe that happens anyway in the telling of a good story, but I write because there are people in my brain, and they want out.

Connor might be related to this one.

There's Wren, who lives in a treehouse and wakes up in other places a couple of times a week. Ink, the black-haired boy who hears color. Vivian, who wishes her mom's tattoo wasn't on the cover of that country album, and Jacoby with his mad uncle. Connor, who inherited an island of seals, and Waverly, whose dad digs up dead people.

They're all hibernating right now, which I totally get. It's supposed to snow today. Again. And we're all totally over it. But spring is coming. Soon we will be awash in vitamin D, and everyone will wake up. Maybe they're stirring a little even now, which is good, because it's getting a little cramped inside my head.