Authors Electric

Let me ask you something: who do you think is the most terrifying villain in literature? Mask of Him Who Must Not Be Named Plenty of candidates to choose from. Voldemort in Harry Potter , Sauron in The Lord of the Rings , the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays , Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories; or going back further in the canon, Macbeth, Iago, Edmund, Richard III (as depicted by Shakespeare, I hasten to add, before any Ricardians take me apart), Mephistopheles… These are all splendidly evil figures. But not, to my mind, the most terrifying, for one big reason: we know what they are. The reader is in no doubt, from the word go, that each one of these is a Bad Lot, and how the hero will or won’t overcome them becomes the central drama of the story. (In Macbeth’s case you could say it centres on whether the hero’s better self will overcome his dark side.)   No. Far more frightening, for m...

One of the things I am asked most often on writing panels and workshops is how to create intriguing bad guys. What they are really asking me, I've come to understand, is how to create antagonists as interesting to the reader as the hero. An effective protagonist needs to have a worthy antagonist. The antagonist needs to present our hero with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle such that the audience can reasonably expect failure and be impressed with the virtues of the hero once he or she overcomes them. This antagonist can come in all shapes and sizes depending on the plot of your story. According to current narrative theory, there are  only six basic conflicts in Western literature : Man v. Man  Man v. Self  Man v. Society Man v. Nature  Man v. God  Man v. Monster* If your antagonist is Society, Nature, or God, your antagonist is pretty much set for you. You need only tweak the characteristics that are germane to your plot. If your antagonist is ...

Iago and Othello I got to fretting over my fictional villains again the other night after flipping off the news (in more ways than one.) Too many real ones at the gates now. Though Trump and his barbarians are nothing new, their arrogance is more flagrant than any in my lifetime. The Death Star of demented greed appears at perigee, bloated with obscenely-financed self-assurance. You can't make these bastards up, even as parody. They're complicating my novel. Just when I think I've got the right shade of dystopia, my near-future narrative needs to turns darker. I've always found creating villains daunting. The memorable ones - from Iago, to Moriarity, to Voldemort - seem more challenging than heroes, particularly the multidimensional ones with whom we can empathize or at least identify with, like Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Raskolnikov. Not that villains are always needed. Protagonists can be their own worst enemies. A suitably sinister villain does, however, ap...

What do your characters want? Every major character in your story has a purpose – a need to gain something or go somewhere. It may be as simple as finding true love, or escaping a bad relationship, or it may be more complex – finding peace after some inner turmoil, or finding his or her place in a new world after some life-changing event. It’s these desires and motivations that drive your story and often push it off into new dimensions. Even your minor characters need a reason for being in your story, although your walk-on people may not have much of a motivation other than serving your character in a shop! When the desires of character A directly conflict with the motivations of character B is where the fun starts, especially when B’s motivations are not necessarily apparent form the start. B may not even realise what he wants, although it might be obvious to everybody else!   That’s why many novels – and this probably applies more to genre fiction than literary fiction – have a...