Make The Level of Evil Fit Your Genre and Category

There is a sliding scale of evil, all the way from the relatively harmless banker Mr. Babcock in Auntie Mame, whose greatest sin is having no sense of humor and sending little Patrick off to boarding school away from his crazy aunt, to the grotesquely evil Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He is an unrepentant murderer who remarks, “No pleasure but in meanness,” right before he shoots an old woman. Your badness quotient will have to be commensurate with the customs of the genre you’re working in.  

Make Your Villain A Quick-Change Artist

Keep in mind that villains can say anything they want, they can violate social norms (and do all the time), they laugh at everybody who seems to think the world has meaning and a moral purpose. And they have no boundaries. They are real shapeshifters, shedding their skin as much as they like. Thackeray once described Becky Sharp’s career as “resembling the slitherings of a mermaid.” They can change, and they often are forced to. Your villain may start out as a truly awful person, like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, but later turn out to be heroic, to have learned something, and to do a 180-degree turn.

Pay Special Attention to Physical Appearance

Your villain should be physically memorable, unusual, and provocative. There is often something off or extraordinary in their eyes, in their looks, even in their souls. Beautiful or ugly, their presence operates strongly on other people to the point that we sometimes can’t tell which they actually are­­ –– hero or villain, possibly both. At the beginning of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff cuts a genuinely frightening figure, cruel and sadistic, and yet in his sadness and tormented love for Cathy, he grows into a richly dimensional man who is in no small part a victim. He is one of a long line of jolie laide figures, whose inside and outside provide a twisted mirror of each other. As one of the archetypes of the cosmic mysteries, your villain can and should be a mixed figure indeed.  

Make Your Villain A Special Kind Of Sexy

About sex––these characters can be quite alluring, and here you are free to indulge yourself in the extremes. While writing Jenna Takes The Fall, I realized that we were going to have to see the goings on between the heroine and her very complex, difficult lover, Vincent Macklin Hull, the true villain of the piece. Her later actions toward him make sense only when you know how intensely he has aroused her early on, despite his frequent criminal behavior.

Hull is a man of 59 to Jenna’s 24. He is an art collector, a father, the head of a thriving business empire, which he inherited from a bunch of “seriously competent bastards.” I wanted to have his first seduction of Jenna take place near the pool by his weekend house in Water Mill, Long Island, and it had to be sexy. How else account for their subsequent relationship? How to make him attractive, lovable, caring, even if it’s merely timebound, opportunistic, driven by lust and boredom?

This was a juicy problem, and if you read the book, you’ll have to decide how well I did. I once knew a genius advertising man, Lee Clow, who said, “If an idea doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not an idea at all.” This one scared me plenty. 

Have Fun With The Darkness

Above all, if we are being brutally honest, villains allow us to roam around in that shady side of ourselves––normally kept in check––that wants to rip things apart, tear down the walls, or just plain go nuts, like Amy Elliott Dunne in Gone Girl. Such a character is often quite witty, because laughing at society is her gig. She’s Hyde to the distinguished Dr. Jekyll. She’s what Edgar Allan Poe called “The Imp of the Perverse.” So this is the place to get down with your own bad self and have some good nasty fun.

In The End

You are never more naked on the page than in the worst moments of your villain. Some readers will love your character, a few will hate him/her, and several will say there’s clearly something wrong with the author. They will question your talent, your taste, and even ascribe to you vices you don’t actually have. They will be shocked, I tell you, absolutely shocked! Congratulations. You’ve succeeded.

A. R. Taylor is an award-winning playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015, was a USA Best Book Awards finalist, and was named one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews. She’s been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes―the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud. In her past life, she was head writer on two Emmy-winning series for public television. She has performed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Tongue & Groove in Hollywood, and Lit Crawl LA. You can find her video blog, “Trailing Edge: Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone” at her website, www.lonecamel.com. She lives in Los Angeles, CA. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Creating Your Villain appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today we’ll be doing something a little bit different on the show. Usually DIY MFA Radio features interviews with authors and publishing industry professionals, but let’s face it: there’s more to life than writing. In fact, if we want to find success in our careers as writers, we have to think about things beyond the nitty-gritty of writing craft and publishing information.

One of the things that can make a huge impact on our careers is learning how to present ourselves in a professional way, and communicate who we are right from the moment someone meets us for the first time. This is why I am so delighted to welcome Kathleen Audet to the show today.

Kathleen is a brilliant image consultant and is president and owner of Your Authentic Image. She is also a good friend and someone who has helped me turn my own mindset about clothing and image upside down (in a good way). Today we’ll be talking about two different ways that image plays into our lives as writers. On one hand, we’ll discuss how to use components of image to make your characters come to life through description and detail.

But more importantly, Kathleen and I tackle some of those tougher questions about appearance. As writers, it’s easy to fall into the habit of wearing our PJs and bunny slippers work while we hid in our creative caves. But as you’ll learn in this episode, how we present ourselves on the outside is often a reflection of what’s going on inside. By changing our external appearance in small, subtle ways, we can actually start to shift some of those deep-set attitudes we have about ourselves and the world around us.

Listen in via the play-bar below or hop over to iTunes or Stitcher Radio and get the episode on your mobile device. Trust me, this is a juicy one and you won’t want to miss it!

In this episode Kathleen and I discuss:

• Why what we wear is important. Even if we’re just hiding in our writing cave, and no one else sees us that day, what we wear matters.
• The work you do around choosing words that encapsulate your essence. Kathleen has a special exercise to help you choose those words, and we also talk about what to do with those words once we have them.
  
• Using paint chips to represent different characters. Interestingly enough when you put characters of opposite sides of the color wheel in same scene, that’s usually when tension and conflict happens.

We also talk about how to apply these concepts to your characters on the page. We discuss how to design your characters visually and which details you can include to make them come to life. These details are:

• Clothing, including accessories.
• Grooming, including body hygiene, hair, skin, nail care, and makeup.
• Body language, including figure/body type, posture, eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, manners and etiquette.
• Semiotics and how clothing functions as a system of signs.

Plus, Kathleen shares her #1 tip for writers.

About Kathleen

Kathleen Audet is president and owner of Your Authentic Image. For more than 20 years she has been studying color, design and image management. Kathleen’s degrees in education and English form the foundation for her insatiable curiosity about people and ability to teach women on a deeply profound level. Having trained on both coasts of the United States, Kathleen’s image and style evaluations are thorough and comprehensive.

Kathleen received image consultant training from the Conselle Institute of Image Management. She is a member of Association of Image Consultants International. She lives northern Nevada and works with clients locally and around the world through her virtual coaching programs.

Create Your Signature Style

Shrink Your Closet, Expand Your Wardrobe

Whether you’re a business owner, executive, working mom, stay at home mom, retired­ and­ loving ­it, reinventing yourself professionally or personally, actively downsizing, or simply long to enjoy getting dressed in the morning… a few things are certain:

• You communicate volumes non­verbally every time you leave the house –­ whether you have 8 pieces of clothing, 80, or more, dressing in outfits you love will help you show up as the real YOU.
• Research has shown that holding onto “stuff” ties you down ­– placing unnecessary constraints on getting dressed in the morning ­ when dressing should be an easy, joy-­filled experience.
• “Decision Fatigue” is a real thing ­– facing a full closet yet having “nothing to wear” forces a less than ideal decision ­ stealing bandwidth instead of starting your day in the best possible frame of mind.

This course is a compassionately-lead, six-week virtual program that supports you to pare down and love up your wardrobe in a way that feels abundant, fulfilling, and freeing. To learn more or get info about when the course opens, head over to: www.yourauthenticimage.com/sign-up-here

Link to Episode 142

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes or Stitcher Radio to leave a review, and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available. Also, if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please share!

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 142: Discover Your Authentic Image — Interview with Kathleen Audet appeared first on DIY MFA.