The A to Z Book Diary: "B" is for Bring on the Bad guys

There's nothing like a good Bad Guy to get your story on track. It's the old yin-yang principle: to have light, you need dark; they balance each other out, and act as counterpoints to drive each other's motivations and development within the story.

And from the writing perspective, let's face it... bad guys are just so much fun to dive into and bring to life. They're just so interesting. And I mean this in the least twisted way possible.

Along that train of thought, an update on the progress of my writing New Years Resolution: so far, so good! I've actually been sticking to it (wonders never cease), and have cheerfully plowed through scrawling out (yes, by hand - I'm old fashioned that way... I have an odd fondness for getting ink stains on my fingers) four pages of brainstorming where I laid out pretty well every main aspect of the plot (which is definitely going to be a trilogy), and about six pages of the story. I scrapped the beginning I'd written ages ago, and tackled it from scratch.

And... *drum roll*... it's working - I'm almost in a state of shock, after metaphorically beating my head against a wall more often than not for years. It's amazing what I'm getting done, now that I've decided to flick that annoying inner-brain "is my writing/story good enough? what if it's not??" switch firmly to the 'OFF' position. HA!

But, I digress - Bad Guys. Heh, what a good time. A real and delicious puzzle.

Writing the Good Guys is for the most part straight forward; obviously, they still have their flaws (they'd be one-dimensional cardboard cutouts without them), but largely they have some sort of recognizable moral compass that is universally accepted and makes them relate-able and the ones that people root for. But the Bad Guys... their compass is the warped antithesis of the Good Guys', and the writer (and the reader, down the line) is left with all sorts of great questions: what's "right", and what's right in this guy's head? How far would he go? Why? What wouldn't they do? Do they have a line? What happens when they cross it? Oooh, the possibilities for moral complexities and everything that goes with them are endless. I'm still in the outlining stages for my principle Evil Doer, which the main hero has yet to meet, and this guy is shaping up to be downright elemental... in some ways literally. But I won't spoil it by giving too much away :)


And all this rambling about it has my creative brain revving its engines - if I have any hope of focusing on schoolwork (exams... right... I need to study for those, don't I?... meh, debatable), I'll need to go pour out my page for the day. 

Now where's my pen...

Image courtesy of artur84/FreeDigitalPhotos.net