{"id":28,"date":"2014-06-25T14:18:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-25T14:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/25\/deadly-but-likable-hero\/"},"modified":"2015-05-23T23:17:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T23:17:06","slug":"deadly-but-likable-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/25\/deadly-but-likable-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadly but likable hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here\u2013ta da!<\/i>\u2013is the reveal of the cover for Writer to Writer, from Think to Ink:<\/p>\n

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And here\u2019s the new cover for Writing Magic:<\/p>\n

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\nOn March 23, 2014, Kenzi Anne wrote, So I have a predicament… The villain in my story needs to lose, and I was initially going to have him die. Unfortunately, I need the heroine of my story to be the one to defeat the villain, but I’m not sure how to do that without having my heroine outright kill the villain herself. I feel like she wouldn’t be much of a hero since killing really isn’t moral or likable for a heroic character…any thoughts?<\/i><\/p>\n

Elisa opined, Well, actually, some people have to be killed to preserve peace. And plus, if there isn’t a penalty for despicableness, what keeps everyone from being despicable? But, if you absolutely don’t want her to kill him, why don’t you have her do it indirectly? Like, have her rig up the chandelier to fall to cause a distraction, only the villain steps under it at the precise moment it falls, and is demolished! (That is, of course, just a basic example. You can go much more complex than that.)<\/i><\/p>\n

And Eliza said, Sometimes it’s more satisfying to watch the villain live with defeat than just get killed. Maybe your hero destroys the one thing that meant the world to the villain and they have to stand there and watch all their hard work crumble before their eyes.<\/i><\/p>\n

The only time I\u2019ve had my heroine kill a villain is in The Two Princesses of Bamarre<\/i>, when Addie stabs (if I remember right) to death the dragon Vollys\u2013to the dismay of some readers, because Vollys is lovable. But she\u2019s evil, and I felt she had to go. I don\u2019t think Addie is any less admirable for doing away with her.<\/p>\n

But Vollys isn\u2019t human. So far, I\u2019ve shied away from having people kill people, though it may be unavoidable in the book I\u2019m working on now, during summer break from poetry school. Squeamishness, rather than morality, has stopped me in the past; I don\u2019t think it\u2019s immoral for an author to have a fictional character kill another fictional character, whether it\u2019s a villain murdering a secondary character or an MC polishing off a villain. I hasten to assure you all: in real life, I\u2019m mild-mannered.<\/p>\n

Certainly in books, movies, and TV, heroes often off villains, and the reader or the audience cheers and goes on loving them. Think of James Bond, for instance.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re wandering a little away from my area of expertise, because I\u2019m not a blood-and-guts writer, but I suspect that the method the hero uses is important. For example, it\u2019s probably a rare heroine who poisons her villain. We\u2019re likely to squirm if an author makes our beloved heroine Martha stir arsenic into the villain\u2019s tea or shoot him in the back using a telescopic rifle sight (correct lingo?) from an office building across the street from his hotel.<\/p>\n

Often in a thriller, we see the two locked in mortal combat. One of them is going to die, and we want it to be the villain. I\u2019ve peeked between my fingers countless times in a movie while a hero and villain struggle on a window ledge. The villain goes over, although maybe the hero really wanted to haul him in to jail. But nobody is miserable about the way it went down and he fell down.<\/p>\n

Speaking of jail and moving in Eliza\u2019s direction, bringing a villain to justice can be a satisfying way of avoiding death. He can no longer hurt anyone else, and if we set it up right, we can make sure his life in the clinker will be horrible. And justice doesn\u2019t have to mean a maximum-security prison in some country we all know; it can be a dungeon in the castle cellar or exile to a convict planet in the next galaxy.<\/p>\n

I love the way Hook meets his end in Peter Pan<\/i>. Peter defeats the pirate in a duel, a terrible humiliation. But the crocodile, whose clock has finally stopped ticking, eats him. If we can engineer this kind of send-off for our villain, hooray for us.<\/p>\n

One way to get there is to think about what would make our villain most miserable. Might be loss of power or wealth or being deprived of the company of his pet boa constrictor. If our heroine can bring this about, the reader will be satisfied. And a nice aspect of these less-than-final final solutions is that they\u2019re reversible, so we can bring our villain back in the next book, if we want to.<\/p>\n

A painful example of using what a character fears most occurs in George Orwell\u2019s 1984 (high school and up). *Spoiler alert!* If you haven\u2019t read this chilling masterpiece and plan to, skip this paragraph. Since the novel is a tragedy, it\u2019s the heroes who suffer defeat, but the method can be applied to villains, too. The government, which is the villain here, knows what everyone fears most\u2013heights or spiders or confinement\u2013and subjects dissenters to whatever that is for them. In this conception, everyone snaps; no one can withstand his greatest fear. The dissenters are broken and no longer a threat to the state. As soon as I read the end of the book, I knew what could be used against me. No bones would be broken, not even a scratch, but I\u2019d be finished. Horrifying. And we can do something like this to our villain.<\/p>\n

We have to set it up early in our story. Probably we have to show how hard it will be for our MC to discover our villain’s secret and bring it about. She may not know what she\u2019s looking for or even that there is an Achilles\u2019 heel in our seemingly invincible villain.<\/p>\n

Kenzi Anne also asks about the morality or likability of a heroine who kills a villain. We can debate forever the morality of a character (or a person) who kills, even to save other lives. But I think our heroine can be likable whether or not she kills anyone. I\u2019m not sure her likability is at stake unless she kills in a way the reader can\u2019t identify with, or that disgusts the reader. Suppose Martha draws a bead on the villain when he\u2019s about to smother her best friend who\u2019s innocently asleep. We want her to get the villain and save her friend, and let\u2019s assume that killing him is the only option. We\u2019re entirely on her side. We\u2019ll still want her to succeed, but we may feel less fond of her if her accompanying thoughts or actions don\u2019t please us. We may get turned off if she\u2019s hoping, as she pulls the trigger, that he doesn\u2019t die quickly, or, alternatively, if she\u2019s debating what she\u2019s going to eat for lunch as soon as he\u2019s dead. Or if she kills him and then kicks his cat or raids his fridge.<\/p>\n

Gee, villains are always so much fun! Here are three prompts:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Put Martha and the villainous, heavily armed, and very large Mr. MacTavish on the roof of a twenty-five-story office building. One of them is going to fall off. Write the fight scene, and kill whoever has to die.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Put them back on the roof, and have Martha figure out what Mr. MacTavish fears most. Have her vanquish him without killing him–if you can, without touching him. Write the scene.<\/p>\n

\u2022 In the traditional fairy tale, Snow White\u2019s evil stepmother dances to death in red hot slippers. Devise a better punishment for her and make Snow White bring it about.<\/p>\n

Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2013ta da!\u2013is the reveal of the cover for Writer to Writer, from Think to Ink: And here\u2019s the new cover for Writing Magic: On March 23, 2014, Kenzi Anne wrote, So I have a predicament… The villain in my story needs to lose, and I was initially going to have him die. Unfortunately, I need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32,33,34,35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}