Why dunnit

Serious authors are drawn to material that resonates with them, even if not always consciously. Just as novelists invent stories and characters to explore themes they find important, journalists are drawn to real stories that do the same. They work toward a personal understanding of what happened, and that understanding reflects who they are.

To some degree we are always writing about ourselves, even when neither directly nor deliberately. Anyone who lives with a story as long as Capote did ends up coloring it subjectively, which is why no two tackling the same material will produce exactly the same story.

Capote was a gay man with a troubling early childhood in the Deep South. This background left him with a jaundiced view of life in the heartland, and, in particular, with its social and sexual conventions.

No standard boy-meets-girl, it was gay-man-meets-eccentric-female-quasi-hooker. He would spend the next five years, while the court case and appeals were exhausted and the executions carried out, getting to know and understand these men. He clearly had a lot more success with Smith, who would carry on a dialogue with the author so intimate that it has prompted speculation fleshed out directly in Infamous that they had fallen in love.

Hickock was a more difficult subject, more guarded and cynical. And the closer he looked, the more this peculiar man came to resemble the author himself. Smith is portrayed as a dreamy romantic with an artistic bent, and a writer—he wrote songs and poems and sent long handwritten accounts of himself to Capote while awaiting execution. Smith is presented as slightly feminine, and submissive, while Hickock is aggressively masculine. He presents them, essentially, as a couple, albeit one with the erotic strongly suppressed.

These are written with cinematic detail, with dialogue that Capote at least partly invented. There is a peculiar intimacy between them. One of those smiles that really work. Smith forms strong attachments to other men. In this case, we, the writers, have to know the victim as well or better than we know the perp. Some real life villains, like the Unabomber, for instance, write manifestos that go on for hundreds of pages and attempt to justify their acts.

That was his motive, though lots of people are Luddites without being violent. So how do we get from motive to action? I think expert opinion is divided about whether one has to have some sort of psychological disability to carry out terrible acts. Is a compulsion operating?

Jekyll and Mr. Is Mr. Hyde capable of not being evil? We get into predestination and free will. This is deep! We can decide one way for a certain story and another way for another. Another can feel dead inside. He needs to inflict pain in order to come to life. Terrible things happen to people in fiction and real life. Is there evil? How does it operate in our story? In our villain? So we can think about the kind of villain who will send our plot zooming in the right direction.

In the fairy tale, her actions are unmotivated. She just does what she does. But for the story to work in a longer adaptation, her motives are key to everything. Who would want a child and than want to jail her? Basic character will do. She may love babies and hate children, for example. So I divided the two villainous acts and the reader comes to sympathize, if not excuse, Lady Klausine. So a single fairy tale plot can support multiple motives.

To come to the one that we want to work with, we can consider the world of our story and the values of the people in it. We can think about the challenges this villain with his motive will present for our MC. We can make a list! Like this:. Smart villain Bumbling villain Resentful World view that makes him act as he does. Fun can come into it. What kind of villain with what kind of motives will we enjoy writing?

Because villains are often a delight to write. More than any other character, our villains give us permission to write over the top. They are generally an extreme, so we can be wild writing about them. But the witch is cast as the major villain. Come on! Who would abandon children in a forest or anywhere else? Who would go along with such a plan? The parents are villains! Write a scene or the whole story, revealing the real motive. Your villain is the Minister of the Department of Transportation, whatever kind of transportation is used in this world.

And he, deviously, makes transportation a misery for everyone. Write a scene in which you show the reader how he operates, and why. Pick one and make her the villain of your story. Invent her motive and write a scene or the whole story.

I love this so much, especially your inclusion of Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, who we respect and fear because we know that Sherlock himself fears almost nothing… yet he is sincerely afraid of this villain.

Yet, they are all so well crafted. I think I most enjoy reading about villains in whom I sense a bit of myself because then the tragedy of their life choices, and their likely eventual demise, is real. I enjoy the dragon Vollys as a villain because she grows so attached to her guests.

Thank you! Yes, best not to spend time with Vollys unless you have heat-resistant body armor and an arsenal of 21st century weapons! Thank you so much! This really helped! Can a villain be motivated by love? Cersei and Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones high school and up are perfect examples of this. Cersei also loves her children fiercely and will do terrible things to protect them. Same with Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina. Anakin Skywalker in the prequel Star Wars trilogies. I have a villain who does this in my first book.

They all just seem kind of the same. Please help! As an exercise, she says to pay attention to speech mannerisms in real life, and write down the ones that you notice. And they share their opinion?

And they say something funny? And every sentence is a question? Other people might not notice either. Still another can be oblivious to their surroundings and daydream a lot. Etc, etc. I also agree with what the others are saying, that it depends on their personality.

I love it because not only can it enhance the speaker tags, it can be used as speaker tags! We each have our own individual body language, so it can really add depth to the characters.

To summarize: 1 notice real life speech mannerisms. Borrowing from real life can make your stories seem more real. Someone can have super sarcastic thoughts, and that probably spills over into their dialogue, so this can be a great tool.

Also remember not to overuse one type of mannerism. The phrase-sprinkling is great for one or two characters, but give all seven a unique phrase, and your readers will get confused. Good for you for tackling switching POVs! I tried it once, but gave up after a while. Wow, that was a long post! Hope it helped! Anyways, in that book, one character is very outgoing, and when reading the chapters focusing on her, you are bound to laugh at least a little.

Another character, actually her best friend, is very cautious. So, when experiencing something new, she would have thoughts about scary it was and so forth. Her books do nothing for me. In contrast, the Maigret novels create place and person powerfully. Simenon was much taken with the canals of France. With this novel I paid more attention to the style when I noticed how adjectives and adverbs were few and far between.

I will read more of the 75 Maigret novels. You can read one easily on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, what a delight. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.

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