The Shape of Today

Deliver Us Some Evil

Over the weekend I tried, with mixed results, to track down a book or two on writing...specifically, writing villains.

There are not many books out there that deal with villains overall, which is surprising to me. I've been toying with the idea of writing a book of my own on villains simply because this rather vital aspect of a story gets neglected time and again by authors, TV and film producers, and game developers. The never-seen Sauron of LOTR, the heavily breathing Darth Vader, and Jack Nicholson's gleefully malevolent Joker in the first "Batman" film all drive the point home: if you don't have a good villain, you don't have a good story.

I want my own villains to seem as menacing to the reader as they would be to my characters, so I want to sharpen my skills in that department. So far I've found surprisingly few books on the matter, but I did find one in the library's main catalog called Bullies, Bitches and Bastards. That one should generate some comment when it comes in the courier. But I'm also hoping it will generate some ideas that haven't occurred to me yet.

In the meantime, it's a chilly morning, and a busy workweek is in the offing. It's time I got to it...