Today, almost eleven months from the day I sat down and wrote the first scene—maybe nine months from the day I wrote HIS first scene—my villain told me his motivation for doing what he does.
Reeeeally?
After I’ve finished, and revised and tinkered with all your scenes?
NOW you tell me why you’re such an asshole?
And what kind of motivation is that anyway? I mean seriously. What kind of motivation is “because somebody’s gonna do it, and it might as well be me? Besides the money’s good.”
If he didn’t die at the end of the book, I’d kill him myself.
Oh wait . . . I already did.
LOL I think your villain deserved a terrible death. I might or might not do the same to the villain of my WIP.
ReplyDeleteYou poor thing! Definitely kill him, he deserves it. :)
ReplyDeleteHugs
Edie,
ReplyDeleteThis Villain has been the hardest character I've ever written to pin down. First draft he was oh so shallow, second draft a bit deeper, but not at much as I wanted. This last past through he's really come to life. Enough he's starting to drive me insane. lol
Zee,
ReplyDeleteI've killed him with great relish in each successive draft. This last time I will laugh as I kill him again.
That will teach him.
As a Romance writer, I rarely get the chance to kill a character who annoys me. (But then, I'm new at this, so who knows what the future holds)
ReplyDeleteI was doing a major rewrite of a 20,0000 word novelette for a Valentine's Day anthology at the editor's request: he felt it would read better in the third person (which I rarely wrote in) then the original first person.
This was a rewrite of a 5000 word story, and I had not been terribly original in my treating it to make it about Valentines Day and sexy.
My editor is one of several writers on a blog about writing sex, and I was reading an entry he wrote about plot, and realized what had bothered me with the story - the hero ended up with the wrong person. He should end up with is FIT+RST love, not the person who puts him off for an entire year.
So I wrote a new ending, where he rejects one when the other, who he thought he's lost forever, reappears on Valentine's Day, in the same bar where'd they's met.
I was rewriting the middle part, the year long building romance from one Valentine's Day to the next, when I realized the ending made my hero look - well, fickle and immature. WHY was he changing?
So I had to take his lovely Romance and twist it, and then make an ugly scene between them. But the logical time for that was New Year's Eve, so I had over a month to fill.
So I had my her's appendix burst during an argument.
Man, what I had to go through to make love logical!
I ended up with 27,000 word- and a week to get it back to 20,000. I'm waiting to see how the editor likes this version.
Next time I'll kill the second one off!
Ike,
ReplyDeleteIf you write romantic suspense you can kill off all the people you want! (well, within reason. I mean if you kill the hero/heroine off--a reader is likely to kill you!)
In my current project today I am killing off a secondary character who my readers love. I've know for a while this guy is going to have to die, but I am more than a little concerned about the violent reaction I am going to get. One of my CPs, who has known for months what was going to happen, has been very --um--vocal, *GRIN* in her objections. But for the last book in the series to work, this character has to die.
I had to laugh about your comment that you had to make your hero's appendix burst in order for the staging to make sense. LOL The hoops we have to jump through to end up with a viable story!