Guest Blogger Kelly Ward: The Villain

While attempting to finish my extensive rewrites, I've noticed that there are more issues at hand than my plot killer problem. I have a big problem with the villain. It's catastrophic in nature and needs to be addressed.

When you have an inept villain, you have no story. Unless you plan on having no villain and if that's your story, then what I'm about to tell you will do you no good. For me, the villain of my series is like Darth Vader. He needs to convey fear simply by his presence. Not such an easy task to complete when you have no visuals to help you.

This villain is complicated. He's not a simple psychopathic killer bent on the destruction of humanity. If that were the villain I was working with, I wouldn't have this problem. Psychopathic villains are wonderful and easy (for the most part) and equally terrifying for the reader if done correctly.

The villain I have created is duplicitous and slippery. He'll just as easily smile to your face while he plots to stab you in the back. He won't be found in the middle of the action like a warlord or evil king. Instead, he's holding the puppet strings, masterminding every single action of the pawns laid out before him. He's difficult to pin down and even harder to write without adding an edge of insanity or a vengeful streak.

If you have a villain in your story, you need to remember that you will either kill your story now or make it great with this one character. While a plot killer will simply kill the stories he or she is involved in, the rest of the series will survive. With a horribly written villain, your series is dead in the water.

If you need an evil genius, create an evil genius. Plot out every aspect of his or her personality and when writing a situation the villain will be involved in, think through it as if you actually ARE that character. Sure, it's good to do that with every single character you have, but it's vital with your villain. I actually have more notes on my villains than I do on my heroes. If only my notes made sense...

One last thing to remember about a villain: names matter here. You need a name that has an actual meaning. I named my first villain Varick because the name sounds evil and it means conqueror (at least it did on the website I was using). What better name for the Bringer of all evil? With my newest villain, I chose the name Nathail because it sounds oily and black and it means snake. It fits him. You can't call a bad guy Mark can you? Well you could, but would he be scary?

Take your time with a villain. They can be the greatest thing in the world or the biggest pain in the neck you'll ever have.


-----

Kelly Ward has had a passion for writing since she was thirteen, and has since blended her passion for writing with her love of vampires into a writing career. Kelly is the author of Prophecy, Forbidden, and Awakening, which are available on her website. You can read more about Kelly's writing and life on her blog, The Fang Marked Writer. She is happily married to the love of her life, Nathan, and is expecting their first child in March.

Something Worth Writing

The most valuable lesson I have ever learned about writing is this:

In order to write well, you have to live fully.

This little discovery of mine started out as an excuse. I spent my young young adult years in total resistence of the notion of writing as a career path, largely because I was afraid my life would come to a screeching halt if I tried to make a living from writing. Yes, writing fills my soul and teaches me about myself and enables me to reach strangers on the other side of the country, blah, blah, blah. But I always had this image that if I wrote, I (who am already inclined toward excessive solitude) would end rotting away in a dank corner of some dark apartment, breaking myself away from my computer screen only long enough to make conversation with my own thoughts. Was that the life I wanted?

No, it wasn't. I wasn't going to be a writer. I was going to be a pastor. No, wait. A teacher of the Deaf. No, no, I'm sorry. An actor. Yes. An actor.

I was going to see the world, experience new things, spend my time around other human beings.

And so it happened that I spent several years chasing anything but the written word, only to find myself mysteriously back at the keyboard, in the corner of my apartment, my soul filling with each carefully chosen word.

Well, I suppose you can't get away from the things you love. So I decided at the beginning of this year to give freelance writing a shot. I was going to write for a living. I made the proper announcements, hit up Amazon for all the "so you wanna be a freelance writer" type publications, and started applying for jobs. But all the while I reminded myself that there would be no darkness, no excessive isolation, and absolutely no rotting away.

This is how my blog, Hollywood Back Roads, was born. I set a goal to visit a lesser-known area of Southern California every weekend and blog about it the following week. It was practical. I could get out and explore all in the name of gathering expertise in a specfic area. After all, a beginning writer cannot support herself on fiction alone, and if I was going to be an expert on something, it might as well be something that got me out of the house.

That was a good call, since getting out of the house changes everything.

Each new venture is a new discovery about myself, about my surroundings, about the people who occasionally come along for my outings. Since the beginning of Hollywood Back Roads, I have felt the odd sensation of being at home in a "foreign land" while my brother and I watched Malibu children leap into a swimming hole all Missouri-style. I've seen the faces of uprooted American Indians twisted in anguish on a wall mural painted by their descendants. I have felt the ocean waves pulse around my feet as I stood on the shore and watched a seal dive and drift only twenty feet away.

Yes, I now know what time the Getty Center closes and how to get to the Venice Canals. But more importantly, I have a new vocabulary. Words like "banjo" and "crest" and "fern" are suddenly brand new. History and Nature reintroduce themselves as old characters in a new light. This exploration is very likely one of the best things I have ever done for my fiction.

I see now that there is little need to guard myself against the hermity writer's lifestyle. A writer has to explore and experience. There is no choice. I cannot write about the world if I am not an active part of it.

When our own dear Coffee Stained Writer invited me to guest blog while she was on maternity leave, I wondered briefly if she was at all irritated by the writing time she'd lose to her son. (Obviously, I am not a mother.) Immediately after, I laughed at such a silly notion. A son is not an interruption to her career. Quite the opposite! While Nicole is bonding with her child, she will be developing a whole new vocabulary of her own, with new meanings for words like "love" and "family" and "diaper rash." Every day her mind will collect new ideas for characters and relationships, conflicts and themes. And while I suspect she has chosen to reproduce for personal reasons like love and family, the fact of the matter is, this whole motherhood thing is a brilliant career move.

It is as Ben Franklin once advised: "Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing." I now keep this quote taped to the wall above my desk, lest I should forget to get out and be a human being for a little while before I lose my vision to reams and reams of otherwise meaningless paper.

So what about you? How do you keep your ideas fresh and your mind alive? How do you balance your life as a writer (or as any other professional, for that matter) with your life as a human being?

--

Abi Wurdeman is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles, California with her brother Phil and her mice, LaVerne and Shirley. In addition to partnering with her brother on screenplays, Abi also writes short fiction and is currently working on her first novel. In an effort to make sure she does as much exploring as she does writing, Abi also maintains a blog, Hollywood Back Roads, exposing the lesser-known wonders of Southern California.

Writing in November: Advice from a NaNo Alumna

November is right around the corner as I'm sure you are all aware and that means it's time to get ready for NaNoWriMo. That's National Novel Writing Month for those of you who are new to the concept.

Last year was my first time participating and I learned a lot in the process. I wanted to share some of my experience so that the mistakes I made will not be repeated.

Never ever write a novel that is part of a series you are currently working on. Last November, I was working on the prequel for my current series. Since NaNoWriMo is all about word count, this was a very bad idea. Now that I'm going through and editing the novel, I'm finding a lot of mistakes I made while just trying to make the word count. Don't work on something that goes with another series. You'll kick yourself later.

Do your research before November. I was writing the novel and researching it at the same time. Granted, this was the first time I had to do such in-depth research for a novel so I didn't know better. I had so many notebooks laying around that I didn't know what was where. It took away from the experience for me.

Remember, it's about proving to yourself that you can do this. Making sure that you are writing enough is hard. Some days, I still don't feel like getting my three pages minimum completed. Some days I'm so blocked I can't get it done. But NaNoWriMo is there to encourage you. As you go through November, just remind yourself that you can finish it. It's all about fifty thousand words, not the next award-winning novel.

My goal this year is to write over fifty-three thousand words. We'll see what happens in November, won't we?

--

Kell is the author of the blog Welcome to Earth. She is currently working on editing her third vampire novel. Her first, Prophecy, is available online. She lives in Rock Island, Illinois, with her husband and dog, and writes full time from home. You can learn more about Kell by visiting her website here.

Being a Writer

If, years ago, you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you without hesitation that I wanted to be a writer. There had been other ideas, other thoughts for the future, but somehow seeing my name on a book cover (or even a movie screen!) was the highest dream I knew.

And then, reality showed up. Turns out I never considered the minor detail of actually making a living until I scored that million-dollar book deal and rose to literary stardom.

College came and went, with radio and television production my sensible major of choice, and shortly after I found my place at a local radio station. I joke that I'll grow up and get a real job someday, but in a way, my path never led me too far from my first dream. Good radio is all about telling stories well, and I came to live in those stories daily. The urge to write never really went away.

In November 2008, something shifted. I challenged myself to the NaNoWriMo way of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month. It came in spurts and drips, but with one final push on the last night of the month, I crossed the goal and typed "The End" on my first completed manuscript. It was messy. It was riddled with plot-holes and bad dialogue. It was awful and beautiful. And I was addicted.

I realized that I had become a Writer when I wasn't paying attention. Or...maybe I had always been one!

I have a hard time thinking of myself as a real-life, Capital W "Writer" most of the time. When I was drowning in the deep end of marathon novel-writing, a friend, noticing the constant word-count angst of my Facebook updates commented, "Oh! I didn't know you were a writer!" I wanted to say, "Yes, I am!" but it was hard. Was I a writer? I'd never finished anything but fragments that nobody was allowed to read. But since then, I've felt the title settling around me. It's taken many words, some more useful than others, to get there, but I'm finally okay with being a writer.

After years of struggling and scratching, thinking and reading about writing (as opposed to actually...y'know...writing), I learned that it's not something you do, but something you are. Writers are people with heads full of stories and ink in their blood. Chances are, if you've found your way to this blog, you are a writer whether you know it or not. Maybe you're published, or maybe you can just barely squeeze a few lines in a journal around family and a day job and life. But all you need is a spark, a desire, and something to mark on. Even if no one else reads it, you are a writer. That's the truth that can escape us when we say "I'll write the novel when I'm good enough," or, "I've never been published, so I'm not a real writer."

I don't believe publishing credit and profit is the reason to write. Our task is simple, but kind of scary: writers are here to help make sense of the world. Madeleine L'Engle said it best in Walking on Water: "the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness and then rushes to canvas or paper." Imagine that! Your words could change the world, even by making sense of a small part of it, by bringing a moment of joy or wonder or sadness or reflection.

So pick up your pen. Find ways to share your gifts in everyday life. Sharpen your craft. Connect with others who share your passion, love them and learn from them.

And don't stop looking for those rainbow answers! The world needs people like you to help find them. What will you write today?

--

Jen Rose is a writer, but she's just now figuring that out. By day, she's a production assistant at Z88.3 FM in Orlando, Florida (though she really likes the title "audio ninja"). By night, weekends, and the occasional lunch break, she writes stuff. She's currently working on her first novel, and she reviews music for JesusFreakHideout.com and blogs at Divinest Sense. She also likes Twitter followers who are not spam, bots, or marketing gurus. Follow her.

Elbow Room for the Imagination

I got my first computer about 15 years ago and immediately hooked up with AOL. For those of you who remember, the net was very different back then. For a few months I rummaged around the AOL sites until I stumbled upon an AOL sponsored chat room called "Poet's Place." The room had a moderator who would schedule poetry readings by IM from those wishing to do so. After each reading, the floor was open for comments.

Now I enjoy all kinds of literature, but poetry seemed particularly appropriate for that type of setting. I became a follower of Poet's Place for some years, and once in a while took a turn a moderator. I even got a chance to meet in person some of the people who frequented the room. They were a great bunch and I still contact some of them from time to time, even though Poet's Place is no longer active. It was all a lot of fun.

But as far as the poetry was concerned, frankly, most of it was pretty bad. However it occurred to me early on that even though the people who posted poems in the room were not very skilled at writing, still, they had something in common with the best of writers in any genre. This is the urge to reveal a unique, personal vision. I always tried to keep this in mind when rendering a comment, and therefore refrained from being too critical. Essentially, I tried to find whatever was good in each poem and cite that as a nucleus upon which a better poem could be constructed. In time, I began to recognize a near universal flaw in most of the poems.

Now it is never wise nor prescient to subject poetry, or any other art form for that matter, to immutable laws. As soon as we do that, someone like a James Joyce or a Paul Klee comes along to shatter those laws and give us a vision not only of undeniable brilliance, but also a brilliance of a kind which cannot be reduced to the standards ordinary people believe define what is art and what is not. So consider this only as advice. If it works for you, send me a percentage.

Beginning writers are told, incessantly, that the key to successful writing is to engage the reader. This seems so basic a principle that most writers sheerly assume an understanding of it. Yet saying you understand something and knowing how to put it into practice can be two very different things.

Consider a piece of creative writing as a series of stepping stones across a pond. When the stones are wide and close together, you cross over the water without any effort, hardly thinking about it. But when they are narrow and scattered haphazardly, crossing requires concentration and agility.

What I discovered in nearly all those bad poems were writers, so infatuated by their own imagination, that they completely ignored that of the reader. It was almost insulting. When they screamed, cried or laughed, they told you precisely why and in annoyingly painful detail. What they were forgetting is that reading a story is as much an act of imagination as writing it is.

If you think about it, Van Gogh's "Field of Flowers near Arles" virtually demands the viewer's participation. The genius of that painting is not what is there, but what isn't. Similarly, Eliot's "Prufrock" has inspired thousands of interpretations. That we all see something different in these disparate works of art is a measure of how the artist has managed to pull us into them. Perhaps the greatness of Van Gogh was not exactly how he saw things, but the reverence he had for how you see them. Maybe, it is this reverence which transforms ordinary fields, or life stories, into enduring works of art.

When you are finished writing, set your pen down, take a turn around the block, drink a cup of coffee or smoke a cigarette, then go back and read what you have written as if it was composed by a total stranger. And ask, has this person left enough space between the stones to exercise my legs as well as their own?

--

Chris Rhetts says about himself (pictured left with daughter Morgan):

I am a 59 year old, relatively normal person living in Acworth, GA (a lake community just north of Atlanta). A friend of mine from church and I maintain a blog, writing about current affairs. I fear we are in fact just a couple of garrulous old gasbags.

I got my B.A. with a major in Comparative Literature at Indiana University way back in 1973. I wanted to go on and get a Masters in education but things just didn't turn out the way I hoped and I find myself years later selling cars for a living. I've never published anything or claim to be an authority on writing. I've had occasion however to read and comment on reams of writing by amateurs like myself. As a result of that experience I think I have some useful ideas about creative writing.

[...]

I love to write all sorts of things and I think I am fairly good at it. I decided very early on, as a boy in fact, that I would write things to please myself. It was never my intention or aim to become a published writer. My first love is poetry. I also write little short stories and commentaries.

Where Have Country Preachers Gone?

Darryl Hart at Front Porch Republic asks why rural ministry is not nearly as popular as urban ministry these days.

In his essay, "God and Country," [Wendell] Berry complains rightly that American denominations treat rural congregations invariably as "a training ground for young ministers, and as a means of subsidizing their education." This stems from a two-fold disrespect for rural people. First is the assumption that persons not yet eligible for ministry are qualified to shepherd country folk. The other assumption regards congregation. According to Berry, "The denominational hierarchies . . . regard country places in exactly the same way as 'the economy' does: as sources of economic power to be exploited for the advantage of 'better' places." Rural congregations can't help but gain the impression that "they do not matter much." Or as one of Berry's Christian friends put it, "The soul of the plowboy ain't worth as much as the soul of the delivery boy."

This dilemma is a bit foreign to me I suppose. I grew up in the Catholic church and finding a qualified priest to lead our parish was never a problem. The archdiocese simply assigned them to us on a 10-year rotation. I'm quite sure the priests had some say in the matter and seniority or preference was taken into consideration, but for the most part they were subject to the decision of the Archbishop.

While examining this issue my gut impulse was to try and look beyond economics to some sort of cultural feature that would lead to the phenomenon Berry discusses. I theorized that perhaps it's an ego thing. Bigger churches imply a minister is doing a good job and obviously reaching more people furthers their evangelical goals. There's also the possibility that some urban congregations are more complex and offer greater challenges. Ultimately though I think both of these fall short. In the end, money does play an important part in the equation.

My problem in writing about this is that I guess I just don't like the idea of money playing a big role in the lives of the clergy. Again maybe my Catholic upbringing is at work here. To get a different perspective I spoke to my wife about this because she grew up in the Methodist church and is much more in-tune with the specifics of Protestant denominations than I am as an outsider. She informed me that her perspective is that the phenomenon described in the Darryl Hart piece is certainly true, but she thought the story being told was a bit too blame-ridden and not an entirely realistic perspective.

While it's true that rural churches do see a lot more change in their ministries, it's not fair to blame the frequent turnover of ministers on the larger urban/suburban congregations. There's no conspiracy, no secret belief that these congregations are somehow more important and more in need of talented ministers. The simple truth is that rural congregations are typically small. Salaries are low, often offset by providing a parsonage (residence) to the minister for free. So it's a good place to start out when expectations of pay and the need for a higher salary are low. Fast-forward to five years later when the minister has met and married a nice girl he met at a Wedesday night potluck and they have a toddler and another on the way. Suddenly the parsonage seems pretty small and the pay seems to just not cut it. What choice does the minister have but to look elsewhere, knowing someday he will be paying college tuition for those two children and would like to have enough elbow room in his home that his family doesn't kill one another?

In the Catholic church priests didn't have to worry about putting kids through college or varying salaries. They all pretty much made the same amount of money and they all knew they had a comfortable rectory to come home to every night. Their needs are small and this facilitates a degree of dependability. So economics do matter and I think Hart is way off base in putting so much blame on urban and suburban congregations. Ministers are individuals who, while having high moral obligations, are also human and have human needs. Moreover, the fact that they marry and have families certainly complicates things further (but I would contend for the better).

Hart suggests other ideas as to why the lure of the big cities is so strong:

Of course, the reasons why evangelicals fawn over the city may stem from sources other than the obvious appeal of bright lights and big buildings. One of them may be a born-again infatuation with celebrity and the disillusionment that follows when public figures like Mark Sanford or Miss California, Carrie Prajean, fall from grace. Evangelicals are disposed to understand grace and faith in extraordinary categories and so overlook stories of ordinary believers, routine piety, and even rural congregations as insignificant. Discontent with the average and routine aspects of natural life and of grace appears to breed a similar dissatisfaction with humble ministries in places of little interest to the editors of the Times.

Obviously there is some ego involved in wanting to minister to a larger flock, but larger churches also make it easier to focus on the actual ministry. In a small church the minister is sort of an everyman who has to wear a lot of hats. In large urban churches the lay folks do much of the heavy lifting. While the church itself may be more complicated, with a school attached, various programs and ministries and perhaps an involved missionary component, there are also a lot of shoulders the minister can lean on while he concentrates on the business of 'saving souls.'

Lastly, I think there's some truth to the notion that maybe these rural churches enjoy their roles as training grounds for new ministers and feel it is part of their mission. The same simpler life that Front Porch Republic likes to exalt on a regular basis also means different goals for rural churches and also different notions of what they need. I'm pretty curious if the complaints that Hart mentions are those of the actual congregations or just a rurally-sympathetic outsider looking in? Is Hart guilty of putting his own ego into this equation and being unnecessarily offended on the behalf of small town churches? For all the cities that love their major league baseball teams there are plenty of little towns that love their minor league status and actually feel that the game is played more honestly there, even if the players are more transient. There's reason in my mind to believe that the ministry may be no different.

--

Mike is the author of the blog The Big Stick. This is what he wants you to know about himself:

I've been blogging at The Big Stick for about a year and a half. I used to cover all sorts of topics (mostly national politics) but I've recently changed direction to focus on what I refer to as 'the intersection between urban and rural life' and associated issues like education and agriculture. I have also been known to write about my garden and my Labrador Retriever, Murphy.

My educational background includes a BA in History and a BA in Anthropology both from the University of Louisville. I also had a minor in Political Science. I worked for the University of Kentucky for three years as an archeologist and then I did another couple of years as a public educator with several historical sites and museums around town. Now I work in finance with a big Fortune 500 company and spend most of my days buried in spreadsheets and pie charts. It's been a weird career change, though I can't complain about the paychecks.

I live in Louisville, KY and am married with two daughters, ages 14 and 10. I have far too many hobbies to list here but cooking seems to always rank near the top.