I have been pondering this for quite some time. Writing "Prey for Vengeance" really challenged my ability to roll with the punches and left me with some serious decisions about the integrity of my outline. As a first time author I was inspired by many of my favorite authors interview's where they stressed that your first novel is going to be terrible. I took great pains to buck the trend. I did all the professionally things like wrote an outline and story boarded scenes in my mind before tapping a key. I rewrote the first chapter over a dozen times to get the wording right. I sent copies to anyone who would read it and got their take on how they felt about specific situations in the book. I was pretty confident with the results but unfortunately that is only the beginning of the problem.
When outlining I had a set evil villian character set as American child. My problem when writing this part was the child in question who I wanted to pin the sins of entire nation on, really didn't fit a normal American teenager when I was done with him. I was left scrabbling for a antoginistic character for my female heroine and when I really got down to it a male just didn't fit the bill.
Here was one of my biggest problems. My story is filled with strong confident females that can kick ass and take names because I have a healthy respect for the fairer sex. I grew up with a strong mother and equally capable pair of sisters that could get one over on me without apparent effort.
So as a male how do I write strong female characters that are both positive and negative archetypes. Well the long and the short of it was that I couldn't. Instead my antagonist was a variation on the protagonist but with a widely diverging background and goals. In essence I cheated like mad to tweak a simple personality and assigned personality traits that fit the experience.
When I managed to accomplish this and it read true in my mind I threw it at people and begged for feedback and so far I haven't heard any screaming or gnashing of teeth.
Here's my probem though, if my protagonist and antonist are basically the same person and neither are inheritantly evil, how do I honestly write the antagonist as a negative. So far my solution has been to take a page from some Japanese cartoons and pit them against each other as rivals and make the their problems personal as opposed to that of the main plot outline, but is that a real solution and will that come back to bite me early on? My main fear is that I might be too subtle and no one will pick up on it at all and the only place this is a problem is in my own head.
In order for me to investigate this further I am going to write a stand alone story with the antonist as the main character and involving no other people from the regular story line, and use it as an exercise to explore this more deeply. If I can carry it off and the story makes sense for me to do so I will release it as free material. If not I will keep pounding on it until I can hammer out something.
My first instinct was to kill off this character at the end of the first book but one of my readers' (Steve Griffing also my illustrator) begged me to keep her in. I honestly thought Nina could easily find a bigger fish to fry, but as the story took shape and Violet cemented herself into my heart I just couldn't do it anymore and I couldn't think of a good reason for her to die. So it was no difficulty at all to make the people in charge of her more sinister and evil and keep her alive. If Violet met me today in real life she would undoubtedly kill me without a seconds remorse and I can't say I would blame her.
If your still sticking with me through all this I thank you. I just needed to put this down so I could work something through my head before I started this project. I appreciate all the time and effort invested by my readers and collaborators on my work. Feel free to leave comments or send me emails with questions and comments about the book or anything else.
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