So – I just gotta tell you about Darla. I do a lot of travelling and not long ago, I was sitting in the O’Hare Airport when a woman walked into the gate area. She was in her early twenties, and carried a backpack, which she held with a whitened fist. She sat down and began to fidget in her seat, checking her watch, looking at the gate, pawing through her bag. She pulled out a book, and clutched it to her chest a moment before opening it, and pulling out a highlighter. The books said, in large black ominous letters – How to get over your fear of flying. Periodically, she wiped her hands on her jeans, and blew out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it. […]
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. . . And your little dog, too!
Today we’re looking at part two of writing a scary, believable villain. For a villain to be great, his or her threats must be believable and truly scary. The threat has to hit home. In the Wizard of Oz, we’re afraid for Dorothy and her friends, but when the witch threatens Toto, we’re drawn all the way into the danger. “She’s going to hurt an innocent dog?” We see Dorothy’s response too. Not Toto! As you develop your villain or antagonist, create a scenario that’s real and hits home. Could it happen? And what if it did? Work on thinking outside the norm, too. Terrorist blowing up a city while Bruce Willis tries to save mankind is exciting and perhaps interesting, but I’m not really drawn in because the threat […]
Read the RestI’ll Get You, My Pretty!
My husband and I were talking recently about addictions. Why, if we have the resurrection spirit of the Living God inside us do we have such a hard time overcoming addictions? It’s like, we look the addiction in the face and it seems so huge that we can’t slay it. It’s bigger than us, stronger than us, outthinks us and sabotages us. It crushes us into submission. An addiction is our own personal a villain. Think about it – when you consider taking it on, do you stumble, do you wonder how you’ll accomplish it? Does it feel undefeatable? Does it feel personal – especially when you look at other people who aren’t attacked by that addiction? But I’m not here today to talk about addictions. Or even the fact […]
Read the RestWhy pick on me?
I had a grade school villain. Her name was Karla, and she, like most bullies, had been held back a year in school and seemed as if they came out of the womb fully grown. She had a gang – her little brother and a few other cling-ons who were fed by her power, and she owned the swings. I loved to swing. Especially the old kind of swings that hang from chains. In our playground, we could tie one of the set of three to the side, and then play a game with the other two – the one in the middle would swing in a circle, gathering momentum and at the exact right moment, the other “swinger” would position themselves in the middle and the two […]
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