November Chills
Writing every day and exploring a villain in the season of death
When November 1st rolled around I started writing every day. No, I can’t claim to be participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) because I’m not actively tracking my progress on that organization’s website. But I do encourage you to check out the charity that runs the event and donate if you’re able.
I’m averaging about 1K words a day so far, which means our story is moving forward. Early in the month I wrapped up Mickey’s backstory and found that over the course of writing our young hero’s first “case,” we’d essentially written a novella. It was a startling realization. (I see a great deal of editing in our future.)
But after coming to young Mickey’s denouement, it was time to finally put some words around our antagonist. We had realized that our bad guy, known simply as John, required the same kind of thoughtful exploration of where he came from that we’d already given Mickey.
So, we’ve begun.
Like Mickey, we’re starting in John’s youth in order to help understand his experience and build his motivations. Like Mickey, we generally know where John comes from and his arc. For instance, we know he was raised by a psychopath. We know he traveled extensively as a child and saw a lot that a child shouldn’t see.
The trick now is wrapping narrative around that scaffolding. So far it is skin-crawling work. Because in order for John to be who he is, he has to have gone through some darkness and trauma. My job is to write that darkness and trauma and find some place inside of me that can make it real.
Of course, in order to do this, I need to delve into my own darkness and trauma. I have to seek icky places in my psyche that resonate with the ickiness of John’s upbringing. And I have plenty to draw on. That’s not to say that I’ve seen the extremes that our character has. But I’ve lived a varied and sometimes complicated life that saw me living on the outskirts with people whose experiences were far more dire than mine.
In some ways, I was close enough to the world I’m writing for John that I can imagine him flitting at the periphery — a brief acquaintance, a friend of a friend, a cautionary tale close enough to make you realize how close you might have come to danger and disaster.
I wish I could revel in writing the evil. But truth be told, I’m not. Reading the horrific is a different thing all-together than writing it.
At any rate, our pace has quickened. We hope to have one of the darker chapters in your in-box soon, and I hope it make your blood run as cold as when we were writing it.