Have you ever – or is it more accurate to ask, how many times have you – spoken of something you’ve written, a novel, a script a short story as ‘just a draft’.
Have you used it as an excuse for something you perceived to be not very good?
Villains aren’t just people who run around being mean and slapping puppies (in fact sometimes they have and love their very own puppy or kitten).
So how do we as writers of for screen, stage and print write the very best villains the world will love to hate?
You make your villain a match for your hero. Pretty much that simple…and that hard. Your villain can be a who or an it.
It’s astonishing how many distractions there are in the world these days – throw into that procrastination (a writer’s biggest nemesis) and it can be a cruel world for the writer. But we’re going to ignore that old side-kick procrastination and think about focus despite the fact the two of them do go hand in hand.
Focus can lead to great things. Lack of it can truly disrupt the creative flow. Once you’re focused and can maintain that focus the work will flow smoothly and swiftly. It’s almost intangible and yet when we’re ‘in the zone’ we all know it. I mean…
[oops, got to go open a window…on the other side of the house…it’s stuffy as I write this]
Have you taken time to sit down and consider a logline for your script? Of course you have – presuming you’re writing scripts. And I’d go so far here as to say it’s not a bad idea to consider loglines and how they’re created if you’re a novelist as well. It’s kind of your ‘elevator pitch’.
Everyone is forever in a hurry so I’m going to give some space to what NOT to do when thinking about creating a logline, aka the short pitch if you’re writing other things and want to get a short pithy hook out there to snag an editor or producer.
Producers and Editors are notorious for being in a hurry and expecting a pitch or a logline to grab them all on its own. I don’t blame them really. They’re buried under scripts and manuscripts and meetings and a lot more that we, as writers, don’t think about. Is it so unreasonable to not want to have to slog through even more paper than they already do?
Writers of all stripes get feedback from all sorts of people – sometimes it’s solicited and sometimes it just jumps out at you. We handle all that feedback in a lot of different ways. But, there’s the feedback from knowledgeable sources we all have to pay strict attention to.
When a screenwriter gets it from on high and is told where a script may be lacking, that’s not a time to argue. When a novelist gets feedback from an Editor or Publisher, that is not the time to argue.