IWSG: I had something I wanted to say, but...

 

    Frustratingly, over the past week I came up with two or three things I wanted to say in this month's post.  Then I had a little health kerfuffle on Monday morning (slept on my arm wrong and cut off all the flow of blood to my hand for long enough that until I massaged the blood back into it I literally couldn't move my fingers 😱) and that kinda drove most of the thoughts right out of my head.

    I do remember one of the topics, though:

    I've been concerned lately about how one-dimensional and shallow the characters turn out when I try to write a villain, particularly of the grandiose "I'm going to conquer/destroy the world" variety that some of my fantasy plots require.  Admittedly, the absurdly over-the-top goals of such a villain are already rather far removed from any sense of realism, but doesn't that just make it more important to make their characterization less absurd?

    I came up with an idea to write a fairly simple game where you're actually playing such a villain (well, a villain-to-be, really), but I'm not sure if I'm actually going to get it off the ground.  It's at that planning stage where I know the basic elements of the story, but haven't defined any of the other characters beyond the fact that they have to exist.  😰  Sometimes I never manage to get plots past that point, because I just can't come up with any interesting characters who work in those particular story slots.

    Hmm.

    Now that I think about it, I've picked up some various character creation aids over the years.  Maybe I should use one of those to flesh out those ideas...not that they've ever worked before, but maybe there's a first time for everything...

    Overall, though, I really do have trouble making villains--and even non-villain jerks--into real, believable, breathing characters, rather than simple caricatures.  I need to work on that, but it's hard to know where to start.  (I mean, if you look at real-world villains and extreme jerks, the majority of them really do seem to be nothing but flat caricatures rather than fully rounded actual people...)

    Maybe what I need to do is write something that's sort of a mystery, where you know that one person out of a group is secretly doing this, that or the other terrible thing, but they all act like nice, sweet people, so you have to piece together the clues and find the one who's actually evil.  Except that doesn't really feel like it would accomplish the goal?  Maybe a mystery where they're all jerks, but one of them  is also evil, and you have to figure out which one.

    Hmm.