Hope everyone had a happy Labor Day as we move into fall.

Today’s blog entry is about the fascinating villains in fiction. The best fiction has both good and evil characters with goals and motivations of their own. If someone is evil for the sake of being evil, but has no reason why, they don’t make full characters and the audience can’t relate.

For those of you who haven’t yet seen “3:10 to Yuma” starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale (it started this weekend) – I highly recommend it. Personally, I don’t like Westerns, so I wasn’t sure how I would feel about the movie. At best, it would be a 2-hour action adventure, at worst, staring at Christian Bale and Russell Crowe on screen for 2 hours. Either way, it was worth the price of admission to find out.

I wasn’t disappointed, and left the theatre pondering how much I enjoyed seeing the dynamic between the protagonist (Christian Bale) and antagonist (Russell Crowe) and how each was not 100% good or evil – they were both.

Crowe plays a thief, a killer and he often has no conscience – – but he sketches people and animals with charcoal when he’s alone. He performs all these evil deeds, yet he respects his pursuers and even bonds with them. This made watching his character and this movie WONDERFUL.

Other antagonists I’ve enjoyed…

1. Ben Kingsley in “You Kill Me” (http://imdb.com/title/tt0796375/) – He plays a hitman for the mob but he keeps messing up the deaths because he’s an alcoholic. So he goes into AA and tries becoming sober so he can go out and become a successful hitman again.

Normally we wouldn’t cheer on someone who was a killer, but he plays this with the same charm as John Cusack did in “Grosse Pointe Blank” and we can’t help but like him.

2. Alan Rickman in “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.” – The critics even said he stole the show because of his dynamic portrayal of the Sheriff of Nottingham. He brought enthusiasm to the part, and I love watching him play these characters.

3. Hugh Laurie in “House” – the TV series. One of my favorite shows of all time. He plays a doctor who’s insensitive, a jerk, and he’s often cruel for sport. But we’re fascinated by him because deep down, he does have something we see as decent, and he’s great at what he does. Even Laurie gave an interview, saying he was surprised audiences love to watch a doctor who is a jerk – but it works. Can’t wait for the fall season opener!

Tell me about some of your favorite bad guys, and why!

If you belong to a writer’s group or research fiction writing online, you know there are some basic rules to writing fiction. Characters need to be believable, stay true to their thoughts/actions, etc.

My favorite storytelling rule is if you’re going to have a gun set on a mantel in Act 1 and Act 2, it had better go off in Act 3. By the same token, if a gun on the mantel goes off in Act 3, it had better be in sight during the first 2 acts. Don’t give the reader (or viewer) all the clues, but don’t withhold key items they need to be engaged in your story.

Movies and books occasionally break the storytelling rules. On occasion, it works. Other times, the writer isn’t true to his/her characters – and then it leaves the audience feeling cheated.

After getting several pages of my second manuscript edited this morning, I went to see the movie “War.” (Okay, I confess – it was mainly because I’ve seen almost everything else playing and I wanted to stare at Jason Statham for awhile!)

I won’t give away the ending for those of you who wish to see it, but I found some interesting aspects to this movie which reinforce how to write better fiction.

• A novel needs conflict and hardships all the way through, not in the last chapter only. I found the first hour or so of “War” quite basic: Triads killing each other. Nothing new in terms of action/adventure plot. But I was on the edge of my seat in the last 30 minutes of the movie, when it finally had some things at stake. This isn’t the way books work. Editors and agents only give a manuscript so much time before deciding whether they wish to read on.
• While surprise plot twists intrigue me (and I must admit I didn’t see a few of them coming in the movie)–it’s also possible to go overboard. Too much twist becomes unbelievable.
• Characters shouldn’t act differently in the last chapter (or 15 minutes of the movie) than they have for the preceding 1-1.5 hours. Not believable, which was my issue with “War.”

What are your thoughts? How do you feel when storytellers break the rules?

Elaine