Does every romance novel need a villain? Can you raise the stakes, layer in conflict and craft rich, complex characters without inserting the same tired old villains readers have grown weary of seeing?
I feel that a newbie writer is tempted to go with what’s easy and we think will work. But a few hundred or maybe a few thousand words into dropping the villain into the storyline, we find we’ve crossed over into what I laughingly refer to as ‘rom-ense’. Or maybe ‘suspance’ is more accurate. Suddenly our story is neither a straight romance but it doesn’t have nearly enough suspense to sustain a reader for a chapter, much less 70,000 words. This happened to me in writing my first manuscript and I’m still trying to remedy the situation. I have neither a straight romance or a clearly defined romantic suspense. The problem?
Unbelievable motivation. My bad guy (in this case a ‘bad’ woman) behaves badly but her motivations are weak and not believable. In my re-writing, I’ve taken out the scenes from her POV in an effort to add in more scenes from the hero and heroine’s POV. I’m also working on making the character’s attitudes and dialog consistently unsavory throughout the novel, instead of in just one huge scene toward the end. I certainly don’t have it all figured out and it is a painful process. But I know I will come out on the other side a better writer with a stronger story. I’m also grateful for my editor who pointed out this gaping hole and is helping me improve my manuscript.
For more information about villains and what not to do, Anne Marble wrote this very helpful post called ‘How Not to Create a Villain’ at Writing World. Click here to see what she has to say.
Villains are, in fact, secondary characters and must take a back seat to the hero and heroine in a romance novel. But so often when I read contemporary romance, the secondary character becomes a huge hit with readers in a debut novel and earns a starring role in the author’s next venture. Here are two interesting posts on that topic:
- Reese Ryan, debut author, talks about the primary purpose of secondary characters http://romanceuniversity.org/2013/07/24/the-primary-purpose-of-secondary-characters-by-reese-ryan/
- Lisa Kleypas talks about recurrent roles of secondary characters http://www.lisakleypas.com/bookhoppers.asp
I thought Lisa’s post was very fun because she mentions the fictional characters that her fans talk about the most and is a reformed bad boy who later becomes a hero. First of all, don’t you dream of becoming the multi-published author who gets repeated requests for more information about a fictional character?? Be still my heart. Secondly, what about the reformed bad boy who becomes the star of the show? I LOVE that.
Let’s discuss: do you have a favorite fictional bad boy who is reformed into the hero?
