It’s Mad May, ladies and gentlemen, and that means this blog is all about the antagonists. Those evil characters that are often necessary to the plot of our books. Today, I welcome Becky Lower to my blog, and she’s talking about how one comes up with the idea to use unpleasant characters, and then how one formulates the personality that makes such people so truly horrendous.
Welcome, Becky!
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When I got the idea for a novel using The Pony Express as a backdrop, I knew I wanted to have a girl posing as one of the wiry riders on the trail. But in order for her subterfuge to be believable, she had to have a really compelling reason to adopt such an elaborate cover story. The answer, of course, was her evil Uncle Jack.
I’m not used to writing mean characters. I typically write romances, about two characters who meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. At least, that’s the plan. But sometimes, my characters tell me what to do. In the case of Samantha (aka. Sam), her uncle, with whom she’d lived for two years, along with her aunt, had been abusive to her aunt, and kept leering at Samantha. When her aunt died, Samantha realized her last line of defense against Uncle Jack was gone. Time to escape.
The rest of the story involves Samantha hiding out from Uncle Jack, who is in hot pursuit. He wants her for himself before he sells her to the local bordello. I had no problem writing her fear. That was palpable. What I did struggle with was him and what had happened in his life to make him so vile. I thought of every wicked man I’d ever known and mashed them all together into Uncle Jack. There was no redeeming the man. He was nasty until the very end of the book.
While writing evil characters is not something I do every day, I like stretching my creativity, and hope I’ve created a believable character. Because, unfortunately, evil does lurk around every corner, and I may need to create another similar character in my next book.
Buy Link: http://amzn.to/1vZON5F
Author Bio:
Amazon best-selling author Becky Lower has traveled the country looking for great settings for her novels. She loves to write about two people finding each other and falling in love, amid the backdrop of a great setting, be it on a covered wagon headed west or in present day small town America. Historical and contemporary romances are her specialty. Becky is a PAN member of RWA and is a member of the Historic and Contemporary RWA chapters. She has a degree in English and Journalism from Bowling Green State University, and lives in an eclectic college town in Ohio with her puppy-mill rescue dog, Mary. She loves to hear from her readers at beckylowerauthor@gmail.com. Visit her website at www.beckylowerauthor.com
Social Media Links:
Website: www.beckylowerauthor.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/becky.lower
Twitter: http://twitter.com@BeckyLower1
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/authorbeckyl/
Blog: http://beckylowerauthor.blogspot.com
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6159227.Becky_Lower
Amazon page: http://amzn.to/1FOy3Sd
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Be sure to check back. All month long, there will be guest authors, each featuring those characters we love to hate!
Thank you, Tami, for hosting me today. This post was a lot of fun to write.
Thanks, Tami, for letting us know a little more about Becky. Best of luck to you both.
Hi Becky – can’t wait to read Expressly Yours, Samantha. The Pony Express has always been a favorite topic of mine when writing and researching historicals and you always bring the setting to such life in The Cotillion series. Did you struggle with wanting to give Jack some redeeming quality to make him – even in the tiniest ways – sympathetic? You say he’s vile to the end so maybe it wasn’t a struggle at all! But I’m curious because I was once told even the baddest villain has some quality that will make people understand him, if not necessarily like him.