Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Today's Insecure Writer's Support Group question reminds me why writing from unused perspectives can freshen up a story.

Today is the first Wednesday in March of 2019, and that also makes it Insecure Writer's Support Group day. This is a blog fest that happens once a month (and has been a recurring event for many years now). Here's a link to their official BLOG that explains all about it. If you sign up, you'll get an opportunity to really connect with other writers out there.

March 6 Question: Whose perspective do you like to write from best, the hero (protagonist) or the villain (antagonist)? And why?

This is a real thinker. Historically, I've written a lot from the perspective of various protagonists because it seemed like the thing I was most comfortable in doing. Many of the books I read (while growing up) seemed to have this kind of structure to them. You got introduced to the hero, then the hero was presented with an opportunity of some kind, or a conflict of some kind, and you followed them along on their journey. Because it was so prevalent in fiction, I absorbed this as a means to tell my own story, and it's very straight forward.

But now that I'm older, and I've read books by George R.R. Martin, Thomas Harris, James S.A. Corey, and Richard K. Morgan (just to name a few), I've realized the power of telling a story from the anti-hero and antagonist point of view (or at least devoting as many chapters to their perspective as I do to the hero's perspective). The reason? It seems silly to me to insist on villains being all good or all evil, even though that's the diet of fiction I was pretty much raised on. People are only villains when they have motivations that are the opposite of whomever's point of view you are looking through to understand them. Increasingly, I find more value in discovering this, and a lot of the way I've been doing it (in some short stories I've written) is through the antagonist's perspective. 

How a writer chooses to tell a story is just as important as the events of the story that take place. In other words, it's just as important as the plot. And by selecting different points of view than the traditional hero-first perspective, a writer can even retread tired old stories because this new point of view makes them all fresh again. So really, it's just another trick a writer can use to hone their craft.

8 comments:

  1. Writing as the villain can be fun and it helps to flesh out him or her.

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  2. Good point about why the villain is perceived as bad. They think they are doing good though, even if it opposes the hero.

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  3. So true. It's good to shake things up. And this makes me think of the movies that have done this, like Maleficent. Definitely changed the idea of that story.

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  4. Though I write heroes or antagonists as the story requires, I do enjoy writing the anti-heroes. They often seem like they're having the most fun, but that probably says more about me than anything else. :)

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  5. Thomas Harris tells brilliant stories. I like his books much better than the movies. I agree with Alex, excellent point on what really doesn't make a villain. We all have our motives from our backgrounds and many times these motives don't translate well to others. Happy IWSG Day :)

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  6. I don't know. I don't have a lot of use for the way, say, Martin tells a story. It all seems rather gratuitous and a form of wish-fulfillment.

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  7. I was struck by the idea you had about 'rewriting' old stories by writing through the antagonist's POV. I think this is why few 'new' stories are written from that view point, because it would give too much of the story away, a story we don't know yet. But to rewrite a story, that is part of the general culture, from the antagonist's POC gives it a freshness we aren't expecting. "Wicked" is the one that comes to mind first. Thanks.

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  8. The closest I've come to writing from the bad guys' viewpoints was in The Compass Master, when the viewpoint changed among several characters. I really enjoyed such switching around, and of course the baddies thought what they were doing was logical and even good.

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