There’s something in every story where you need to have heroes and villains. You’ve got the good fight and you’ve got the bad fight. Or at least, that’s the way it so often seems to me. You’re cheering on the side of the hero and willing for the villain to crumble down. Or occasionally, when you get a well rounded villain you find yourself sympathetic to their cause, you want them to win and the lines between good and evil become blurred. If those lines were even there before.
In writing our story, we both have our heroes and our villains that live in our head and cause us trouble. Our villains … well, some of the time we have difficulty looking at them as villains. Not because they’ve suddenly become good and are skipping through fields picking daisies and such. But because we’ve tapped into them, we’ve found that point where the switch was flicked and they could no longer do what they should be doing. There’s been a point and a reason and suddenly, suddenly we find ourselves going “awwww, that’s tragic”.
Of course, it doesn’t excuse what they do in the course of the story. But it helps to explain just why they’ve turned out the way they have. And that’s the thing with heroes and villains, they’re not just born. They don’t just pop into your head and say “hi I’m a villain” or well, alright they do. Usually that’s exactly what it is, you get this idea of them … they aren’t good people, but you know that there’s a reason why they aren’t. After all, no one is specifically born evil, and it’s the same with characters. They go down paths, they make their choices, they do all of these things until eventually they come so far from the sweet little innocent that they were once upon a time.
But isn’t that the joy of writing? To take a character and to see it flourish. Sometimes those heroes that you write, their lines are blurred. Some of our heroes could, arguably, be called villains. They know what needs to be done to get to point B and are willing to do whatever is necessary to get there. They’re not afraid to get their hands dirty, because sure it might be morally questionable … but the end result is worth it. In their eyes at least.
And that’s really what we love, watching this … brain child of ours start out, where they’re tottering along and being cute and innocent, before two days later they’ve commanded our brains and trying to rule the world. And sometimes, sometimes it really is scary what our brains come up with and the way they take a turn one way or the other, but that’s the price of writing and one we’re only too happy to pay!
Our week has been a little bit hit and miss with one thing and another for the both of us. But, between those times we’ve been able to do a bit of writing, a bit of development and a bit of ‘oh my god would you believe what x character has done now?!’ or ‘what do you think if x character did that’. Or more commonly ‘x character is telling me to tell you this’. These are our heroes and our villains, and sometimes … sometimes I’m really at a loss to know who the heroes are and who the villains are!
~ Clara
Charlotte and Clara 