I needed a better villain. So I did some brainstorming on my favorite villains … Long John Silver, Voldemort, Darth Vader, Hanibal Lector, Dracula. Aside from the fact that most are male (no comment), most also happen to be CRAZY. I’m not a psychologist, but I do know that crazy is not a preferred diagnosis so I did some google searches into psychological disorders.
Entertainment has overused the multiple personality side of psychological disorders and there’s plenty of sociopaths in the mix as well. So I searched for unusual psychological disorders and found one that fit my villain and my story perfectly. That led me to wonder if this was just good backstory prep or am I cheating? By choosing the disorder and building the character around that am I going backwards? Shouldn’t I be establishing the charcter and then figuring out what kind of crazy they are?
Then I remembered something that I think I need to print out and tape to the wall by my computer: This is my story and I can do whatever I want. Why do I always feel like there are “rules” I need to follow when writing? If I want to work backwards that’s my business.
My villain’s disorder of choice is the Cotard Delusion, where the person believes themselves to be dead. I’m not sticking to any strict medical definition of that disorder, but that one sentence was enough to open up unlimited ideas for this particular character. At the moment I don’t plan to disclose the disorder in the course of the story, it just gives me consistent behavior for this person to follow that may seem illogical to a sane person.
I’ve now run into the problem of my villain being much more interesting (to me) than my protagonist. In the end I think that is a good problem to have because it will force me to spice up that character as well.
HourADayWriter 