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    13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook: 13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain
    13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook: 13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain
    13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook: 13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook: 13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain

    By Sacha Black

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    About this ebook

    Sacha Black's book 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain showed writers how to create their ultimate villain in an easy and humorous, step-by-step guide.

    This workbook puts those lessons to use by building on each chapter in 13 Steps To Evil and guiding you through the development of your indisputable bad guy. It's time to get to the core of your villain and supersize that evil.

    Inside the workbook you'll find hundreds of thought provoking questions, exercises and creativity boosting prompts. This resource will help you:

    • Choose the perfect villain traits
    • Create sinister character histories and motives
    • Avoid pesky clichés
    • Design conflict and tension that grips your reader
    • Build your market knowledge so you create a villain that sells

    Craft your characters through easy to digest exercises that empower you to conquer your villain for life.

    Read the 13 Steps To Evil Workbook today and start creating kick-ass bad guys.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSacha Black
    Release dateSep 20, 2017
    ISBN9781386550600
    13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook: 13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain
    Author

    Sacha Black

    Sacha Black has five obsessions; words, expensive shoes, conspiracy theories, self-improvement, and breaking the rules. She also has the mind of a perpetual sixteen-year-old, only with slightly less drama and slightly more bills. Sacha writes books about people with magical powers and other books about the art of writing. She lives in Hertfordshire, England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. When she’s not writing, she can be found laughing inappropriately loud, blogging, sniffing musty old books, fangirling film and TV soundtracks, or thinking up new ways to break the rules.

    Read more from Sacha Black

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      Book preview

      13 Steps To Evil - How To Craft A Superbad Villain Workbook - Sacha Black

      Step 1 The Basics Of Villainy

      Why Writers Fudge Up Their Villains

      Before we develop a villain, we need to understand why so many writers get them wrong.

      Villains are like newborn infants. So much glorious potential. Until we writers get our grubby mitts on them and balls it up. With the careless flick of a pen, we can turn a finely sculpted baby villain into a cringe-worthy cliché because we don’t make him bad enough, or we create something so heinously evil it’s unrealistic.

      While researching for the book, writers told me all kinds of problems they encountered while creating their villains. From getting the dialogue right and avoiding clichés, to knowing how evil to make a villain, to how to reveal her motives without using blatant exposition.

      But behind all these issues are two basic barriers that are the Achilles in every writer’s villainous heel:

      1. Depending on the point of view (POV) the book’s written in, the villain is usually seen through the eyes of your hero.

      A solitary POV gives you a page-limited amount of time to show your villain’s best, most authentic, and devilishly evil side. Page-limited to the point it makes it eye-wateringly difficult to convey her backstory effectively without information dumping. You have to be better, clearer, more tactical, and more concise with your words to create superbad villains.

      2. Writers are hero worshippers.

      We love our heroes and protagonists more than our spouses. And as a result, we spend shameful amounts of time honing our protagonist’s muscular heroics into shape. But that relegates our villain (the plot-driving conflict-creator) to the corner of our book, complete with a nobody-loves-you-anyway hat. In other words, writers don’t pay enough attention to their villain.

      When a new born arrives onto this planet most parents are concerned with what gender the tiny homunculus is. While gender is less pressing for a villain, establishing what kind of bad guy they are is important. Because ‘villain’ doesn’t always mean raging warlord with a beard, a 10,000-strong army and a penchant for wands. In fact, villain, doesn’t always mean villain. Sometimes it’s an antagonist. To confuse things more, sometimes the hero isn’t the protagonist either.

      Let’s unravel this with an example. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is a villain, but he is also the protagonist. That’s because the story is about him, and what he did. But the hero of the story is Clarice Starling, an FBI agent trying to solve the crimes of another serial killer. In Gone Girl, there are two protagonists: a couple, one of whom turns out to be the

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