What sort of Bear lives in a cottage
with a wing chair?
In working with my coach yesterday, I discovered that my villain character may be a sociopath. That was not what I wanted to write about, but now I know how she was able to do the things she caused to happen without feeling any guilt. She is in denial of her own issues, of her dogmatic belief in being righteous about what other people should be doing.
That fuels a lot of what she does, and it has gotten her where she is. The reason she is hiding out where she is in the persona that she wears has to do with her values. Now I am thinking about what has to happen to a person, not to mention a fairy godmother, to make her shift into that twisted, manipulative being who may be beyond redemption. I don’t like to think about writing a character who is beyond redemption.
Yesterday as I typed in her voice, I got a sense of what goes through her mind, and why she believes that her advice does not make her culpable for what the advisee does. This is definitely not good for a fairy godmother character, even if she is an antagonistic force. I do know how she has her ideas about what is right and wrong, and her ideas are different from mine.
Somewhere along the line, the issues of many of my characters in this opus deal with abandonment. I always write about whatever is going on with me, and in this case, abandonment fits. I have not been abandoned, as such, but I am now living in the empty nest.
I am feeling somewhat abandoned, but for me, it’s a way to recreate my life. I do miss my daughter, but she is out in the desert of Arizona doing her thing, and she is doing well. I am proud of her. I hope that I am not hiding out here, trying to make other people do “right.”
In the meantime, Maven and I need to work on finding the paths for the others who have fallen under the spell of this person. I plan to find the answers to my own abandonment issues by writing this book. Hopefully, I’ll have some insight into the character’s sociopathic thoughts without going there myself.
I very much enjoyed reading your blog Charlotte. I appreciated you sharing your insights into your writing process.
Thank you for dropping by, Carol. I ‘ll take all the encouragement I can get!
Great article. Check out the book Without Conscience by Robert Hare, PhD, to get an understanding of these types of people. They are much more common in society than we’d like to believe. I have several in my book as well.
Thanks for the suggestion. the more I write, the more i need to understand psychology and why people do things…at least, why OTHER people do the things they do.