When the Villain is a Husband

One of the most important things about creating believable fictional characters is to avoid making them one-dimensional. Real people aren’t simple, and you never want story people who are either all good or all bad. This comes up a lot at our writers’ critique group meetings.

Recently one woman was going on and on about how there’s nothing she hates worse than some mustache twirling villain that’s just one hundred percent bad. I reminded her that she had no trouble accepting the cheating spouse in my novel who is also stupid, vain, and terrible in bed.

“Oh that’s different,” she says. “That was a husband.”

Disclaimer: The quotations reported in this blog reflect the opinions of those who said them. (Which is why they’re anonymous.) They do not necessarily reflect the view of the blog writer, who is at this writing happily married, to a man who–it’s probably best–doesn’t read this blog anyway.