Main villain? Not even close.
Recently, I’ve been using weekends to fix up one of my future series. The Elysium Saga has been sitting in a drawer for years and it’s fallen behind in the evolution of Windemere and the handful of characters that jump series. Even worse, the notes off the game makes less sense than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Seriously, I have no idea what I’m talking about in most of the plot outlines.
Total overhaul of characters and plots and origins and overall direction. The original was a scavenger hunt that spanned 4-5 books. The last book didn’t even make sense and seemed to revolve around me wanting to wipe Rodillen off the map. Also, under the new rules of Windemere, victory for the heroes would destroy the world and I still have other stories to tell. It wouldn’t even make sense for the plot to happen, so I’ve been hacking and slashing away at the mess.
This brings me to the main villains . . . yikes. A seductive immortal, a copy of a villain from another series, a hell beast, a possessed priestess, a vampire god, and the son of the vampire god. Well, the immortal is remaining unchanged, but everyone else is either getting promoted or cut. The copied villain is out because she didn’t have a reason for being in the series anyway. Nothing more than a powerful enemy with no real story behind her. I can’t even call her a casualty because she’s in another series. The real casualty here?
The vampire god who used to be the main baddie. He was the chessmaster and the major threat behind Elysium’s peril. His son was a powerful, cunning henchman who I happened to like better as a villain. Still, the way the current plot is going, the goal of the villains doesn’t fit with the vampire god’s personality. He wants to rule and the story is going more for destruction. This means he’s getting killed off a few books earlier and his son is taking the reins of the operation. It changes one of the hero’s storylines pretty harshly, but I figured that out. Probably why this is taking so long and delaying me from getting to the Sin series planning.
So, has anyone else ever done a book or series where the main villain no longer works? So a new one has to rise from the ashes of the old?
Legends of Windemere 
You’re not alone in changing/removing/adding/using them elsewhere Charles – I seem to recall Stephen King once saying that he sometimes needed to stop writing a story and reassess his characters, because something was tugging at the back of his mind that one (or more) of them was not doing their job properly 😀
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Good to know. Never fun to demote a character.
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This, this, and this. I’ve had to completely go and restructure books before, taking some characters out (for now), demoting certain charaters’ importance while increasing others, while completely changing the way the plot falls into place. At first, it was a little depressing, but, ultimately, these sorts of changes are not only needed, but they’re also GREAT. They help the story become better and teaches us the importance of letting things go and embracing other things. Eventually, the story gets to where it needs to be, even if there’s a few casualties along the way.
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Exactly. I have to admit that I’m beyond the depression part here since the character still gets some time in the spotlight. He’s better off than a few that I found notes on and have no idea where they came from or what they do. I have another series that I’m looking at the notes for and there’s a character named ‘Burke’. He’s mentioned in the synopsis, but no idea who or what he really is. All I know is that he’s there and he dies at some point. Poor ‘Burke’. Shows how much of an original idea can be lost before the final product.
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Still not reading these…loving the book, Charles! Wow 😀
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This is for a different series entirely.
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Lol..see I don’t even want to take the risk. But now I will.
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I can’t recall ever changing villains, but I -have- altered their motives a few times. Especially when I wasn’t entirely sure what those motives were.
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That’s kind of how this started. This guy’s motives hit a dead end by the end of the second book. They were core to him, so I couldn’t change it without altering him entirely. These would remove another villain who I liked and had an interesting story. Tangled webs indeed.
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Yes. One of the reasons the two books I’m on the brink of releasing are taking so long I’d because the Real World, which had got a bit dark, got into my writing. My baddie is handsome and power driven, other people are just pawns in his game. I let rip ands howled him as mysogenistic, debauched and totally dissolute. Somehow that ruined the tension. According to my copy editor it also turned the books into something rather grittier than y.a. So I’ve had to cut and rewrite vast chunks, but the book and the character are the better for it. Said baddie is back to being cold and calculating and far more scary than when we followed him through a maiming and torture fest…. Which is strange, in itself.
Cheers
MTM
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Funny that you mention that because the opposite happened with me and the current series. The main villain was supposed to be dark and sinister, but he’s come out oddly benevolent. He’s still evil with a casualness to killing people and using threats on his minions when necessary. But he doesn’t have that aura of pure evil that I was planning on. A lesser villain has that. I guess I’m lucky that I never fully claimed YA status because that lesser one would put me in the same position as you. The main one has become an odd pleasure to write too. Maybe cold and calculating is a better way to go because those villains are more human.
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excellent.
I have only finished one book and only hinted at the villains. Like everything else, I have overcomplicated them in my mind, knowing where they are going but discovering new villains en-route to the ultimate goal and getting side-tracked. My imagination is out of control and I am becoming increasingly frustrated that I can’t get it all down on paper.
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That’s a problem I know far too well. I usually sacrificed a little sleep or free time to get it written down. I’m curious about your first book. If the villains are only hinted at, what are the heroes going up against? Do you mean real villains and the first book had some preliminary baddies?
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sorry, Charles, have to come back to this – baby keeps grabbing the mouse and three year old driving me nuts.
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apologies for previous, both little ones are poorly at present and very needy, bless them! My story has more encounters with ‘monsters’ than real villains. The initial villains turn out to be ‘heroes’ and the later villains have small parts, slowly revealing their evil as the story goes on, the major villains are only hinted at and will become real problems later. It is weird because it wasn’t the book I intended to write. The story that I wanted to tell was set elsewhere with different characters (it will all tie in nicely later), I had been thinking about it since I was little and my world took form. I was writing various pieces of history about one of the islands in my world that had nothing to do with my story initially, Tarkus, Isle of the Mad. As I began to write about the ghastly places such as The Palace of Insanity and Bastion of Barbarity, I wanted to learn more about it and began thinking about back story as to how these places came about, who was this Kalassia, trapped in a mirror at Kalassia’s Keep, How had the Nevermore Tree been planted in the catacombs below the fabled city of Elspar and so much more. As I wrote, I realised it needed more than just these appendices and began writing what is now my first book. However, my imagination has spiralled out of control and the first book (at 115 thousand words) hasn’t even touched on how The Isle of the Mad came to be and though I know where it is going, it keeps asking more and more questions and the new characters have their own exciting histories. I keep wanting to start writing the original books I intended to write but tarkus keeps calling and life is so busy that I rarely get the chance to write more than the occasional appendix, little-lone start book two of the tarkus chronicles or restart my campaign to publish book one, I am even struggling to write a decent synopsis. I admire your ability to manage a family life and write so much, Charles. Best wishes from baldy.
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That’s kind of why Windemere already has 30-40 series/stand alones planned. As I worked on Legends of Windemere, questions came up or foreshadowing for future events happened. Then I had ideas that worked better in another book. I found it was easier to leave some of these ideas as history or foreshadows in the current series in order to avoid straying. This is going to lead to a few ‘Windemere History’ books that explain things like the Great Cataclysm, the Race War, why magic is so common, and where the gods’ Law of Influence came from. When building a world, it’s really tough to create a history and not pursue some of the events.
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It seems we have a similar set of events to capture, familiar concepts within fantasy. So much wonderful mythology to explore!
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Fantasy seems to always have that ‘big war’ and ‘big disaster’ in a world’s history. 🙂
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