Guest Post: M.R. Cornelius, author of H10N1 and The Ups and Downs of Being Dead

by SofiaWren May 30, 2014

Here! Here! This week MR Cornelius, speculative fiction author of The Ups and Downs of Being Dead, and (a personal favorite of mine) H10N1.

Here’s what Cornelius has to say about Villains and her writing:

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was still fairly young. Maybe it was all the stories I read about big, bad wolves, wicked witches, sly foxes, and ugly trolls. The farmer’s wife hacking off mouse tails with a carving knife? Yeah!

As I grew older, it became abundantly clear that no story is worth its salt without a villain. The tough part is creating an antagonist that’s unique, one-of-a-kind. But that is no small feat. Just like Christopher Booker pointed out in his book The Seven Basic Plots, it has probably been done before.

So how do I make a ‘bad guy’ good reading?

I came across this great anecdote on John Sandford’s website, where he explains how he came up with the antagonist for his novel Eyes of Prey.

So you’re sitting around in the office, feet on the desk, throwing wadded-up pieces of paper at a waste-basket, and you’re thinking, all right, kills a woman, kills a woman. Let’s see, can’t cut her throat, did that in the first novel; she can’t be crippled, did that in the first novel. No violent rape, did that in the second one… cut her nose off?

No, not her nose. It’s gotta be tragic, but a nose, handled just a little wrong, could be seen as slightly comical. A finger? Well, finger amputation could be ugly, but it’s not really horrible, is it? Lots of people lose fingers and lead normal lives. And even good guys cut off people’s fingers — see Denzel Washington’s character in Man on Fire.

Ears? Too Van Gogh. Maybe even too artsy, somehow — didn’t one of the Getty kids get an ear cut off? Getty, as in art museum?

How about gouging out the eyes?

Okay, that’s bad. But why would he do it? What would be his motivation? (Throw some more paper balls in the waste basket.)

And how would he keep the eyes for trophies? In jars? That’s icky. They’d be floating around in there like pickled eggs in a redneck bar; so maybe not eyes. Maybe pull out fingernails? No, no, no. Leave that for the Gestapo novels.

Back to eyes.

How about… how about if he cut off their eyelids so they’d have to see themselves die, couldn’t close their eyes? Then he’d have the eyelids left over, maybe Davenport could find an eyelid under a couch…

Wait a minute! What if he used the eyelids as trophies? You know, strung them up somehow? Hung them from the ceiling, so they’d be floating around like little butterflies…

[Sound of frantic typing.]

Like Sandford says, with each new book, the challenge to come up with bigger, badder people gets tough. I’ve broadened my villain base considerably. Cruelty and malice aren’t limited to men. Remember Annie Wilkes swinging that sledge hammer in Stephen King’s Misery? Or Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who showed absolutely no remorse after Billy committed suicide?

And of course, the threat may not even come from another human. How about the shark in Jaws? Cujo? King Kong? In some instances, the antagonist is a disease, a war, the weather, the sea. Sometimes there’s more than one villain in a story. I had a flu pandemic, various marauders and looters, and even a pack of dogs in my novel H10 N1.

So here is my solution. I have made the task of developing unique villains easier by creating a series of giant spinning wheels, like they use on the Wheel of Fortune. I have one for the villain, another for the weapon, and a third for cause of death. My next book is about an agoraphobic cabana boy who uses soap on a rope to cause asphyxiation.

(Oh, dear. I probably shouldn’t have told you the ending.)

BIO:

After 15 years as a cafeteria manager in an elementary school, M. R. Cornelius turned in her apron and non-skid shoes for a robe and slippers. She now writes full-time at home, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Amazon:

Ups and Downs of Being Dead

http://amzn.to/LvCEf7 (US)

http://amzn.to/O2Adjk (UK)

H10 N1

http://amzn.to/urF61L (US)

http://amzn.to/xLIMsJ (UK)