YOUR INNER VILLAIN: Guest Post by Priscilla Paton

PRISCILLA PATON: Your Inner Villain

Forget about your inner hero, inner child, inner cupcake, inner hedgehog. It’s all about the Inner Villain.

In my next Twin Cities Mystery, When The House Burns, a young man is on fire to release his inner villain. His boss builds him up only to cut him down. His coworkers side-eye him. A woman he desires treats him like a naughty puppy. Clever, with a tony British accent, he could easily slip into the villain role.

Many of us hide an inner villain—don’t confuse inner villains with inner demons that drag you down. Inner demons are red, boiled, spiky, and naked. Inner Villains have great wardrobes. The vehicles they drive have pick-up and class. They never eat microwaved leftovers. They know what and who to step on to climb to the top. The IRS doesn’t know they exist; there’ll be no Al-Caponing them. They can carry off wearing a hat. No one ever asks their age—no one even thinks about their age.

The portal to inner villainy opened for me during chats—conspiratorial asides, really—with professional women. (All women are professional at something, down to slipping on shoes without bending over.) These women were not lonely, unfilled, or unsuccessful, yet they wanted a villain that looked like them, a reverse role model of duplicitous achievement. A Latinx woman wanted a Latinx villain, in heels, who wouldn’t let certain colleagues, relatives, or exes bring her down, who transcended being a “token” anything. In another chit-chat among friends, a white woman, without me mentioning inner anything, detailed a character and a plot. With three sips of martini and a backlog of resentments as inspiration, she leaned in to confide about a “fictional” woman. This underrated woman is expected never to draw attention to herself, to be accommodating and tireless. She begins to scheme against clueless men and rival she-wolves who take for granted that she’ll shoulder the burden. These blind souls do not realize that she has x-ray vision of their vulnerabilities. People start to notice and admire her while remaining ignorant of her cunning. The essence of her villainy will be that her antagonists appear to create their own downfall. If they should suffer in idiotic fashion, so be it. They brought it on themselves. And a little meanness is like a dash of cayenne—just enough to kick up the fun.

I admit, inner villainy has an element of feminist revenge fantasy, or to include my male bad-guy-wanna-be, the underdog scrapping to be top dog—let the sexy scars show the victor. 

My Twin Cities Mysteries detectives, Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger, shouldn’t house inner villains because they’re the good guys. Then again, lesbian Deb endures with little patience micro and macro-aggressions, and straight Erik as a whistle-blowing homicide detective makes enemies everywhere. The two constantly face injustice, criminals ready to kill, and procedural snafus. The temptation is great to take shortcuts and go rogue. Deb and Erik do switch directions and go off grid in surprising ways. Shortcuts, though, may be a quick path to ruin, and going rogue could mean entering the redzone where no reason can halt aggression. Remember, inner demons are red.

Beware when the inner villain absorbs the inner demons, which puts real viciousness out in the world. Inner demons become desperate with addiction, distrust, hate, and rage. Active hostility eats its way out to wreak havoc among friends and foes. Rafe, the character on the verge of revenge in When The House Burns, risks that by freeing his inner villain he triggers violence in himself and the greater evil of his enemies. In conniving to reach his dreams, he could destroy them and put the woman he wants in the path of a murderer.

I tried out “embrace your inner villain” on a friend who is an advocate for victims of domestic abuse and violence. Taken aback, she found the idea confusing and not funny. She encounters genuine wrongdoers whose damage ruins and sometimes ends lives. There are no quick fixes, no shortcuts, in finding safety and justice for the victims and helping them become independent survivors. The meanness aimed at them erodes self-esteem and hope. (Much meanness, including my own, has a nastier kick than a dash of cayenne.) My advocate-friend had just endured a bad day with the system and needed reassurance about staying the course. Then, maybe because she experiences much frustration when the right actions fail to yield the right results, she repeated, “so, an inner villain,” and the corner of her mouth tweaked.

What if the inner villain could collaborate with the inner hero, the trickster and the champion coming together in a Loki-Thor partnership? (FYI, there’s a bromance between the actors who play Loki and Thor in recent films, Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth.) That’s the stuff of stories, the challenging engagement of inner conflicts with external ones. Though meanness and scheming can backfire, I’m not ready to evict my inner villain because she’s onto something. She protects a person from the boredom of routine, from the entrapment of always being a people pleaser, from being a stepping stone for others but never yourself.

If you want a final takeaway, it's this: dress like your inner villain.

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Priscilla Paton writes mysteries set in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Priscilla grew up on a dairy farm in Maine. She received a B.A. from Bowdoin College, a Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston College, was a college professor and taught in Kansas, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Minnesota. She has previously published a children’s book, Howard and the Sitter Surprise, and a book on Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth, Abandoned New England. She married into the Midwest and lives with her husband in Northfield, Minnesota. When not writing, she participates in community advocacy and literacy programs, takes photos of birds, and contemplates (fictional) murder.

CHARACTER GLIMPSES: Guest Post by Priscilla Paton

Priscilla Paton:

CHARACTER GLIMPSES 

I was stranded in the Albany, New York, Airport when a beast confronted me, a wondrously large beast. One hundred pounds plus of black-and-white Newfoundland, otherwise known as a Landseer because this bi-colored dog was a favorite subject of Queen Victoria’s favorite painter, Edwin Landseer. Landseer’s “Lion” of 1824 portrays a friendly, beautiful black-and-white dog, and the one facing me had eyes that even in awful airport lighting were, to use a Victorian word, lambent. I believe her name was Florence, as in Florence Nightingale, a working dog whose work was therapy. My blood pressure dropped twenty points and I knew she had to appear in my next mystery. 

Whether canine or human, my characters can be inspired by a glimpse, an impression. A teenage girl whose haircut recalls Joan of Arc. A Black student pianist who laughed in shock when a master teacher commanded him to play against the muscle memory of a year to improve in under thirty seconds. The uplifting haircut and downturned mouth of a seventy-year-old woman. Such glimpses beget a fictional character (and my characters are fictional because it’s confining, not to mention of questionable judgment, to adhere to a real person). But the full identity has yet to evolve, and the big question has yet to be answered—how might that character be caught up in a murder? 

A character needs wardrobe, makeup, personality. Most of all a character needs an arc with a starting point, a crisis, and a resolution. You know this from The Sopranos, when Christopher is stymied by his screenplay and his direction in life because he can’t find the effing arc. 

When that effing arc eludes me, I turn to experts. Elizabeth George’s book Write Away demonstrates how she achieved depth-of-character in her Inspector Lynley series. David Corbett’s The Art of Character examines how desire moves a character through a story. Creating characters becomes tough when I have to think—and feel—the way through their worst moment and greatest pain. 

It is an ongoing challenge for writers to appropriately create characters of different social classes, races, genders, or nationalities. But it’s inevitable because communities and families (including my own) are increasingly diverse. Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward provides a starting point, and writers can consult with sensitivity and diversity readers. Listening to other voices is required, and traditional research helps. To prepare for writing Should Grace Fail, which deals with substance abuse, I read memoirs by the children of addicts and was stunned by their suffering and anger. 

Then there are characters who jump at you out of nowhere, leap full grown into your mind like Athena in the head of Zeus. My recurring detectives arrived that way. True, my initial concept of clever reserved Erik Jansson had him older and wiser; then I realized I wanted him to reach that point after multiple adventures, not begin there. He underwent a Benjamin Button reversion to become a more tender age. Erik remained reserved, so I needed someone to shake him up. That’s when Detective Deb Metzger barged in from another storyline I was considering to irk him and seize half the action for herself. Create characters and you’ll have to deal with relationships. Erik and Deb are stuck to each other like gum to a shoe, and it’s on me to see that they grow (or something) as individuals and as partners.

A final note on that airport encounter. I might have given a Newfie a one-sentence cameo in Should Grace Fail except for this: her handler, scarcely bigger than his dog, told me what she meant to PTSD vets and to traumatized children. (Another Landseer painting, Saved, depicts a dog that appears to pray over the child he rescued.) What struck me as the handler talked was that Florence meant everything to him. She had altered one life for the better—his. That was worth developing. 

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Priscilla Paton writes the Twin Cities Mystery series, set in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area. The first in the series, Where Privacy Dies, was a 2018 Forward Indies Finalist, and the next, Should Grace Fail, comes out in December 2020. Priscilla grew up on a dairy farm in Maine, a state of woods, lakes, and rivers. She now lives in Minnesota, another state of woods, lakes, and rivers, not far from urban Minneapolis and St. Paul. She received a B.A. from Bowdoin College, a Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston College, and was a college professor. She has previously published a children’s book, Howard and the Sitter Surprise, and a book on Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth, Abandoned New England. She participates in community advocacy and literacy programs, takes photos of birds, and contemplates (fictional) murder.