Bullies, Bastards And Bitches: How To Write The Bad Guys Of Fiction

This book did not live up to my expectations. I read several good reviews and hoped that it would give me a solid foundation for creating the bad guys I need in my fiction. But I found the exploration of badness and evil to be shallow and repetitive. It was not much more than I got out of a few chapters in a more general book about character development. About halfway through the book, I started skimming and scanning the bullet lists. The author did present valid points, I just wish they had gone deeper. One point that did make an impression was the idea that the antagonist does not have to be a person. It can be a force or natural law. Another was a good list of types of antagonist that included several non-obvious character types.

[Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches] by [[Jessica Morrell]] As a fantasy author, I learned a lot about writing villains. I was in the middle of writing my sequel, "My Undead Mother-in-law" and it ended up much better (according to early readers; it's not out until July 2017).

Besides villains, Ms. Morrell also covers dark heroes, anti-heroes, sympathetic villains, likable bad guys, neutral characters and truly wicked ones. She has a chapter on psychopaths and sociopaths, too, providing definitions and examples of each. She goes further, giving resources the reader can pursue to understand the psychology of criminals.

Indeed, the many examples she cites of heroes, lovable bad guys, and villains from contemporary culture, fiction, and movies, show more are probably the best feature of the book. I recommend this book for anyone interested in writing or learning to write. show less