History That Never Was

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Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

“How to Create Superheroes and Villains to Match” was high on my list of interests, since I write some superhero fiction and often have the most trouble sorting out the villains. The panelists, all superhero and supervillain fiction authors, had a lot of great advice on both heroes and villains. Many of my notes were focused on the villain side of things, like what drives a person to villainhood and the idea of likeable vs. compelling villains. They also had some good notes about making superheroes human (or thinking of them as a person first, if they aren’t human), including occasional selfishness, having others they can depend on, and remembering that they don’t always want the job (which also applies to villains). Finally, they mentioned that for character development, you could ask “What do they want?” for a villain character, but ask “Why do they do it?” for a hero character.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can watch the video on YouTube. It is a longer one, running about 1 hour and 32 minutes.

Tags: advice, conference, genre, online, panel, superheroes, supervillains, writehive

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, November 18th, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.