Our guest today is an award-winning screenwriter; his first feature film was To End All Wars. He is also the best-selling author of the Chronicles of the Nephilim series and a new series, Chronicles of the Watchers.
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The post How to Write Compelling Villains with Brian Godawa appeared first on Christian Publishing Show.
101 Best Websites for Writers
I’ve thought about this topic many times. As I shape my manuscript, I’m always asking myself, “How much is too much? Will this trigger trauma memories in the reader? Will the reader be offended?” Writing nonfiction, it’s imperative to tell the truth. But, I don’t think the reader needs to know all of the truth–we can trust them to fill in the missing parts. In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom, and co-authors John and Elizabeth Sherrill, tell of the horrors experienced at Nazi death camps. The scenes are deftly told in a way that we know the women were being raped, but without the gory details. Surely the language directed at the prisoners was not congenial, but there’s no profanity in the book (that I recall). There are ways, I think, to get the idea across to the point that the reader can automatically fill in the blanks–no offense is made, and none is taken, because the writer is not normalizing wrongful acts, or, in effect, desensitizing the reader’s conscience by painting graphic pictures in their mind. We’re treading a fine line, but that’s where craft comes in.