#writing breakthrough

okay so try to picture this: you're deep in your manuscript, probably three coffees past reasonable human consumption, and you're writing this villain monologue. you know the one, where they explain their master plan and you as the author get to flex your "look how evil and wrong they are" muscles.

except.

except they start making points.

good points.

points that have you staring at your screen like "wait… are they… are they RIGHT?"

this happened to me last month and i'm still recovering. my villain, let's call her vera because i'm not ready to say her real name out loud yet... was supposed to be this corrupt politician type who wanted to tear down the magical council system in my fantasy world. classic power-hungry antagonist, right? wrong. (i promise you the plot is good, it sounds basic, but its good.)

turns out the magical council system i'd built was actually a bureaucratic nightmare that perpetuated class inequality and suppressed innovation. vera wasn't power-hungry, she was FRUSTRATED. she'd tried working within the system for decades and watched it fail people over and over again.

and suddenly i'm sitting there at 1am realizing my protagonist has been defending a broken system this entire time just because it's "traditional."

soooo the thing nobody tells you about writing morally complex villains is that sometimes you accidentally write someone who's more ethically consistent than your hero. and that's when the real work begins.

because now you have options:

option one: rewrite vera to be more obviously wrong. add some puppy-kicking or unnecessary cruelty. make her methods so extreme that her valid points get overshadowed. (this is the coward's way out and also boring)

option two: lean into it. let vera be right about the problems even if her solutions are questionable. make your protagonist grapple with the fact that the world they're trying to save actually sucks for a lot of people.

option three: the galaxy brain move, realize that vera isn't actually your villain. she's your protagonist's wake-up call. maybe the real antagonist is the system itself, and both your protag and vera are just people trying to navigate it.

i went with option three and it changed everything. suddenly my story wasn't about good vs evil, it was about different approaches to change. my protagonist had to evolve from "defender of the status quo" to "person who recognizes that sometimes revolution is necessary."

but here's what really broke my brain: i started agreeing with vera more than my protagonist. like, significantly more. to the point where i had to step back and ask myself if i'd accidentally written the wrong person as my main character.

(spoiler alert: i had)

the weirdest part? this made my story SO much better. because when your villain has legitimate grievances, your protagonist can't just sword-fight their way to victory. they have to actually engage with the problems. they have to grow. they have to earn their hero status instead of just being born into it.

so if you find yourself nodding along to your villain's speech, don't panic. you might have just accidentally written a story with actual moral complexity.

just maybe don't tell your beta readers you're team villain until after they finish reading.

trust me on this one.

twenty-one years of never feeling good enough. and i finally do. i finally do. ive always been good enough with my writing. i started when i was 9 and i turn 30 in july.

the part of me that suffocated me, that killed my creativity...... it's now the one suffocating. it scrambled, sirens went off, there was panic, uncertainty, but now there's peace. there's finally peace.

and ive been crying for a while, but it's not sadness. it's relief. catharsis. it's healing.

i was just so desperate for approval. whose approval? i guess my own? the approval of my readers? of imaginary people who aren't real? the future readers? i dont know if i have an answer. maybe all of them.

ive always been so terrified of the question "who am i without this? who am i without perfection?" but i guess it's time to find out. but it's no longer scary. it's freeing

i’ve only ever been someone who loved so deeply, who cared so fiercely about my craft, that ive held myself to impossible standards, hoping, praying, that reaching them would finally quiet the voice that said, “you’re not good enough.” i do have to thank it, though. it served its purpose but. time to move on.

its like...ive come home ive hated my writing for so long absolutely hated it never felt good enough no matter what i did it truly destroyed me

21 years of never feeling good enough, of never feeling like my writing mattered, of wanting to quit and never write again. two fucking decades of this. pretty much my entire life. it has held me back so much what ive loved became a chore the joy slowly ebbed away that wasn’t fair. that hurt. that almost broke me.

like the armour is falling off. the chains are breaking. and its weird and scary and intense and overwhelming. my entire identity is built around this

my brain is gently nudging me like "so can we feel this about everything?" and im like "hold up. one breakthrough at a time." lmfao

the difficulty was largely in that my original idea was mostly just an amalgamation of half-baked ideas ripped from other media and turned into an interestingly-paced story, and there wasn't really that much of a plot, since i focused largely on character.

This is the most I have written in one go in FUCKING YEARS. It’s been so long since something flowed like this, where I was willing to stay up all night because I didn’t want to stop writing. I’d forgotten how good that feels.

I really, really hope this continues, at least enough that when I do hit a hard spot, I feel like I actually have something that might be worth the effort of finishing.

I may need someone to read through it at some point and tell me it’s not horrible and totally OOC, but I’m okay with it at the moment. I feel like stuff may be happening too fast, and maybe the characters aren’t quite in character, but it’s okay. It feels like it can actually go somewhere. My attempts at fic have never felt like that before.

I can do this.