Finding Monsters

 

Monsters lead such IN-teresting lives.

I've been working on Book 3 of the Twins of Bellesfées, and I'm about ten chapters in.

. I know the theme, and I know what each of the characters does to accomplish the initial plot to convey the theme, but one thing it lacked was a villain.

Although that's not entirely true.

The problem was, the villain was society itself: the callousness of the industrial revolution toward children and the cruelty of France's laws concerning women's rights.

Joss Whedon excelled at turning social flaws into concrete monsters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A child is beaten by his coach; the child creates an avatar of physical brutality. A mean cheerleader becomes a mean sorceress. A mom wants to re-live her youth through her daughter's accomplishments, so she literally swaps places with the daughter.

In the early days of bad science fiction films, aliens represented social fears like radiation, communist invasion, and juvenile delinquency. Later, George Romero had fun with zombies representing mindless consumerism, The Walking Dead used zombies to represent a pandemical disease, while Simon Pegg used zombies to illustrate the clueless aimlessness of the 21st century.

Wouldn't it be nice if all our social flaws could be defeated within a fixed time slot, and no commercials?

In Book 1 of the Bellesfées series, I embodied rape in the villain shapeshifter, and political ambition in an evil count who manipulated souls. In Book 2, religious hypocrisy and sexual immorality are represented by the king, while the debilitating effect of self-doubt and self-denigration are reflected in the vampire.

I wrote ten chapters of Book 3 before finding my monster. In this case, I was fortunate to find a single villain to be the avatar of both my complaints. But it wasn't an easy find, and now I'm faced with considerable re-writing.

Nevertheless, the writing has to serve the story, and it's a timeless truth that a story isn't a story without some kind of monster to confront.

If you're writing, find your monster. The story comes from that.