Can You Find Your Villain?
Last Sunday I listened to a discussion between two well known women writers, Louise Erdrich and Ann Patchett. It’s always fascinating to get their insights on creating fiction–but this exchange stood out for me. Patchett talked about creating her recent novel THE DUTCH HOUSE, and how she based a particular aspect of the novel on her own life.
FIRST: Here is a very partial summary from The Bibliofile, which tells you that the novel focusses on siblings, Maeve and Danny.
Maeve and Danny’s mother abandoned their family when they were young, so they are raised by their father and the household help instead. One day, their father brings home a woman, Andrea Smith, who he later marries. Their father is more interested in his real estate holdings than in them, and Maeve and Danny’s relationship with Andrea is fractious and later overtly hostile.
The New York Times review gives us another glimpse into major elements of Patchett’s story: “The Dutch House” is a sibling story — that of Maeve and Danny Conroy, a brother and sister growing up comfortable in Elkins Park, Pa., in a house known throughout the community (and by the family) as the Dutch House…The children’s father purchased the house for his wife without telling her before the children were born — it is enormous, wildly elaborate, stuffed with the ornate furniture and outsize presence of the VanHoebeeks. Though they are dead, they are looming spirits — the Conroys never even take down the VanHoebeek portraits.
THE VILLAIN
Patchett confesses in another interview, that after writing a complete version of this novel, she basically threw it away. There wasn’t enough tension. There wasn’t that push-pull between characters. The novel needed a villain to ramp up the tension. But who was the villain?
Patchett then stated that her difficulty in writing the Dutch House was actually fueled by her own anxieties of becoming a stepmother. When she married Karl VanDevender, he brought two children to their marriage, Patchett fearing she would be unable to enter the proper mother role. Instead she saw herself as the stepmother who might bring unhappiness or worse to the family unit. We all know familiar tropes about stepmothers–Hansel and Gretel being an example. From Patchett’s fears grew the answer to reworking her novel.
She states: The greatest lack I think in my body of work, if, God forbid, you were to read it all, is that I don’t write villains. I have this shortcoming that whenever I get too close to anybody, I become sympathetic to them. And I just really wanted a villain. That was why I wrote this book in first person, because all Danny (the novel’s narrator) knows is what Andrea (the stepmother) chooses to show him.
LOOK WITHIN YOURSELF
This discussion has made me reconsider the villains I encounter in my own writing, and in my reading and film watching. Now I want to consider if the creators of these fictions are pulling from their own personal experience to create tension, stress, climaxes–and maybe even the very villain that has center stage. Because we are human, we all have faults–we all can succumb to jealousy, anger, and the penchant to avoid or change the truth. Being human is a complex challenge for every one of us.
Patchett found herself lacking in the area of mothering another woman’s children and turned that fear or lack into a novel. That’s Patchett’s wheelhouse. Her strength. Some of us look back on past mistakes or actions and want to erase them. We then reach out to help others, becoming more observant of others’ needs.
As a writer, I now want to look more closely at the antagonists in my work. I want to get inside their skin, reveal some of the fears, angers, even hatred I might have felt in my own life. That might create a villain–and yet it might also create a character who is willing to awaken one day and search for change. I think we all have a little of that in our lives. Patchett writes a novel to deal with it. We can reach out to those around us that we might have hurt or offended. It’s hard work, but we can do it.
