Love at First Write

Has any other writer had this same problem? You begin to write a character into your story to play the antagonist or perhaps even a side character with a hellish bent, and you soon find yourself inventing reasons why he or she isn't so bad. You create excuses for their betrayals and wrongdoings because you can't bring yourself to hate them. You don't want your readers to hate them either. There is always a mitigating circumstance for their evil ways.

When the portion of your story, which required their existence ends you simply cannot write them out. You make plot twists and turns around your unexpected creation just to keep them in the story. They practically overshadow your main character by the force of their compelling personality, and if you are not careful, they will take over your story completely.

I have a problem with Jake. Jake is a combination of three or four past lovers, or perhaps that's five, whom I have combined into a delicious, four-course meal of masculinity, good looks, sardonic humor, and boyish vulnerability, which has kept him in my stories for two sequels. He is a liar, a serial cheater, and a selfish, self-centered manipulative woman chasing bastard. But, I can't seem to write his demise. He's too darned charming and handsome.

The main character has threatened to disembowel him, call his wife, neuter him with dull scissors, shave him bald and tattoo 'Cheater' in permanent marker on his forehead after he falls asleep. He goes back to her anyway. She smashed his truck up with his own tire iron, ripped up the interior with a finger nail file, and loosened lug nuts on all four tires so they fell off when he drove away with another woman. He's going to go back to her anyway if I have anything to say about it. Which, it so happens, I do.

They are either both crazy or their author has totally lost it. I'm quite sure by now that it's the latter of the two. I find myself sneaking down to the computer in the middle of the night to write, 'just one more chapter', and end up drinking coffee at three in the morning to keep my eyes open long enough to see what Jake is up to next and how my main character will react. Another chapter turns up on the screen in front of me and then, another. Jake never has plans. Forget those outlines and character arcs. He just does what Jake does and writing mechanics be damned.

It's sort of like choreographing a very tense dance. Both characters are seriously flawed and are unable to make the right decisions in their love lives. They are both physically addicted to one another, even though they are suspicious, and insecure about their places in each other's lives. Being emotional weaklings, they keep promising themselves they won't, and then they do.

'Jake smooths his mustache down, as he always does when he's perturbed, and wonders how he will punish her for destroying his baby blue truck. Maybe this time he will tie her to a bed and...'

In one episode the main character punishes Jake for being the shallow, greedy man he is, by telling her female competitors that he had fallen off a ladder in a terrible construction accident. Unfortunately, he had crushed his round male parts, which were no longer round. (Although, in fairness, pancakes are still round.) Regarding the sluts with pity, the character explained that Jake had been neutered by the accident and they would have to look elsewhere for their thrills.

After telling her tall tail, she dragged him off to her hotel room by his tall tail, denying she ever told anyone about an accident, and enjoyed his man parts all night long, despite them being crushed in that dreadful accident.

I'm not sure I can keep up my double life as this character's lover. But, still, I can't wait to see what he's going to do after I destroyed his truck. Writing is a sickness, done in the dark by sick people.