Instructor: Beth Daniels. What sort of villain do you need in your story? Are they Snidley Whiplash melodramatically evil or the subtle type? 

Is their villainy more stabbing a neighbor in the back verbally or physically? A bully on the playground or on the prom committee? 

Are they predators, whether paranormal or not?

Do they have powers we mere mortals (also known as the rest of the cast in the story) need to go up against, or not?

We love our hero and heroines but sometimes (a lot of the time!) the villain is much more fun to create – AND BE – in your story. 

In BUILDING A BETTER VILLAIN we’ll spend a week considering our villainous options. Lots of questions to answer to create the character we never want to be but without whom our main characters would not have a story worth the telling. Villains are pivotal points for a plot, you see.

Oddly enough, a villain doesn’t necessarily need to be human, demon, fae, or alien. It can also be Mother Nature or a troubling situation. Which means you can have more than one sort of villain in a story for your main characters to deal with.

Snidley Whiplash is the Mr. Potato Head version of a villain, no doubt, but as they used to say of the soon-to-be-bionic man, “we can build him better.”

And we’ll begin drawing up those schematics over the course of one week.

Beth Daniels currently writes as Beth Henderson and J.B. Dane, though she answered to Lisa Dane and Beth Cruise in the past as well. She has worked with editors at Berkley, Zebra, Leisure, Harlequin/Silhouette, and Simon and Schuster's Aladdin Paperbacks, done e-books for a now defunct company (not her fault, she says), and began her writing life with hardcover books slated for library use with a publisher that got out of the romance business (again, not her fault). More recently she’s had a number of articles about writing picked up by e-zines, saw a short story published in a mystery and suspense magazine that turned up its toes the next year (really, really not her fault), and has a story in the MOTHER GOOSE IS DEAD anthology from Dragon Moon Press.

For over a dozen years Beth taught college level composition, both in the classroom and online, and a credit course on Novel Writing. Five of her former Novel class students are now published.

Twenty-six of Beth’s manuscripts have appeared in print or e-book format. These have been historical romantic adventures (6), romantic comedies (10), romantic-suspense (3), and young adult romantic comedy (7). Her titles have appeared in 12 different languages in over 20 countries. At the moment she is working on various manuscripts and collaborated with another RWA member on a contemporary/fantasy/romantic adventure. She also ventured into self-publishing to keep her out-of-print backlist in print.