I finally tried writing from a villain's point of view, now my whole story changed

Last month I got stuck on a short story about a landlord evicting a family. I kept making him mean with no reason. So I decided to write one page from his side, just to see. The result was that he had a sick wife and unpaid medical bills, which made the eviction a desperate choice, not a cruel one. That one page turned into 20 pages and flipped my whole plot. Has anyone else had a character turn sympathetic after trying their perspective for a single scene?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery_jackson1mo ago

…and that's how I ended up with a whole series about a pizza delivery guy who turns out to be the only person who knows the city's sewer system better than the rats. I was just trying to write a quick scene where he gets a flat tire, but then I thought, what if the tire was slashed by a rival delivery driver who's got a thing for the same girl at the dry cleaners? Next thing I know, I'm writing a 40 page backstory about the sewer rat kingdom and their prophecy about a human who smells like oregano. Now my original horror story about the landlord is sitting in a folder called "abandoned ideas" and I'm researching rat migration patterns at 2am. So yeah, the villain perspective thing, it's a slippery slope, but sometimes you just gotta follow the weirdness.

violaramirez1mo ago

The real trap here isnt the villain, its that you found out the rats have more personality than half your human characters. Once you go down that hole, you cant come back. Nobody writes a 40 page backstory about sewer politics and then just abandons it. That pizza guy is your main character now, the landlord story is dead, and you know it.