Following
on from my guest post on Bella Settarra’s blog last week about ‘Defining Erotic
Romance’ I had some interesting feedback including one writer who said she used
her ex-husband as a villain in one of her stories and thoroughly enjoyed
whipping his butt (in the story!). http://bellasettarrabooks.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/jennifer-denys-talks-about-erotic.html
And
another who said that using bad people we know as our villains was a great way
to work off angst.
That
made me wonder how many other authors have used the names (or even the
characters) of people they hate/dislike/who have made their lives a misery for
their villains.
I
then found this link to the 50 greatest villains in literature: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3560987/50-greatest-villains-in-literature.html
Looking
down the list I see Cruella de Vil is quite high however, it took me years to realize
this actually reads ‘cruel devil’!
However,
did J K Rowling know someone called ‘Voldemort’? Where did the inventor of
Hannibal Lecter come up with that name? Did a ‘Bill Sykes’ do bad things to
Dickens?
Some
villain names have become so well-known that we use them as descriptive terms
like a Svengali meaning ‘someone who manipulates’, Machiavellian meaning ‘someone
who schemes maliciously’, Jekyll or Frankenstein – both of whom were doctors
who created monsters, to be a Don Juan is to be ‘a womaniser’.
How
fabulous it would be to have a villain of mine used in this fashion…. Maybe I
need to give more thought to my villains!
Jen
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