After 5 years I finally caved and tried writing fan fiction for a prompt I hated

I spent years rolling my eyes at the 'write a story from the villain's perspective' prompts. Thought it was lazy and overdone. Then last month a writing group I'm in on Discord had a challenge to write from the villain's side using a really specific prompt about a librarian who steals overdue book fines. I gave it a shot just to prove I could do it better than the cliches. Turned out I got so into the character's backstory about why she hated late fees that I wrote 12 pages in one sitting. Now I'm kind of hooked and I've done three more villain POV pieces since. Has anyone else had a prompt they swore they'd never touch but then it clicked for them?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_mason19d ago

Started out the same way honestly lol. I used to hate the whole "villain has a tragic backstory" thing, figured it was just an excuse to make bad guys sympathetic. But my kid dared me to write one about a supervillain whose whole deal was stealing people's lawn gnomes. I actually ended up writing three pages about how he lost his own garden to a HOA dispute and the gnomes reminded him of what he had before. Kinda made me realize there's more to it than just making excuses for evil lmao.

blair_davis5019d ago

Jumped in on a similar thing but from a different angle. I always hated the "villain was actually right all along" stories, thought they were just a cheap way to make the hero look dumb. But I tried one where the villain was a city planner who wanted to tear down a historic building to stop a flood that kept wrecking a poor neighborhood. The hero stopped him because the building had "historical value" and then the flood hit and destroyed 20 homes. Writing that made me realize sometimes the villain's plan just works better than the hero's emotional decision.