The writing prompt about 'write from a villain's perspective' that I swore was overdone but actually saved my story

I used to roll my eyes at any prompt that said 'write from the bad guy's point of view.' Thought it was lazy and every writer just made the villain some misunderstood softy. But last month I had a short story that was totally flat, no tension, nobody cared about the hero's mission. So I tried rewriting the whole thing from the antagonist's side just as an exercise. Turns out, I had no idea what that character wanted or why. Getting inside his head forced me to build real motivation, not just 'evil for evil's sake.' Now the hero actually has a worthy opponent and the conflict makes sense. Has anyone else had a prompt they dismissed as cliche that ended up fixing a problem in their work?

2 comments

2 Comments

mark491mo ago

So when you rewrote it from his side, did you end up keeping a lot of that new backstory or did you just use it to make the original version better? I always struggle with how much of that research to actually put on the page.

the_hannah1mo ago

Oh wow, you rewrote the whole thing from his side? That's intense lol. I honestly don't know how you even manage that without going crazy. For me, I always end up keeping way too much of the new backstory and then I gotta cut half of it cause it bogs down the pacing. It's like, you spend all this time building this whole world for the character and then you have to accept that 90% of it is just for you to know. I remember with my last project I had this whole tragic childhood backstory for a side character and literally none of it made the final cut. It hurt but the story was better for it.