A few years ago I read a quote from bestselling author Diana Gabaldon on her website. It stayed with me to this day because her words gave me insight into the mysteries of character creation. I was so intrigued, I did a series of posts about it on my blog.

The quote was specifically about Jack Randall, the diabolical villain in Gabaldon’s highly successful Outlander series. As an aside, the character is one of the most insidious villains I’ve encountered in fiction. Why? Because Gabaldon gave him so many complex layers. There was a dark psychology to Jack that scared the hell out of me, and that’s no easy feat.

Here’s the Gabaldon quote in question:

“There’s a local group of fans here in Phoenix who have been taking me out to tea every spring for the last few years …. [and] at one of these teas, the readers got onto Jack Randall, and what a horrible, terrible, nasty, loathsome, repellent….etc. he was. And all the time, I was sitting there, quietly sipping my tea, and thinking, “You really don’t have any notion that you’re talking to Jack Randall, do you?”


Chilling, especially if you’re familiar with the character.

In my original post on this, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of a writer goes into the character, especially villains. This all came to me again today while reading some news items on the tragic death of Heath Ledger. The actor was being interviewed by the New York Times last year about portraying The Joker, a hopelessly demonic character in The Dark Knight, the upcoming sequel of Batman Begins. Ledger talked about how physically and mentally draining the role was. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

[Joker is a] “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” [Ledger] said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

Characters (be them from a writer or an actor) spring from somewhere deep inside the creator. And sometimes these ‘fictional people’ can take a tremendous toll on us. I know for me, when I’m doing difficult, gut wrenching scenes, it takes me a while to come “down.” My words affect my mood, and anytime I climb inside a character’s head, I do become that character, complete with all their good and bad points.

These people come from near and/or distant places inside our minds, and tapping into them, especially if they’re dark, can be hard on the psyche and the body. How ever brief my time inside a psycho’s head, the stay is always uncomfortable. I have to think and feel like them in order for the words to flow. I can’t phone it in. It has to literally come OUT of me. You see, these psychos don’t just spring from the ether. I believe that in order to make these villains real, we have to tap into the darkest side of ourselves. Or at the very least, ingest, digest and then excrete (for lack of a better word) the darkness into our prose.

I’m also reminded of Stephen King’s fascination with this subject. He’s done two stories on it that I know of. One, The Dark Half (made into a movie with Timothy Hutton) and the other, Secret Window (starring Johnny Depp). Both characters are writers who have a darkness within themselves that literally comes to life.


Here’s the trailer for Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF

Brief Johnny Depp interview about getting into character for Stephen King’s SECRET WINDOW

How much of yourself do you pour into your characters, namely your villains? Does venturing inside the darkness ever creep you out? Do you (like me) need a mental cleansing after you “become” your villain on the computer screen? Or are you one of those lucky people who can turn it off and on like a light switch?