I’ve been taking some time off of writing my story in order to edit another author’s story. Even in doing that I can’t help but think about my story from time to time to time to time. 
Okay, so I think about my own story a lot. I’ve been reviewing the main plot and essentially the premis to my story and I’m starting to wonder if I’ve got a dumb main plot. My story is set a bit in the future in an almost distopia. Life isn’t horrible but it’s not all peaches. The future gives me a bit of lee-way on technology. I don’t want to give away my story but the part that I’m having a problem with is that my villain is spending a lot of money to deal with my hero in a specific way and I’m not sure that the cost is worth it.
Here is an analogy:
Suppose that the villain has captured the hero and is using an elaborate means of torture to extract information out of the hero by which a rare and expensive herb is used to drug the hero and by using several hundred employees dressed in wacked out costumes, get the hero cough up the information when pulling out a simple knife and starting to inflict pain on the hero is just as effective and cheaper.
So the part I’m having difficulty with is the believability that the villain will go to so much trouble and expense when there are much simpler ways of getting to what the villain wants.
April 10, 2007 at 06:49
That’s a hard one. Last night’s episode of 24 actually might help you. Jack tried physical means to get information from a suspect. It didn’t work. Sooo, they set up a big sting operation to trick him. Their hope was he’d be willing to give it up without torture.
Can your villian be using a computer to put these images into the hero’s mind? How about drugs that make him think this is real?
As long as you have a plausable reason, you can have your villian do anything.
April 10, 2007 at 07:43
Plausible reasons yes. The part I’m struggling with is whether the reasons justify the expense. My villian is not an “uber take over the world” type villian and my heroine is not a “save the world” type heroine. I’ll have to contemplate how I can make myself feel comfortable with this so that I can write it with comfort.