How to Create a Cuddly Psycho-killer
Everybody loves Dexter.
My friend and I want to write a crime story for TV.
We are both screenwriters. He has mostly written comedies, I’ve written family dramas, but we both love the crime genre. We have been talking about a variety of existing villains and protagonists, including the obvious ones from shows like Breaking Bad and Ozark.
My friend gave me an example of a psychopath from the Japanese novel Out, by Natsuo Kirino.
After reading a bit from the novel, I began writing an e-mail to him explaining that I wouldn’t like to write a psychopathic protagonist. It is so hard to empathize with a psychopath, because well, they don’t have anything to empathize. The “urges” they have don’t exist in the majority of our audience.
How can a writer write a character if they can’t actually find the traits and feelings of that character in their own heart?
Stories are about emotion. If your character doesn’t feel love, fear, sadness or anger, how do you make your audience feel something?
Then I stopped in my tracks because I suddenly remembered something.
Dexter.
I watched Dexter only two years ago so it is still fresh in my memory. I typed it in Google and what do I…
