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Bullies, Bastards And Bitches: How To Write The Bad Guys Of Fiction | 
 enlarge | Author: Jessica Morrell
Publisher: Writers Digest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $16.99
Buy New: $10.46
You Save: $6.53 (38%)
New (26) Used (7) from $10.46
Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 307774
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1582974845
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.3
EAN: 9781582974842
ASIN: 1582974845
Publication Date: July 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
Tap into your story's dark side by creating realistic and memorable anti-heroes, villains, antagonists, and difficult protagonists.Discover how to create nuanced, three-dimensional bad guys who are indispensable to the stories in which they appear.Explore the rise in popularity of anti-heroes, how anti-heroes possess some of the same qualities of villains but with the soul of a hero, and how these complicated characters reflect contemporary society.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A very good and gritty guide! November 3, 2008
With her incisive eye and analytic mind, Jessica Page Morrell cuts to the bone of bad characters, showing the writer how to put flesh on them and how to use them to get under the reader's skin. Her encyclopedic knowledge of both classic and contemporary fiction allows her to fill the pages with examples of her many categories of bad guys--unlikeable protagonists, antiheroes, dark heroes, and bad boys. Morrell's approach is anything but formulaic. She deftly parses the nuanced aspects of protagonists and antagonists, refusing to stoop to a simple good/bad characterization of these fiction types.
Jessica Morrell is fast becoming, in my opinion, one of the preeminent authors of writing guides. Being somewhat of a writer's guide addict, I can say that this book is one of the grittiest and most helpful guides I've read in a long time. I did not agree with the author's choice of the male pronoun as the generic or her decision to focus more on male characters than females (though she does have a chapter devoted to dangerous women), but this is a pretty minor quibble when you consider how much valuable content there is in this book. Any writer who wants to portray the dark side of human nature should delve into this book. Mining Morrell's impressive breadth and depth of understanding is sure to enhance the writer's ability to develop more complicated, engaging, and deeply layered characters.
Bad to the Bone October 4, 2008
Even though I've written several novels of my own with villains, I enjoyed Morrell's book, Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches. It was a well-written, thought-provoking book that I highlighted on many pages. As I attempt to write my most challenging bastard yet, I found this book to get my clogged wheels turning again.
User friendly Bullies, Bastard's & Bitches September 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Jessica Morrell's book, Bullies, Bastards & Bitches is a user friendly resource for those of us who aspire to create more compelling, frightening or comprehensible bad guys.
Whether you're trying to create sympathetic villains or terrorizing sociopaths, this book offers great examples from classic to modern day scoundrels, and breaks down their modus operandi.
In fiction, great characters need to be frightening, charming, seductive or repulsive in some way. In BBB the reader is skillfully guided through the when, where, why and how of creating such outrageous and often deviant characteristics. Loved it! Mindy Sitton Seattle WA
Not a Bitch to Read! August 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Morrell's discussion of deeply flawed protagonists adds greatly to our knowledge of what it means to create a three-dimensional character. Most compelling is the section devoted to bitches. With her perfectly-chosen exemplars, Morrell's takes us through a fascinating analysis of why, even today, an "unsympathetic" heroine remains so much more of a taboo than her male counterpart.
Highly recommended for those of you who want to write and read unforgettable characters.
 Disappointing August 19, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I hoped this book would be so much more than a book that tells me what I already know: no character is all good or all bad, and that even the most devilish of characters should have some redeeming virtue to make him/her interesting. And, nasty characters come in degrees of nastiness.
I'd hoped for a little more insight into how/why classic characters "work," but while they are mentioned, quoted passages are too short, and the author assumes the reader is familiar with the works mentioned (but who can be familiar with ALL the mentioned works), rather than providing enough background. I'd also hoped for a little more discussion of the types of bad guys. Rather than a list, more of an analysis of character types, and how their brains work--similar to how enneagrams work, or some of the other psychological profiles and those types of variations. She, however, merely lists them by title, without going into what the titles mean.
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