What if the greatest villain in your book isn’t a monster or a murderer? What if it isn’t the Joker or Hannibal Lecter? Isn’t Professor Moriarty or Sauron? What if it is a place?
My current writing passion is a book set in a series of prison camps in 1944 and 1945. The main hero is a boy from Kansas in his 20s, shot down in his B-17, captured, and shuttled from one camp to another.
The villain? It isn’t Adolf Hitler. The book only mentions him three times. Nor is it Hermann Göring, who once observed that “We will either go down in history as the world’s greatest statesmen or its worst villains.”
Not to mislead, the book has villains. The member of the Gestapo who grilled our hero in the Nazi interrogation camp; "Big Stoop" who regularly beat prisoners and didn’t require a weapon to demonstrate his control or his brutality; "Iron Cross" who engineered and led the forced marches from the Kiefheide Railway Station into Stalag Luft IV. These and more provide plenty of villainies.
But as I continued writing this book, I realized the primary villain was the prison camp. The villain was a place, instead of a person. When Roy woke up each morning, he didn’t worry about whether Big Stoop would beat him as he had so many others. Or what many nameless guards could and would do. He worried about the camp, and how it was crushing his hope. His soul..
The POW Camp had no supernatural powers, like a haunted house or a cursed castle. But it was every bit as much alive, and as evil, as any of those imaginary places. Only this one is real. And so is the story.
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