Thoughts on what I’m writing?

[Historyguy]

I am trying to write a novel but it’s pissing off two women I know.

The problem they have is my villain, Abigail Williams (she’s a real person who was used in the Crucible, but given the fact that she really did exist, she’s fair game).

She will be 40 because the novel is set in 1720, as she was only 11 or 12 in the real witch trials.

At this point, the money she stole will have gotten her far in life and now she’s a wealthy widow of a merchant in Barbados.

She continues to do what she did as a child, create moral panics and mass hysteria to get innocents killed (now they are her enemies she’s framing as pirates).

her greatest nemesis is a fictional daughter of Sarah Osborne that I invented. Abigail will try to get her hung for piracy.

Thoughts?

But they wrote about Jesse James the adult acting in a way consistent with how the actual Jesse James acted as an adult. You want to covey that a confused child was in fact an evil Machiavellian bitch, which you are claiming must be true because you are casting her as a one dimensional evil Machiavellian bitch as an adult.

She’s not the main character at all. Thats the other girl I mentioned earlier.

She wasn’t a woman, she was a 12 yo child. It’s not obvious that she gained anything. We don’t know that she ‘went missing’ - afaik there’s no evidence what happened to her, likely she died.

But she is your “villain” ? As you said in original post. That sounds fairly pivotal to me, but if it’s such a minor role, what are you mithering about?

You did ask what everyone thought.
And you have some answers to what women here think. But you don’t like the answers.

You don’t have to listen to what anyone thinks, just go and write it.

I am trying to write a novel but it’s pissing off two women I know.

Then stop discussing it with them - unless they’ve confiscated your laptop, how are they stopping you?

It sounds like you’ve made up your mind about what you want to write, OP, so why not just write it?

Maybe you’re just not a very good writer then 🤷‍♀️

Should I use a man named Robert Lowther instead? He was a corrupt Governor at the time in the exact location I want it to take place.

The bad news is, he survived and got away with everything he did.

Might be a better idea. Presumably there’s a lot more known about him, but I suppose he’d be harder for you to work into your fiction .

Write what you like!! It’s your story. Why do you care what we think?

this is coming over very weirdly tbh

There’s actually less known about him. All we know is that he was so corrupt that he went to prison and got out unfairly.

Just write whatever story you want, very few people (me included) know the ins and outs of that period of time.
If it’s a mega bestseller perhaps you’ll be asked in interview about the character development and then you can explain it and account for it. But if you want a historical uber baddy with no motivation or character then write it like that and invent one.

i thought @CautiousLurker01 had great advice.

I would imagine quite a few Americans know a fair bit about the Salem Witch Trials. And The Crucible is probably one of the best know, frequently performed plays bar Shakespeare. The OP sounds like he intended to plagiarise that with the idea that Abigail stole money and ran away.

Shiuld I just not write this?

it’s clearly getting a lot of people ticked off

@ErrolTheDragon Ah, it’s just me and people I know who are dunces then. I’ve not seen the crucible. I always seem to know the least cultured people.
Consider me The UK General Public.

Someone once asked me what Jack Sparrow was like in real life.

dead serious

Someone once asked me if there was fat in cheese. Needless to say that person was overweight.

Yeah, don't write it. Sounds as though it wouldn't be good for readers nor good for you, which makes it a waste of time or worse.

(If you have a strongly negative reaction to that, perhaps it will help you to understand more about why you want to write it. If not, go and write something more interesting!)

Lowther was a plantation owner (inherited from his first wife I believe). I have no problem with you painting slave owners as also evil in other ways.

I’m going to engage once more on the assumption that you are asking all this in good faith.

Here’s what I understand:

You need a villain. You chose a woman, and chose to make her one-, maybe two-dimensional. Ok, so far so Disney evil step mother - if she’s entertainingly written I could potentially suspend my disbelief.

However, where you have gone wrong is to choose to make her a real woman, one that has been studied, and widely written about. That person is, in the minds of anyone who knows who she is, already 3-dimensional — people have hypothesised about why she did what she did, they have ideas about her character already. You can’t un-3-dimension her without looking like you are trivialising her.

Add to that the fact that you are a male writer, the act of trivialising and diminishing an actual female person in order to create a bit-character that only exists to motivate your protagonist, makes you come across as completely misogynistic. You may not intend it that way, but that is what your readers are seeing.

Look it's been a while since I studied The Crucible but isn't the driving point of it that the government of the time were conducting communism trails. Surely then what we get is that Abigail and all the girls are victims of the ruling class trying to rid it it's self of an imagined enemy.

Why not just make up a character? As historical references are clearly not important to you or the story. You need a villain just write one.

OP, try not to be so needy. If you want to write the book, write it. Don't ask for constant feedback and validation.

It's like baby names - everyone will have an opinion, it doesn't mean any of them are "right" or "wrong". Just do your thing.

OP, just write it. Your main issues are getting it written and whether it’s any good, not whether a bunch of people you don’t know like the subject.

Do you have an agent or an editor? This is a conversation you should be having with them instead of putting your idea on a forum that has 14 million users while you're still at the working it out stage.

Why aren’t you on a writing forum asking these questions? There’s loads around.

Also worth bearing in mind that you can't copyright an idea so don't be surprised if one of the clever women you're tapping for insight here takes this premise and writes a subtle, nuanced, multi-layered story about what became of Abigail Williams.