Your dictator keeps coming out flat — and you can feel it every page he opens his mouth.

The cartoon villain announcing his own evil from a throne is the version the form produces by default. The version your book needs is something else: a regime that operates on the page even when your protagonist is offstage, rendered through specific people inside it rather than through speeches by the leader at the top of it. Writing Wicked: The Tyrant is the craft guide for fiction writers ready to do the harder version. Drawing on the historical record of real dictatorships and on the novels that have outlasted their political moment, the book treats tyranny as a system rather than a personality, and the writing of it as the form's most difficult and most rewarding work.

Inside the book:

•Build a regime that operates on the page even when your protagonist is offstage.
•Write menace that works on a reader who hasn't yet been told the character is the villain.
•Render real historical dictators without turning their victims into a body count.
•Match the historical record's actual endings rather than the genre's tidy ones.
•Avoid the form-specific failure modes in fantasy, historical, thriller, contemporary, romance, and literary fiction.
•Apply twelve diagnostic checks and ten targeted writing exercises against the current manuscript.

The final book in the Writing Wicked series.

Open the book and write the tyrant your story has been missing.

Writing Wicked Book Ten