Revenge in Print: On Crafting Revenge Stories in Fiction

Here’s the thing about crafting revenge stories—this isn’t true for all authors, but for some of us, every story is a revenge story in one way or another. Writing about trauma can be an effective and satisfying way of processing, and while some of the resulting stories may never move beyond the author’s hard drive, others must be set free to find readers who seek a similar satisfaction. Some of us right wrongs by…writing wrongs. 

(I Have a Conflict—and That’s a Good Thing.)

That was my goal when I started drafting So Witches We Became, although the process didn’t always go as I intended. Here are a few things I learned along the way about writing revenge.

Choose Your Villain With Care

I wrote Witches—the story of a group of friends trapped on a barrier island by a ravenous curse—after going through Hurricane Irma in 2017. As a longtime Floridian, I’ve experienced plenty of hurricanes, but Irma was different. She seemed meaner. Stronger. She made a beeline for Marco Island, where I lived at the time, and when I started drafting Witches the following year, I thought I was writing a disaster thriller as a way to claw back some vague sense of control. 

The more I wrote, though, the more I realized that I was focusing on the wrong bad guy. Hurricanes aren’t villains; they’re forces of nature. Revenge against a human villain would feel more substantial. While there’s still a hurricane in Witches, it’s the least of my characters’ worries. If anything, it becomes a symbol of the power they have when they support each other and face the real villain together.

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Good Villains Aren’t Cartoons

So now I needed a proper villain. I took inspiration from the overload of “boys will be boys” sentiments in the news cycle at the time and developed one of those guys. You likely know the type—they get what they want, and they always want more, and somehow, they always get away with everything. Most of the women I know have stories about those guys; while I appreciate that so many of my friends and family have trusted me with those stories over the years, the fact that such experiences are so universal fills me with a quiet, seething rage.

Those stories are so common, in fact, that conjuring a villain from them became a tricky task. It’s too easy to pile offense on offense, insult on insult. Before long, you’re left with a villain who’s an inch away from twirling his mustache and cackling menacingly while tying women to railroad tracks. It was important to me to let my bad guy show his humanity. He has his own issues. 

As his writer, I know the roots of his bad behavior—not that those roots excuse the things he does, but his complexity makes him feel more real to me, and that makes him all the more threatening. He’s not a force of nature. He’s not a monster. He’s a guy plenty of us went to school with, dangerous and frustratingly familiar.

The Revenge Must Match the Character Exacting It

Without delving into spoilers, the main issue I ran into while workshopping an early Witches draft was an apparent mismatch between my main character Nell’s nature and the method of her eventual revenge. 

Throughout the story, Nell is exceedingly gentle. She gets upset early on when another character catches and kills a fish in front of her, and she frequently takes on the “mom friend” role in her circle, caring for her friends and ensuring they have what they need. While she certainly deserves to get revenge for the trauma she’s kept hidden for an entire year, I realized I was trying too hard to shape that revenge into what I would do in her place instead of making it germane to her. 

I had to finesse the details of it to match the person she becomes by the end of the story (and boy, is it hard to explain all this without sharing exactly what she does!). I hope I did her proud. Staying true to one’s characters is essential in revenge stories, even when those characters’ decisions and actions might clash with what the writer would do in a similar situation.

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Now Go Get ‘Em

A good revenge story leaves the reader satisfied; it should do the same for the writer. There’s nothing quite as delicious as gathering one’s latent anger and rage and disgust and weaving it all into the kind of consequences we don’t always see enough of in reality. Dig it up and set it free—the most effective revenge stories tend to contain at least a grain of truth and lived experience. 

As the bumper sticker I used to have on my car said, “Never wrong a writer. They get their revenge in print.”