4/16

I’ve spent time further developing my storyline. My plot, loosely, is amateur home invaders attempting to rob a vacation home that appears to be vacated. I’m writing multiple home invaders because I want at least one Macbeth and one Lady Macbeth. My Macbeth has a sympathetic reason for the heist; maybe a dying parent or child needs money, unsure. This character doesn’t want to hurt anyone, and balks when they realize the house isn’t empty. My Lady Macbeth is younger, an accomplice with a somewhat complicated relationship with the other character – this one is smarter, more sadistic, committing a crime for the sake of it and egging Macbeth on, confident they can pin it on the other character, who has motive, claiming that they were dragged along by a desperate partner. For my victims, I’ll have a similar dynamic. This will be a privileged group, either a family or college friends on a break. Either way, I plan to introduce them as obnoxious but familiar, led by one character whose composure is a bit too firm and who tends to violence. This will be the first Lady Macbeth on the other side, accompanied by another who also encourages the group to defend themselves and the home they rarely visit. This is the main part: I want to blur the line between self-defense and pure violence, to have the attackers at some point become the attacked and then flip the script again. One of my biggest points is to have the home-invading Macbeth, the only really sympathetic character at the beginning, slowly lose that sympathy and humanity. More difficult, i think, will be doing the inverse, and making the unsympathetic characters more likeable, all while piling on the evidence that some – or all of them – are simply monsters.