I need help with my love interest. She starts out as a villain who falls in love with my main character. The only problem is I don't know how to go about the whole love interest thing. I don't know how to make their relationship progress from villain to romantic interest. She shows her feelings for him early on, she tries to help him throughout the story but the problem is my main character is very misogynistic and even though she helps him and is nice to him he doesn't trust her. How do I go about developing their relationship from I don't trust you your a woman and your one of the bad guys to I think I'm in love with you?
There needs to be a point where they relate to each other. Maybe they are forced to work together for a while, she poses as someone else to gain his trust, maybe there is something about her that reminds him of someone else and while he hates her he is also fascinated or drawn to each other. As long as it feels natural and is introduced relatively early in the work I think you'll be okay.
Perhaps she's different from most women he's met. If he doesn't trust women because he thinks they're weak and undependable, maybe he trusts a really tough and competent woman.
She is a villain but she falls in love with him and tries to help him throughout the story. At one scene when my main character seems to be pretty broken she comforts him and tries to be a friend. As for the reason he hates women, he was married when he was 20. The relationship was really bad and he wanted out and so he cheated only to find that the woman he was with cheated first.
Love isn't magic. There have to be clear, at-least-semi-tangible reasons for her to develop feelings for the guy. You seem to be treating "she falls in love with him" as being an irreducible, unquestionable fact, and that's not gonna work. Actually, I think it may be a form of "begging the question", which is interesting to me because up til now I wasn't sure exactly what that term meant :/ Also, I don't buy that one bad relationship turned him into a misogynist. Misogyny is, at least to me, an especially vile trait that you don't develop suddenly at the age of 20. You need to plant the seed earlier in his life when he's impressionable and vulnerable. Then again, maybe you don't mean for it to be quite that intense. The character might just have a "Bah! Women! Who needs 'em?" sort of attitude, which would be a lot easier to like than a straight-up woman hater.
The foundation for a good reciprocal relationship is trust, so you as the writer will have to develop instances where trust is forged. Like irontrousers said, it isn't magic, and will take a subtle approach especially to overcome initial bitterness.
Maybe have them have something integral in common that neither of them can ignore. A spookily similar past experience or a belief that's central to them. As for him being misogynistic, I agree that one bad relationship probably wouldn't turn him against all women. In pretty much every case I've seen where a real-life person hates the opposite gender, it's because they have a beef with their parent of that gender. So maybe his mother was a jerkmo.
Maybe they have both possibly been caught up in each others' shady pasts? Opposites have the ability to attract, so that can also be used in the story. But I agree that you have to be clear to the audience, or else they are not going to be able to understand who likes who or what is going on.
What makes her a ‘villain’? I mean, is her character really screwed or is she just a small time crook through circumstances? If she is a real ‘villain’, why does she try and help the guy? There must be some moment of empathy or something that makes her want to help. Or maybe she feels indebted to him in some way? When she first ‘shows her feelings’, what are they, exactly? Most people don’t have instant warm nurturing love at the start. Lust and/or shared experiences are more common instant mate makers. Trust me—only a masochistic female wastes time on a woman hater. You’ll have to make it clear to her and the reader where his angst comes from, or we’ll all lose patience quick. Oh, and of course, that mate maker thing I mentioned will be more than enough to keep him busy on the book’s path: ‘I don’t want to like you—I don’t want to love you—Oh, dammit, I love you’.
I agree forcing them together is a good way to go but one thing I took from a drama class I took was chemistry. You have to create chemistry between the two characters, whether that means they hate each other at first or whatever. My teacher made us watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to show us the chemistry between Robert Redford and Paul Newman and this is a lesson I never forgot. I used it to form the chemistry between all my characters. Good luck.
What's that film with Sidney Poitier when he escapes with another man, and they are handcuffed together? I mean, they are forced to be together but at the same time, they have chemistry? Come to think of it, a pretend or forced marriage between the two MCs has been the start to a love story before...
