The Art of Revenge
- fiction4
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
All art forms are powerful – visual, tactile, auditory, verbal. Art decorates, entertains, sets moods, and inspires deep feelings. And if you learn how a particular work came to be, you’ll discover new levels of resonance. Artists have been moved by beauty, elevated by love, torqued by madness, and changed by life events. Is it any surprise that one of these powerful motivations is revenge for real or perceived injuries or insults?
Drop the words “art” and “revenge” into the search tool of your choice, and you’ll find story after story about familiar and obscure works intended to skewer someone or something that wronged the artist. Here are just two examples.
How Dare You?
Why do most people think of Salvador Dalí when they hear the word surrealism? That’s because, unlike his fellow artists in the Surrealist movement, Dalí worshipped money and shamelessly turned himself into a global brand to earn ever-bigger commissions. So of course, his younger sister Ana Maria’s memoir dealt him an unspeakable insult. She revealed that Salvador Dalí, master of images dark, unsettling, and insane, grew up as a happy, normal child. Happy and normal? Ouch! Bad for the brand! So Dalí had his revenge. His sister had been the model for his 1925 realist painting “Figure at a Window,” a rear view of a young woman in white and blue leaning on a window sill and contemplating a panorama of open water. In his vengeful 1954 surrealist reimagining, “Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity,” he recreated that painting with a nude in the same position, orbited from behind by several weird, enormous, phallic shapes. (We don’t know if Ana Maria ever apologized for upsetting her brother.)
From later in the 20th century, we look to the band Jethro Tull, whose 1971 album “Aqualung” made them a household name with its blend of hard rock, British folk, manic flute playing, and literate lyrics. The press and radio stations repeatedly called it a “concept album,” even as band leader Ian Anderson insisted that “Aqualung” was a collection of 11 distinct songs, with a few of them sharing common themes of religious hypocrisy and social injustice. Tired of this unwinnable argument, Anderson vowed to create “the mother of all concept albums.” The following year, Jethro Tull released “Thick as a Brick,” a 45-minute song built on seven themes that reprised, developed, and blended. And because concept albums often inhabited the progressive rock genre, the previous album’s crunching, bluesy guitar and pounding piano flourishes had been replaced by feral, pirouetting guitar leads and lush, sweeping organ cadences, all driven by Anderson’s signature flute and acoustic guitar. A project designed to spite genre expectations became one of that genre’s cornerstone works.
Anyway, much as I enjoy surrealism and prog rock, I’m here to talk about the art of writing. So let’s see what might happen if we inject the craft of fiction with the motivation of revenge. (Note: the following exercise is completely hypothetical.)
Recipe for the Dish Best Served Cold
Nobody cares about your hurt feelings in seventh grade. Hell, no one even remembers. But if you still feel the throb of that bruised ego and you happen to be a fiction writer, it’s time to rub your hands and cackle with triumph.
Don’t tell the story of what your seventh-grade self experienced as persecution. Unless you’re writing YA fiction, it wouldn’t be much of a story. Instead, imagine your tormentors as the adults they might have grown into. Change their names, give them backstories, and then drop them into hopeless, humiliating, or ridiculous situations. And by all means, change it up for maximum effect: science fiction or western, police procedural or overwrought soap opera, post-apocalyptic hellscape or Hollywood spoof. Whatever genre you feel like writing.
Next, what’s going to happen to your characters in this story? Damnation? Redemption? Existential crisis? Totally misreading the room? Hey, it’s your revenge fantasy. Go wild!
A Playbook for Getting Even
It all sounds so deliciously simple, doesn’t it? To make the most of your retribution, you’ll deploy superior writing skills as only you can. Those might include:
• Character building: Unless you’re writing farce (certainly an option), don’t set up a bunch of straw man/straw woman characters. Lean into their humanity, strengths, and pathos. How do these people look and sound? What do they love and hate? Who are their friends? If they’ll pay the ultimate price, exactly what would that be? The more authentic your characters, the more satisfying their suffering will feel.
• Setting: Effective stories inhabit landscapes or interiors that readers feel with their senses, lending an undercurrent of in-story reality. For example, consider the scenery and props of the fictional genres suggested above.
Science fiction: an interstellar space liner.
Western: a small-town saloon frequented by hard-workin’, hard-drinkin’ folk.
Police procedural: a dusty evidence room and a stale break room in the wee hours.
Overwrought soap opera: a genteel, slightly shabby manor house with a beautiful garden.
Post-apocalyptic hellscape: a city street lined with rusting cars, plants growing through the broken pavement.
Hollywood spoof: various locations in the Dolby Theater and Ovation Hollywood shopping mall in the hours before the Oscars.
• Plausible plotting: My, what a rich tapestry of settings we’ve created! What story might unfold in each of these?
Science fiction: our protagonist is misunderstood by aliens on that interstellar space liner.
Western: the new sheriff in town takes a dislike to someone’s face.
Police procedural: the evidence room curator develops an embarrassing digestive condition.
Overwrought soap opera: sleeping with the wrong person creates tension among masters and servants before the reading of a deceased matriarch’s will.
Post-apocalyptic hellscape: the last known box of breakfast cereal triggers a vicious gang war.
Hollywood spoof: simmering resentment and a contract dispute loom over this year’s Oscars ceremony.
• Readability: Writing for personal enjoyment can elevate your mood, placate your inner demons, and bring the party without the hangover – all at a fraction of what therapy would cost you. And just imagine the bonus of satisfying your readers when you bring them along for the ride. With your characters so well drawn, your settings so convincingly rendered, and your plot so delicious, you’ve stirred in all the ingredients for your audience to emotionally invest the empathy or antipathy your characters deserve.
Ha! Gotcha!
Well, you’ve completed your story with great satisfaction. Now what? You publish it – the ultimate vindication. And do you include an author’s note about why you wrote it? Do you reach out across the gulf of years to a former classmate? “Hey, mofo. Long time no speak. Remember that time in seventh grade when…?” Or do you just take private satisfaction in having finally avenged that old wrong? (Pro tip: when entertaining revenge fantasies, the private satisfaction route is ultimately the least harmful to self and others.)
And what if revenge is so sweet that maybe you want another piece of the pie? There’s always a sequel. There’s always someone else who deserves their fictional comeuppance. Remember, you’re a writer, and in the worlds you create, you are omnipotent. You’re the one dispensing justice. So there!
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