Character motivation for becoming a drug dealer?
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EelKat's Guide To Character Creation


By EelKat Wendy C Allen

>>I have a character that is a rich bored housewife type and her arc is to become a drug kingpin eventually but I need some kind of connection or reason she would suddenly get into drugs

I've a friend who got into drugs, and his reason, was simply that his friends were doing it and bragged to him how fun it was.... could be as simple as that for your character. If she's wealthy she can clearly afford to be dealing with high end drugs, and if she's bored, perhaps she's just looking for something to liven up her life. Maybe one of her friends, pulled her aside one day and said: "Hey, look what I got!" showed her some drgs and said "This stuff is amazing, you gotta try it!".

>>The character is already independently wealthy, so this would be more about having something to do with her time and energy.

Maybe she's always been the "perfect wife" type. Strict morals, church on Sunday, long skirts, high neck collars... raised that way, married a husband who was like her dad, same strict super Christian, no sin in my house, attitude.... but maybe, deep down inside she hates it... she wanted to be a wild teen, wanted to dye her hair and get a tattoo, but never did because she was too bust trying to be perfect... now years of frustration, bottled up inside her, she can't take it anymore, watching her friends, other housewives, going out for nights on the town, while she stays at home... maybe she's just fed up with trying to be perfect to please daddy, to please hubby, and drugs is her rebeling point.... it's small so she can sneak it in unnoticed. Can hide it from her super strict hubby.

>>Motive is maybe not the right word. I have motive. What I mean is that I need the catalyst that makes her go from not selling drugs to selling drugs. Where does she get them? In Breaking Bad Walt runs into his old student Jesse Pinkman. What I'm looking for is the Jesse Pinkman.

Perhaps what you want is pure raw opium, or pure raw LSD... is she a gardener? Chances are high she has BOTH growing in her garden ... most every garden in America grows both. In their raw form, neither is illegal in America.

Opium is very simple Poppy flowers.

Poppy seeds are sold at every neighbour grocery. Used in cooking cakes and breads, a topping on pasta. But eat a cup of them straight from the package and see how fast you get arrested for driving under the influence.

Almost every granny in the country grows poppy flowers in her front yard.

While you can get some opium from the seeds, the stuff that drug dealers work with is the sap/milk from pods/stems. Just take a razor, make a few slice marks in the pod, wait 3 or 4 hours, then collect the hard white "tears" that have formed on the sides. These tears are pure unprocessed opium - and are the primary ingredient needed to make heroin. Each of these tiny pinhead size white resin drops well sell for a few hundred dollars a piece.

Next, carefully cut the stems, tie them in bunches, hang them upside down in a dry room for about 3 or 4 weeks. Once dry, cut the stems up into 2 to 3 inch pieces. This is Opium Tea. Not worth as much money wise as Opium Tears are, but still a very high priced drug. Classy Rich women often prefer Opium Tea to other drugs, because they can drop a couple of these stem pieces into their regular morning tea, and no one is the wiser. They appear to still be drinking tea, and no one knows they've steeped it with opium.

As your character is a wealthy housewife, looking to sell drugs, Opium Tea is what I would think would be her go to drug to sell.

The average person doesn't know how opium is made, so anyone seeing her in her garden, slicing poppy pods will just think she is pruning her flowers, anyone who sees her drying flowers on her front porch, well just think she's drying herbs, any one who sees her making tea, well just thing is regular green tea.

The tea she would sell to the ladies in her social circle, the tears she would sell to heroine makers who will use it to make heroin.

As for LSD. Most people are familiar only with the man made synthetic stuff that was invented in the 1960s, however, it's natural form, has been used by shaman and holy men for getting visions, for thousands of years. Anyplace where pine trees grow has LSD growing as well. A bit more difficult to come by, because you have to wait for it to rain. After a good rainstorm, head to the forest, look around the bottom of pine trees for red mushrooms with white spots. Amanita muscaria, commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita. Be careful. It's deadly. Used wrong, you'll be dead within 15 minutes. They become edible at a certain stage and are deadly toxic at other stages of growth. She'll have to learn how to tell the difference. A very dangerous drug to make, if LSD is made wrong it can put a person in a coma, make them a brain dead vegetable, or outright kill them. She'd really have to know the art of mushroom hunting and mushroom processing REALLY well if she wanted to go the old school LSD made from mushrooms road.

However... it's possibly, if she's wealthy, that she has a personal chef. Perhaps, her personal chef is a mushroom corsair, and, was in the 1970s an LSD addict hippie. Maybe he tells her this and she becomes fascinated by this. Perhaps, she takes her on a mushroom hunting excursion one day, and he tells her how years ago he used to make drugs from mushrooms... perhaps she is turned on by this, and offers to pay him lots of money if he makes some of these mushroom drugs for her and her group of socialites.

>>I need some kind of catalyst that makes her decide to start selling.

>>And the drug plot actually won't even be the main plot in my story. And it's actually a soap opera for a youtube series, so "done before" is ok, to a degree.

Have you watched any big daytime TV soaps? People get into drugs on those all the time. And it's almost always some cheesy rebel reason, like "I caught him in bed with her, so I'm going to hire a guy to sell drugs to her husband, ruin his 3 years clean record". In the big daytime soaps BOREDOM is ALWAYS a primary catalyst for EVERYTHING. Every episode of Days of Our Lives and Young and the Restless you'll always see a character who is very wealthy, happily married, and very bored and will suddenly, for no reason at all go: "I'm bored, I think, tonight I'll...(insert some crazy rebellious out of character thing to do here)."

So if you are writing for a soap opera, I would think, boredom would be an incredibly believe reason for her to suddenly become a drug dealer, just because that is the very nature of soap opera logic and is what soap opera fans expect to see.

Perhaps in your case it could be something like, her and a couple of friends are laughing over drinks, and she says: "I'm bored with life, I need to do something to spice things up." and one of her friends laughs and jokily says: "Well, you could always sell drugs." No really meaning it. But then the next day, she starts thinking: "Hey, you know what, selling drugs WOULD spice up my life." Perhaps she could daydream about all the cool exiting celebrities she'll meet, not realizing the type of gangster thug people she'll end up dealing with. Maybe she's always been sheltered and so doesn't have a realistic knowledge of what drug life is, so she pumps it up in her mind as something glamourous, and gets into selling drugs hoping to meet some big name rock star that she's a fan of who she knows uses drugs? Thus has this very unrealistic expectation of what she's getting into.

I think that's probably the way I'd go if I was doing something like that in my story.

(I frequently write drug addicts and drug dealers, and my current main character is an opium and LSD addict, that why my mind went in that direction.)

In any case, hopefully something here helps you out. Good luck with your YouTube show!








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