I have trouble writing believable villains. My husband struggles to write believable heroes (or so he says; I think his heroes are fine). We make an interesting pair. Jack Sprat could eat no fat/ His wife could eat no lean, and all that.
It leads to interesting discussions. I’m currently struggling with the villain in my regency murder mystery, (spoilers for a WIP, working title The Root of All Evil, ahead!). He’s very handsome and charming and uses his skill as an actor to hide the fact that he is of that disreputable profession instead of the gentleman he pretends to be. He attempts first to blackmail his victim, and when she proves a harder target than he thought, he kills her to stop her complaining, and later meets a sticky end when he can’t let go of his blackmail plan.
But how to make this person into a well-drawn character, not a caricature? Not to say that caricatures can’t be accurate; I know I owe Ayn Rand an apology for thinking her villains were made of cardboard and no human would really say those things or act like that. But this isn’t that kind of book.
I never liked reading mustache-twirling villains who do evil for the lulz, and I try not to write them. On the flip side, I always worry that the audience will sympathize too much with the villain, because I try to give them realistic motivations. They’re trying to feed themselves or their families, secure the succession of a kingdom, stay alive in an unforgiving environment. One antagonist creates a scandal in society because she’s got a tiger by the tail and can’t figure out how to let go without creating an even bigger scandal.
My other half’s advice was twofold- and he actually has some training in writing, instead of winging it like his wife, so it might be worth something: For this specific villain, identify one of the usual villain traits and make sure it drives all of the villain’s actions. To practice writing villains in general, he says to take a character flaw that you possess and write about it as if you were writing yourself into a story as the villain.
The specific villain has, for better or worse, two main villain traits: greed and fear of discovery. Oops. I’m already deviating from the instructions. Surprise, surprise. These traits give me options for the driving force behind each action, but run the risk of confusing the reader: “Why is Villain asking for money so blatantly? I thought he wanted to stay under the radar.” The silver lining to the cloud is that the two motives occasionally work against each other, as in the example, so it stops Villain from sliding unrealistically far down the greed spectrum or the secrecy spectrum.
It’s still good advice, and worth keeping in mind, especially during editing. Word choice and subtle changes to movement or expression can make the same action appear wildly different, and done for different reasons.
The second bit of advice is good for writing exercises and tricky in other ways, since it requires a certain amount of honesty and introspection. I know I tend to rationalize my flaws or shy away from thinking about them at all because I feel guilty about not being perfect. Problems of a Former (Almost) Gifted Kid.
The idea behind the exercise is to think about the villain’s flaws, motivations, and actions in a realistic way, then smooth over the little contradictions that are inherent in humans, making a real person into a character. Because that person/character is yourself, you can examine the thoughts, language, and actions that make sense in that scenario- ‘What would I do?- without having to guess at another person’s private motivations or interpret their actions out of context. Then, take that process of examination and apply it to characters who aren’t based on you. I think this would also work for writing realistic heroes; just base the character’s actions around a good character trait instead of a flaw.
It’s good advice; that doesn’t mean it’s easy. I’ve been thinking about plausible scenarios for a few days and not getting very far. My life isn’t very conducive to villainism or heroism.
Oh, well. I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, how do you approach the writing of villains? Do you go for the unexplained evil type or the realistically motivated type? How do you make the reader believe in your villains?
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “An Exercise in Villainy”
The villain in my first series was a mean girl and a jock. She sort of (but not exactly) redeems herself by the end, and others end up as the mean girls. He doesn’t and pays a price for it. In subsequent rewrites of the series I’ve pulled back on the mean girl’s outright evilness and discovered some very real, grounded motivations for the way she acts and the way she views one of the protagonists, whereas the jock’s main motivation is jealousy, which, I’ve heard, is a stinky cologne. Having been a teenage boy at one point, I can recall moments of blind jealous rage (although I was a nerd so they weren’t as rage-y as a jock could get).
The villain in my second series is an abuser. She is charming, conniving, and highly manipulative like some other abusers I’ve known in my life. The protagonist finds her irresistible.
I have a gallery of rogues in my third series, but it’s more action-oriented than a drama and the villains span from an entity of pure evil to guy tired of being unlucky in his life. Probably my favorite is a former hero who is trying desperately to do the right thing, but ends up using unconscionable means to do so. I couldn’t bring myself to off said antagonist at the end of the arc, so I left the door open for her to continue to pursue her goal.
I’m honestly having trouble with my fantasy books because I don’t want my villains to come across as cartoon-y. I have been mostly focusing on the characters and their relationships and there are some good chapters there. And some boring ones. But I think I’ll be able to make it work in the end.
Ugh, I should have proofread better: “The villains in my first series were…” is how that should start.
I really have only two out-and-out villains in my books … well, three if I count the disreputable, dissolute character in the Luna City series. The first two are sociopaths: both of them get off on causing pain to others. One is completely self-centered – what he wants is want he gets and devil take those unlucky enough to be in his way. The other is just plain crazy.
If I may recommend a book, Sacha Black’s “13 Steps to Evil”, and for your husband, “10 Steps to Hero.” Which I guess is two books. But more for thinking about things than slavish checkbox stuff.
Also, quite frankly the best villains are those whose motivations we understand and might even sympathize with initially. If they had made better choices, they might have been able to be heroes.
There’s different levels of villain, too. There might be a villain in one scene that works as a hero or foil in another, which is different than the overall story villain/antagonist. And sometimes the hero and the villain work together to accomplish something, and a normally “good” character becomes obstructionist.
One suggestion might be to use the same “character development process” or “plot development process” on villains as one does on the protagonist. Which of course is not helpful for discovery writers, but sometimes instead of “what’s the worst possible thing that could happen to him” or “what’s the worse possible thing for him to do (that affects him),” include a “what is the worst possible choice he could make that makes him fall deeper?”
Are they? Sauron’s a great villain, and no one gets into his mind.
Not in the books, but oh yes, people did:
Tolkien apparently had a very clear idea of what Sauron was after, why, and how he thought, even if the characters in the book never really thought about it.
We have two instances where someone did.
The first one was in the scene with Galadriel’s Mirror, where she says that she is able to see Sauron’s mind, where he can’t see hers because of Nenya the Ring of Adamant; it’s why she’s worried about Frodo’s capability to see it through.
The second one was where Aragorn showed himself to Sauron in the Palantir of Minas Tirith as Isildur’s Heir. Again, it worked as a distraction to draw attention away from Frodo, and again Sauron didn’t see into Aragorn’s mind to find out about the Ringbearer.
And it looks like my reply capability is back.
Just the fact that your villain is opposing your hero is often enough to instill dislike in the gentle reader’s breast. I’ve noticed a trend to have villains do really heinous stuff I don’t want to read about—-like pulling the wings off flies and even more terrible stuff. That seems unnecessary. If what your hero wants is good, just the fact the antagonist is in the way can make him villainous to the reader.
I’ve also found this phenomenon works on me as a writer. My villains start being super annoying to me as they pursue their dastardly goals.
I once read (part of) a book where the villain was so sadistically evil that I skipped several hundred pages to the end of the book to make sure he got some comeuppance (he died). Then I returned the book to the library and never read anything by that author again. I get wanting your audience to hate the bad guy, but good grief…
Yup. I don’t want to have to watch graphic details of the villain’s sadism to hate him. Happy to hate him just because he’s the opponent.
I prefer to see enough villainy to know that it would be objectively better if the hero won.
Which isn’t much since I like heroic heroes.
This works wonderfully for the bureaucrat-as-villain. They’re not particularly evil, just obstructionist.
I agree 1000 percent. I’ve imported the bureaucratic mind set to more than one of my villains. It works well, in a scary sort of way.
I love dropping a giant tank or a robot insect in front of a bureaucrat and watching them try to deal with it. I do it all the time. ~:D
Yes, absolutely. I generally have the Hero dealing with cleanup, all the evil actions of the villain take place off-stage. As a reader I don’t need to see all that to know the villain is bad, all I need is to hear about what he did, second or third hand. We find it and clean up after it.
As a -writer- I do not want that stuff in my head. Mental hygiene comes first.
Two the more successful (successful here being defined as popular with readers) villains I’ve written were for a pair of online collaborative stories I took part in way back when. The first was a starship captain – very good at his job, professional in his appearance, a strict personal code of honor, charming, witty, a loyal friend, a loving husband, and a true believer in the empire that he served. As far as he was concerned, anything he did for his empire or to win a battle for his empire was the morally right thing to do. The second villain was a detective for the same empire’s state security service. She was a skilled detective, professional in her appearance, charming, witty, playfully flirty, and, like the starship captain, a true believer in the empire. Neither one of these characters saw themselves as “the hero in their own story,” they just did their respective jobs the best they could. Whenever I had either of them do, or have subordinates do, any sort of evil deed, I had them mention it casually, in passing, almost as an afterthought, before moving on to mundane like “then my orderly handed me a full mug of coffee and I wondered how he managed to carry from my ready room without spilling any” or “she took a sip from her glass and smiled appreciatively; it really was an excellent champagne.” That’s one way you could go about writing villains – have them be likable, even almost heroic, characters who are very practical and pragmatic when comes to their evil deeds.
A side benefit of writing villains this way, is you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of time writing about those evil deeds or dwelling on any sort of justification the character might use for doing them.
My human villains tend to reflect the bad traits I see in myself and in the world around me. Which is why they’re usually raving egomaniacs and kind of petty and mean-spirited.
There’s always the villain that is more like a force of nature and whose motives are not that clear.
I’ve mentioned I’d been digging deep into Enneatype stuff for character building. One of its things is a theory that our default actions are usually driven by one of the three negative emotions: fear, shame, or rage.
One of the interesting notes is the greed could be driven by either fear or by shame.
Fear, because having all the shinies means as God is your witness, you will never go hungry again.
Shame: because having all the trophies means you are special and no-one can ever tell you you aren’t again.
If he’s motivated by fear, the counter balance may be fear of running out of money which gets exacerbated by the risk of discovery.
Or if he’s motived by avoiding shame, he may be wanting to be able to rub his wealth in the face of all the stuck ups who looked down on him, show them that he’s more worthy than they ever were, even as he craves their admiration.
Personal opinion, what differentiates a hero from a villain is the hero faces their flaws and fears and overcomes them, while the villian becomes consumed by them.
Good insight. I’m going to use that somewhere.
Doesn’t it depend on whatever genre or sub-genre you’re writing in as to how ‘realistic’ your villains need to be? I’ve seen completely ludicrous villains who worked because they were in a very over the top sort of story. More than a few 30’s and 40’s pulp stories come to mind, as do some 70’s and 80’s action-adventure novels of the Mack Bolan variety. And there’s super style stories or space opera where you can really go wild.
Though I’ll admit that even in those a more low-key and realistic villain can be a welcome change of pace.
And what about villains who go from sort-of realistic to more over the top as their plans are ruined? I’m thinking mainly of Vicky Wyman’s Xanadu: Thief of Hearts, where the main villain goes from just a snobbish, arrogant, vindictive man who’s domineering towards the woman he professes to love, to a raving would-be dark tyrant after he allows himself to be possessed by an undead necromancer. His path of descent actually makes some sense in the story.
Even within a certain genre, trying to “ground” a villain and make him more realistic can ruin what made him interesting in the first place. Take Marvel’s Secret Wars and Secret Wars II from the 80s. The first one had a basically omnipotent “Beyonder” capture a bunch of heroes and villains and set them against each other on Battleworld. We never really learned all that much about him and it’s one of my favorite stories. But with Secret Wars II they tried to delve into his personality and motives and the sequel is widely considered a dud, especially compared to the first one. A comic book villain can have real gravitas (for example Magneto in the Fatal Attractions storyline) but sometimes just keeping it simple is the way to go in an over-the-top genre like that.
Villains are difficult, IMHO, because their motivations are alien to our general way of life. You don’t see real villainy out there, usually. People steal money because they want money, that’s understandable. Crimes of passion, deep hatred, repulsive but understandable.
But how about a guy who sets up a fake school and sucks in kids from a third world country to come to Canada and get a fake degree, thereby soaking the kid’s already poor parents for every dime they ever had or ever hope to? That is large scale -evil- and apparently it is happening in my province of Ontario right now.
Who is that guy? Who would do that? If I only understood his root causes, would his evil actions make sense? What makes him tick? What’s his backstory?
Honestly, I DO NOT CARE what that guy’s story is. If he’s in a story I’m reading, what I want is for him to be hounded down, tried, convicted and jailed so hard that not only he never does it again, but all the other a-holes who might be tempted shy away from the idea.
So for me, when I’m a reader, all I need to see is what the villain does. In my first book we never see the villain until the very end. We see one of its minions, briefly. We don’t even spend much time learning what the villain does, beyond a bare description, how it makes people into zombies. The book is about finding a way to beat it without the hero sacrificing his humanity and without getting millions of people killed. (I found a pretty cool way to do it.)
My second book, (which comes out in the next few weeks because I’m tired of waiting) again we only see the villain at the end. We see what he does, briefly, and then the rest of the time is romance, adventure and gunfights. The management of overwhelming power, using it with a light touch to accomplish limited goals.
Third book, we deal with the governmental reaction to the first two outrageous emergencies. Beginning with Earthly bureaucracies, and ending up with an Un-Earthly one. The villains are your run-of-the-mill politicians, bureaucrats, web-spinning spiders in the centers of power. A-holes, basically. The kind that make everyone’s life difficult for their own amusement and enrichment. I had a lot of fun dealing with them, lots of robot spiders getting up in people’s faces, Alice Haddison in Heinlein Mobile Infantry battle armor saying “molon labe!” to the cops.
I like it when we don’t know much about the villain. Just enough to justify the kicking I spend most of the book giving him.