Writing Worthy Villains

What not to do

1.     Pointless Cruelty

If you’ve spent any time trying to write a good villain you’ve heard the advice not to have an evil villain just for evil’s sake. It’s not believable and the audience can’t sympathize with the character. An invested audience is one that has investment in all your characters, not just your hero.

2.     Unthreatening goals

Not only should your villain’s goal be counter to your hero’s goals, they also have to threaten your hero personally and all the way up Maslow’s ladder of needs.

It’s why villains so often threaten the life of a superhero’s loved ones. The superhero will get out of this jamb alive, but will his or her mortal loved one? And what would the loss of that all too basic human need: love, do to our hero???

3.     Lacking Power

An incompetent or inept villain is a comedy relief, not a true villain. Be sure to give your villain the power to hurt your hero otherwise he’s serving a completely different role in the story.

4.     Avoiding Comeuppance

When the story ends and it feels like the villain got off too easy, your audience feels cheated. They’ve come along with you on this ride, this quest for justice, and if the villain doesn’t pay they feel let down, cheated, and like their time has been wasted. Don’t forget your face off scene between hero and villain; it’s a big part of customer satisfaction.

5.     Your audience can’t sympathize with your villain

This happens when the author attempts to create sympathy for the villain but fails. This can happen for a couple of reasons. Perhaps you’ve not fully introduced your audience to the villain. You know all of your characters much better than your audience. While you may have written multiple bios on your villain and countless scenes that will never see the light of day. Your audience only has what you give them on paper. Make sure to give them enough. This is one of the reasons it’s so beneficial to have someone else edit your work. They, as the reader, can see when you’ve put too little on the page, effectively alienating us from your characters. It’s a story killer.

Another reason your audience may have trouble sympathizing with your villain is if they pass the limit on what your audience can accept as morally redeemable. Things like: killing small animals, hurting children, torture, and violence of a sexual nature can be triggering to some audiences to the point where they will either stop reading or at the very least not be willing to recommend your book.

6.     Insufficient Motivation

If your villain wants to blow up the world has he considered the fact that he too lives on the planet and needs a place to escape to while the world burns? These villains do exist, and they can work, but they have to be carefully written.

If your villain is so propelled by a need for revenge that  he/she is willing to end all humanity in a move that will hurt even themselves you need to have your hero (or some character in your story) get this out of them, the why, and the what they plan to do afterward. Do they have a plan to survive? Or is revenge worth dying for?

An insufficiently motivated villain will fall flat. And if he doesn’t earn his way into the story you might as well not have a villain at all.

Steps to doing it right

Create the villain’s backstory

Your villain’s backstory is the most important part of his/her bio sheet. What drives your villain? What is his misbelief about the world? about himself? How was he wronged? And why does he believe his crime is going to set it right?

Villains who are evil just for the sake of being evil are two-dimensional. Every criminal from petty theft to murder has a motivation: Did your criminal grow up stealing bread because he was hungry and graduate to stealing diamonds when other more straight and narrow opportunities seemed out of reach? Or did he watch his parents die in front of his eyes and vow to avenge their murders? So he goes around killing anyone who gets in his way while he attempts to exact revenge.

2

Design the villain as a person

You must complete a character bio on your villain just as you would for any main character. What are your villain's likes and dislikes? What does he or she look like? Is he highly intelligent? What are his special skills? What makes him tick?

Is he tall? Is she diminutive? Does he have hauntingly beautiful eyes or a stare that can break right through you?

A two-dimensional villain isn’t nearly as interesting as one we can relate to. Maybe he’s great at talking his way out of sticky situations or has an uncanny ability to charm anyone.

3

Name your villain

Hannibal Lecter is a cannibal who liked to skin his victims , leading easily to the nickname, Hannibal the Cannibal.

Darth Vader means Dark Father. The internet will tell you this is wrong, and I believe them (this is a wormhole you’ll have to go down on your own. I’ll never get those hours back, you’ve been warned.) But the reality is that when you say Darth Vader (knowing what, little, I know about Star Wars) I still think Dark Father which makes it a perfectly fitting name for the character.

And Lord Voldemort’s name comes from French, meaning ‘flight of death’ or ‘theft of death’ which he accomplishes by becoming immortal.

Even not knowing the details of the story you can see how fitting these names are.

A great name infuses your villain with life and personality.

Spend some time on this, google name generators and how to name your villain, it’s worth the effort.

4

Finalize the motivation

At some point in the writing process you may find that you need to dig deeper on your villain’s story. Your hero is not the only character with an arc, your villain has a journey of his own.

At this point, you can use a technique where you write a synopsis of your story from the perspective of your villain. Write a broad strokes overview of the entire story from the villain’s POV. Remember: All villains think of themselves as the hero of their story, so the story from their perspective will look a lot different from your protagonist’s view point.

That’s a good thing! You are creating the root of the conflict by putting those two points of view at odds.

5

Remember to make your villain likable

Add some redeeming qualities. No one is two-dimensional, we are all multi-layered and dynamic.

Find little ways to humanize your villain. For instance, maybe your villain is a killer but has a soft spot for furry things or a penchant for helping out the elderly due to a beloved grandfather.

If you can’t imagine siding with the Wicked Witch of the West perhaps you haven’t really paid attention to the Wizard of Oz or maybe you haven’t seen Wicked. Dorothy killed her sister and stole the ruby slippers. A great villain must have a realistic backstory and motivation, one that we can all sympathize with.

It can be difficult to break out of the black and white mentality of good vs. evil. For this reason, many villains are given a devastating backstory. When your audience feels a bit of connection not only to your MC but also to your villain your story suddenly becomes multifaceted in a way it wasn’t before. 6

Connect your villain to your hero

Once you’ve got a good handle on your villain’s: character, motivations, backstory, and viewpoint, you need to inextricably link him or her to your hero. Your hero and villain must be hopelessly intertwined if not at the start of the story certainly by the end.

Their actions must play off one another and spur the other one on.

Heroes and villains who can act independently of one another, whose actions do  not affect the other leave the story feeling aimless, it’s as if the author is telling two different stories instead of one.

In writing this article I got lots of help from mythcreants.com and thenovelsmithy.com