Villains

There is really nothing like a good villain. From Blackie Duquesne to Darth Vader, they’re often the most striking and memorable characters in a story. A lot of the professional writers I know find villains a lot more fun and interesting to write about than heroes; several have gone so far as to turn their plots upside down so that they can write their villains as heroes. Warts and all.

Villains come in several varieties. There’s the villain who is purely evil, who can commit the most heinous of crimes without batting an eyelash or disturbing a (non-existent) conscience, whom the readers love to hate and in whose downfall they can rejoice without guilt or regret. There’s the slightly less evil villain who is at least comprehensible in his villainy; he/she may be a bit over-the-top, but in a way that suits the story. You also have the realistic villain, who is horrifying because he’s recognizable as someone you might meet in real life; this sort can range from the extremely believable and realistic portrayal of a psychotic sociopath (whom most people are unlikely to encounter, we sincerely hope) to the equally believable and realistic portrayal of a narcissistic bureaucrat that everyone recognizes instantly from a go-around day-before-yesterday. And then there are the non-villain villains, the pure antagonists, who are not evil but merely disagree with the hero about what needs doing and/or why and how.

If you want to write a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery adventure, you pretty much by definition need the purely evil, technically cardboard sort of villain, because the whole story and plot will fall apart otherwise. A realistic, believable antagonist-who-just-disagrees is next to impossible to make work in the sort of story; if you do manage to make it work, it’s usually by turning the sword-and-sorcery adventure into some other sort of story entirely. (This can, of course, be a Very Good Thing, but only if you happen not to care much whether you really end up writing a Conan-style sword-and-sorcery.) It is, therefore, reasonable to claim that a realistic antagonist is not a “good villain” for this kind of story.

Similarly, if you are writing a more-or-less realistic novel of complex interstellar politics and interpersonal relationships, a one-dimensional “pure evil” villain is problematic, because the thrust of the story is likely to be more realistic and a cardboard villain will very likely be out of place in such a story. Space opera, on the other hand, can work quite well either way, depending on the story and the writer’s preferences.

My very favorite sort of villain, though, is the villain who has style. This sort tends to be both confident and competent; they have what they see as very good reasons for the things they do; they’re frequently ruthless in pursuit of their goals, but they don’t go for unnecessary violence (though their standards for “necessary” are rather more elastic than most people’s). They’re intelligent and witty, and sometimes they even have some shreds of conscience and/or honor. They’re the ones you secretly wish would change sides.

The trick to creating a “good” villain is to match the level of roundedness and characterization to the sort of story you are telling, and then to put as much work into understanding the villain as a person as you put into understanding the hero. You don’t have to like the villain, particularly, and you certainly don’t have to identify with him (or with the hero either, for that matter). You just have to understand them, to whatever depth is appropriate to the story or more, and then reflect that understanding in your written portrayal of the villain in the story.

Where I think a lot of folks go wrong is in paying insufficient attention to the sort of villain they need for the sort of story they’re writing, especially when the story starts mutating in process. The writer starts off with a Conan-type adventure, where all the characters are types: Noble Hero, Evil Villain, Quirky Sidekick, Smarmy Minion, etc. The action-outline reflects this. But then the writer starts actually writing the story, following the Noble Hero and his Quirky Sidekick. By the time things are a couple of chapters in, the Noble Hero has expressed some rather non-Noble sentiments about peasant girls and mentioned some of his internal conflicts about fighting generally, and the Quirky Sidekick is having a minor depression over his attraction to the Hero’s promised bride, and in short, they’re starting to act like people rather than types.

But the Evil Villain and Smarmy Minion haven’t come on stage yet. The writer hasn’t had to live with them and figure out why they’re having nightmares about mourning doves and drinking quarts of Maalox and making occasional elliptical remarks about safety. So they remain types, motivated mainly by the necessities of the plot rather than by their own interior needs and wants. And if the writer doesn’t notice this, the result is an unbalanced book with realistic (sort of) good guys and cardboard villains. Often, even if the writer does notice, he/she notices too late to do the real work of making the villains into the same sort of rounded characters the heroes have become, so they throw in a couple of stock motivations like a traumatic childhood and hope that will cover things. It seldom does.

One of the ways of avoiding this problem is to bring the Evil Villain on stage right from the start. This is easier to do in some stories than in others; for instance, in the sort of Romance where the heroine has to choose between two suitors, it really isn’t very effective to bring the “bad” suitor on stage at the last minute. In an epic quest fantasy, on the other hand, it usually makes no sense for the Evil Overlord to be hanging around the Humble Hero’s village beginning in Chapter One. To get around this, a lot of authors move to multiple viewpoint format, providing scenes that look in on the villain from an early point in the book.

It’s also common to build up an off-stage villain’s reputation by having other characters warn the protagonist about him/her, have the hero run across the aftermath of horrible things the villain has done, etc. One has to be careful with this, however, as it is easy to build up an off-stage villain to the point where the actual villain is a big disappointment when he/she finally appears at last (because nobody could live up to the scary reputation the writer has created).