Back in high school, I read a lot of mystery novels, many of which were police procedurals, and I got the basic triumvirate for figuring out who was the killer pounded into my brain: Means, motive, and opportunity. They actually apply to any villain undertaking any dastardly deed: the villain always needs a way to do it, a chance to do it, and a reason to do it. And of the three, motive is the most commonly neglected, to the extreme detriment of many otherwise-excellent stories.
I think there are a couple of reasons why motivation seems to get short shrift so often. For one, people do all sorts of peculiar things in real life for reasons that seem thin to the rest of us. It’s always tempting for a writer to say “But I read in the news where this woman picked up a knife in a restaurant and stabbed the waitress because her tea was cold! So it’s believable! It really happened!” But “it happened in real life” does not absolve the writer from the need to convince the reader that “it” happened in the story…and the whole reason incidents like that make the news in the first place is that they are strange and nearly unbelievable.
Another reason is because authors make the mistake of thinking that making a villainous character unpleasant and unlikeable is enough. While it is true that most people are more easily convinced that someone they don’t like is behaving badly than that someone they do like is behaving badly, just being a nasty SOB doesn’t automatically make someone willing to lie, cheat, murder, blackmail, or commit whatever other crimes one’s villain needs to commit. Unlikeability is not a motive.
The third reason why motive gets neglected a lot, I think, is that villains often don’t spend a lot of time on stage. They are, after all, trying to get away with their crimes without being caught or punished, and that often means keeping a low profile – and always means keeping the main characters from finding out that the villain had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime. This means the writer doesn’t have a lot of chance to show what the villain is really like, even if she knows – and a lot of writers learn about their characters by writing them, which means that a mostly-off-stage villain doesn’t get to be known very well by writer or reader.
And a fourth is that the author sometimes realizes in mid-book that they can twist the plot in a new direction, if only some particular thing happens…and Character A is the only one who is in a position to take that action. So they have A do it, but they forget to go back and figure out why on earth he/she would want to.
A novel I read recently had what looked to me like several of these problems at once. The author had set up an intriguing mystery, plots within plots, and then about halfway through recomplicated things nicely with the discovery that the supposed villain was actually under the influence of an advanced drug that induced and mimicked the obsessive paranoia that can come with late-stage Alzheimer’s. I was racing toward the finish when the discovery of the real villain, the man who had been secretly administering the drug, stopped me cold.
The real villain was, from a plot standpoint, an excellent choice. He had plenty of opportunity, and was one of the few who had the means (access to the drug). He wasn’t onstage much, and he was quite unlikeable – abrupt, suspicious, impolite, and continually cranky. But I couldn’t believe that he would feed a dangerous drug to a man he had supposedly been friends with for over twenty years, merely because he disliked the original and wanted to see them put in prison without getting his own hands dirty. It pretty much wrecked the book for me.
The author would have been much better off if she’d stopped to think more about why her real villain was doing what he did. She had two possible ways to make the book work (maybe more, but two that are blindingly obvious to me at the moment): she could have come up with a stronger reason than unfounded dislike and suspicion for her villain to go after his ultimate victim (a reason strong enough that the villain would betray an old friend in such a horrible way), or she could have turned the villain into a full-blown sociopathic personality who’d finally gotten to the point where he couldn’t hide it.
The second choice is both the easier one to pull off and the one that would result in a weaker book. It would be easier to pull off, because it’s perfectly reasonable that a high-functioning sociopath would have worked hard to conceal that condition, so when it comes out at the end that this is what is behind his actions, it’s plausible for it to be a big surprise. It makes the book weaker, because it’s too similar to what’s already been done – the first “villain” turns out not to be responsible for his actions because of the drug, and the one who’s really responsible is doing it because he has a disease. “Variation is good” applies to plot twists as much as to anything else in a story.
That leaves coming up with a stronger reason for the ultimate villain to drug his friend in order to get the friend to do what he wants done. This is difficult, but doable. Convincing the villain that his friend has betrayed him and deserves to be drugged, for instance, or giving him some dark event in his past that he can only cover up this way, or tying the friend and the victim together in some way that makes the villain see this as an appropriate revenge on both of them.
And it doesn’t really matter whether one is talking about a murder mystery or a Regency Romance or an epic quest novel – if there’s a villain, he’ll be a lot stronger and more interesting if he has really good reasons for doing what he does.
My favorite villains are usually the ones who think they’re the heroes. Whatever their motivation is, they’re utterly convinced they’re the ones doing the right thing. And the best villains are the ones where I’m not 100% sure they’re wrong…
Hm. I wonder if the idea that making a villain nasty or unlikeable is enough to motivate dastardly deeds is the flipside of the real-life perception that being a good person–which often goes hand in hand with being likeable–is sufficient motivation for doing good deeds? Kind of like an offshoot of the “But that’s how it really happened!” argument.
I’m not saying that either of the above works in fiction. Just trying to understand where the “nasty is enough” notion might come from.
I just went back mentally in my recent writing, because what you just said was nudging at me. And now, come to think of it, *I* know why the villians of my story are acting the way they do, but the reader doesn’t. I completely skipped over it in my writing! And this train of thought has just made a stop at Station Character 911. The villians don’t really get more than 1 chapter of stagetime in the novella. I assume they’re mean and nasty and show that through my main characters’ thoughts, but where in the world did these villians come from? How did they find the McGuffin (it’s supposed to be really hard to find)? Why would they do this?
My villians need a lot of work! I kind of avoid them because… well… they’re villianous! 🙂
Cheryl – There’s an old saying that a conflict between two good guys who both have a valid point is a lot more interesting than a conflict between a good guy and a bad guy.
Cindy – I’m not sure where it comes from, but the “good guys are likeable, bad guys are not” thing has been around fiction forever, and it’s a really common trap for writers. Part of it is that when we like somebody, we want them to win…but if they’re a bad guy, then we don’t. It’s easier to keep everything pointed in the same direction if the bad guys are nasty. But the likeable bad guys – or at least, the ones who have at least a few charming characteristics – tend to be the most memorable ones. Quite a few of them, like Doc Smith’s Duquesne and George Lucas’s Darth Vader, end up being redeemed.
Mary – See all the stuff I just said above to Cindy and Cheryl. One of the writer’s jobs is understanding all their characters, villains most especially. And the thing to remember is that villains are people, too. They think they’re doing the right thing (or they come up with twisty reasons why what they’re doing is necessary and/or something they deserve, if they can’t quite convince themselves outright that it’s right).
Another possible reason: because psychologically realistic villains may be less enjoyable for the author – or reader – to spend time around than any of Regular Roy, Captain Special, or Doctor Dolor Man of Mwahaha. Evil’s reputation for attractiveness is often overblown. So the villain is a tempting rug under which to sweep the things that make no sense.
(A very popular cosy crime series here in the UK almost invariably weaves its way through all sorts of trickery and red herrings to the stunning deduction, “X did it for a ridiculous reason, because X was secretly as bananas as a treeful of meth-addled monkeys.”)
One interesting extension of your point is the use of differently textured villains to evoke different reactions from both reader and characters. Sauron in Lord of the Rings is so hollowed-out that he’s virtually a walking hole into hell; Saruman begins with both motives and malice, and falls apart utterly during the book; Denethor is the ruin of a great and dedicated man, spent on resisting evil with neither humility nor hope for his comfort. The range of complexity as well as wickedness offers a range of response that a story with a villain only of a single kind can’t offer. (And so, for instance, I read the reactions to their respective deaths: joy and wonder at Sauron’s, relief and nausea at Saruman’s, pity and horror at Denethor’s. Not just about the degree of villainy, but also in the degree to which it feels like there is anybody home.) Another aspect of your ‘variation is good’, here.
True, such combinations aren’t right for every story; and a villain with little or no ‘there’ there is not, in and of themselves, very interesting. But it seems to me that it is really a state into which people can back themselves, or be pushed. The specialized ways in which more regular folks flounder to cope with that – or to project it falsely out of fear and hate, or to deny its reality out of horror and natural incomprehension – can be very dramatically interesting indeed!
In my current WIP, the real villan is almost never on stage but I know exactly what she’s doing and so she appears to manipulate the three protagonists into doing what she wants.
The fun part was coming up with her motivations but having her hidden behind the MCs, I avoid my usual problem of giving everything away in mental dialogues.