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Joined: 8/13/2011
Posts: 272
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While we can often talk about the wheres and whys of our protagonists, it is often our villains that define our stories. So how do you make them memorable and more than moustache-twirling black hats?
One rule I find useful is to make their motivations understandably human. Whether it's fear, greed, ego or even hope, having your villain driven by something people can understand or even get behind can make them so much more compelling. It can also help define what they're doing. A character consumed by ego will act in a way completely different to one consumed by fear.
So how do you define and establish your villains?
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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LOVE THIS QUESTION! Bumping so it's visible to others.
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Joined: 4/30/2011
Posts: 662
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Oh my! Such a hard question to answer.
I have a villain that's bored. He's the god of vice and is trying to occupy himself during his banishment while not getting into too much trouble.
I have an ambitious queen who continues to grab for more power despite half her children walking out on her because she's such an awful parent and person.
I have a "my way or the highway" religious zealot whose as morally pure as silt.
Honestly, I don't know how I do it. I just write and see what the story gives me.
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Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
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My villains aren’t villains: to them, they’re the heroes of their own stories.
Don’t misunderstand me—I routinely write about truly detestable scumbags; it’s my way of taking revenge on the sonsofbitches: racist, neo-fascist, xenophobic haters and jingoistic yahoos of every color and stripe; homicidal monsters in human form who manifest pronounced psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies.
My evil characters have a backstory and fully-developed psychology which defines and motivates them (whether I share all of the specific details with the reader or not).
Moreover, they all want something—but the goddamn heroes of the story keep getting in their way . . .
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It's like politics. Think of two polarized opposites, say Ron Paul and Bill Clinton. Pick a side and make the other one the villain. It's easy to do if you believe in your side. Stack the storyline against your protagonist enough to make sure your hero has the reader's sympathy, though. It wouldn't do to admit Carl is right.
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Joined: 8/3/2012
Posts: 8
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Maybe cliché, but remember your villain has a mother too. There’s always someone in the story world capable of loving or at least having fond memories of the Villain, and yes even if they are a disgusting killer, or child molester. Turn on any crime show and listen to the family of the suspect or killer talk about them. As far as how to define this within your story, It’s heavily tied to the POV you’ve decided to use. Obviously if you have chapters or scenes that follow the villain around then lots of backstory and introspective thinking / dialog can really help define who this character is. If on the other hand you stick to the POV from your Protagonist then you have to be careful with how you do this. The villain has to be defined through the experiences and encounters from only the protagonists perspective. There are still lots of ways to do it. Newspaper articles, internet searches done by your protagonist. Maybe there is a relationship with in the book between the hero and the villains brother, or ex-girlfriend. Another thing I find that writers sometimes forget is what’s already been said from all the previous posts. Each villain has goal and life of their own throughout the story. It’s commonly understood that when we are laying the groundwork for any story regarding the hero, we show them at some point in their status quo environment. What was going on in their life, what were their goals and so forth. Too many times the villain suddenly just appears and leaps from the bushes with a knife in his hand and proceeds to terrorize and control every other character in the story. It’s fine and also sometimes necessary to just have them pop into the characters life this way, but it’s not okay to let the story proceed too far without backing up and somehow defining their actions by defining who they are.
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• While we can often talk about the wheres and whys of our protagonists,
it is often our villains that define our stories. So how do you make
them memorable and more than moustache-twirling black hats?
An easy question. Only the protagonist thinks of the character as a villain. Do the members of the bad guy's gang think him despicable, or as a someone pursuing what they feel they have a right to have?
You want an antagonist, not a villain. Villains are the implacable enemy who kills for the sake of killing, and ticks of plot points because the script says he must.
But the antagonist simply has values that come in conflict with the protagonist. That could be something as simple as believing s/he has a right to take what you believe is yours or as complex as trying to force you to sell your beloved land to them at what they view as a fair price, so they can build something they believe needs building, instead of preserving a site that must not be lost, in your view..
Place two such people into a situation that has no resolution or workable compromise, but from which neither can withdraw and you have a crucible, the classic death spiral..
Actors have a fun exercise in imprivisation. They tell one actor that they've gone to the apartment to get $50 that's owed them. Nothing else is to be discussed.
Actor two, who lives in the apartment, is told that their goal is to get the other actor to give them the product that wasn't ever delivered, and to discuss nothing else.
It makes for an interesting scene. Taking two of our characters into a scene with opposing goals can do the same.
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Joined: 4/24/2013
Posts: 45
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How did I define them?
My antagonist is ruled by his ego. He's a prince... a conceited one who believes that his title means he can do whatever he wants, whoever he wants, and that others need to bow to his needs and whims. Concerning his past and unfunctional relationship with his father, he's also headstrong and driven by a need to prove himself to his father.
The second antagonist I added to the mix in the second novel is a witch consumed by the loss of her twin sister. The grief overwhelmed her and made her search for the means and ways to bring her sister back. If it meant garnering more power, she would do that, if it meant trampling over someone, she doesn't have a problem with that either.
Put those two together and it gets messy... especially when they have similar goals.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 222
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There isn't a whole lot of difference between my antagonists and my protagonists -- they're people, they just happen to be people on opposing sides.
My protagonists, however, do things like run enemies off of cliffs because that's the most efficient way to get rid of them (and feed the local wildlife at the same time.)
It just happens that my antagonists often do things that even my protagonists won't do.
That said, at one point in the story, the protagonists and antagonists have to all get along or they won't survive long enough to try to kill each other off -- and my characters do have some sense to them!
I don't distinguish between protagonists and antagonists when I write. They all have their own goals, I just make sure those goals conflict.
If I had to say one thing I do differently between the protagonists and antagonists is that the antagonists don't have any lines they won't cross, while the protagonists do. Barely, but they do.
But, that's in that one story.
The other one, the antagonists are downright creeps and I keep wanting to burn them with fire. Unfortunately, my protagonists don't believe in combusting their foes, so I have to sigh and bear that inner burden...
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Joined: 5/8/2013
Posts: 25
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I agree with the above comments. My antagonist really thinks he is a hero.
He was abused as a boy, murdered his abuser, and went to war aged sixteen. He has deep psychological scars, and I've tried to handle those sensitively. He is also a sadist, responsible for mass killings, abuses of power and atrocities, and will do anything to preserve his family. He is, essentially, a cross between Vlad the Impaler and Henry VIII.
He is aware that he is not a "good" man, but he would be deeply offended if the word "evil" was bandied around. His goals are, as far as he is concerned, perfectly legitimate, and the ends justify the means. He doesn't break his own personal codes of conduct, and as far as he's concerned that makes up for everything else.
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Joined: 4/24/2013
Posts: 18
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Like CM Rosens my villain was a victim of a callous father who denied him his birthright by refusing to acknowledge his parentage. He believes himself entitled to inherit from the man he's hated his entire life and when a random set of circumstances present him with his chance he takes it. Unfortunately he doesn't know about the one person with the knowledge to ruin everything for him and when he does find out that he could be exposed, that's when he really crosses over to the dark side.
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Joined: 5/11/2013
Posts: 4
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I, too, like treating my villains as protagonists with backstory, personality and family, as well as give them goals that aren't evil "just to be evil", but more along the lines of "a means to an end." Maybe something happened in the past that drove them half-crazy with grief (and thus the Evil Necromancer is only raising the dead in order to find his murdered wife children). Or their means are oppressive, but they're walking that road because their goal is "good" (they want their people to enjoy freedom again; they believe in a "good" God whose teachings were unfortunately half-twisted by centuries of scribes-committed typos; and so on).
In the odds my villains are truly "evil", I place them more on a Blue and Orange Morality scale (meaning they think in alien ways, and can't really be judged against human standards). For instance, in the story I'm working on these days ("Was"), one of the main antagonists is a ghost who devours other people's souls, but does so because it's the only way for such spectres to go on existing. (In other words, is "wanting to survive" something really evil, or is it only natural? Is a famished wolf eating a human "evil", or is it just trying to go on living?)
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
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I'd like to echo Carl E. Reed here. My villains are the heroes of their own stories.
Some of the most evil people in history have carried out unspeakable deeds, not because they wanted to be bad guys, but because they believed they were doing the right thing. In their minds, they are a hero.
I try to create a villain that walks a grey line.
Take my book, SALEM. The Brotherhood are the big bad in the story, hunting down witches and stripping them of their power or killing them. They believe that magic is evil, the touch of the devil, and goes against God. They believe to the marrow of their bones that they are right.
One of the books written in the SALEM series approaches the storyline from the POV of the Brotherhood and their battle against the rebel witches. I wanted to show the reader neither side was actually right and if they sat down, cracked a cold one and talked they could work it out.
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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My villains tend to be villains, not just antagonists. They're people who either actively enjoy causing suffering, or who have, for philosophical or personal reasons, decided that the suffering of others is not worth taking into consideration when they make their decisions. They don't think of themselves as the heroes of their stories or as "good guys" -- they think the concept of heroism is naive and that goodness or altruism is a delusion clung to by fools and sheep.
This is not to say that I write them as one-dimensional embodiments of senseless malevolence. They have their rationales, and they derive those rationales from their upbringing or their life histories. On a subconscious level, they respond positively to those who treat them nicely, even if on a conscious level they rationalize ways to exploit those people and sneer at them. They are often outwardly confident and inwardly insecure, and suffer from some critical loss or neglect in their past.
But they're still bad guys, and they wouldn't argue with anyone who called them that -- although they might cut his throat if they thought he would inconvenience them by making their true natures widely known.
I write these kinds of villains because I am interested in the notion of heroism -- of the conscious choices and unconscious natural inclinations that lead some people to actively pursue a better world. Villains are the inverse of that, and as a result, they fit nicely in with the themes I like to explore.
Plus, they're fun, and it's much more satisfying to bring about their downfall than it would be if they were simply people whose objectives were at variance with the protagonists'.
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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(With that said, on the way to defeating the villains, my heroes do often run into impediments in the form of non-villainous people whose perspectives or goals run contrary to the good guys' quests. In some cases, these are not nice people, and in others, they're perfectly decent. But the ultimate threat is almost always someone relatively nasty.)
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Who are they that we should call 'villains'? Are we not, all, boiling, gobbling, and spewing from the same pot?
I used to think I needed to write my 'bad guys' as completely and directly evil-to-good as possible. Now, I've calmed down and decided to let them (the villain) tell more about (our own) innate character and how (we can) deal with it. The 'hero' is, usually, a supporting cast member. Of course, if not for the hero, the bad guy would, too, have no purpose.
(For, in truth: 'There is none righteous; no, not one...)
My 'villains' have a testimonial or they're just 'built' that way. And though they be (seemingly) remorseless and/or prideful, I always find a way to give them 'heart' -reason- in the end. (Yes, I know it's fiction; I only hope for more.)
(Everything/one has a time and a purpose under Heaven.)
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This is a good question. I'm writing a series in which I have a evil, ruthless, he'll rip your limbs off without thinking villain. And, I've read several times in writing books 'make your villain human' 'there is no such thing as pure evil'. So, I had trouble figuring out what this meant and what the hell to do about it, because I'm all for big scary evil villains, I love them, especially when they are snarky and everyone hates them.
Well, I decided my villain is a downright evil fecker and he is going to be an evil fecker the whole story, because that is his role. But, I DO agree that you should make the villain's motivations understandable. Nobody really is purely evil unless your the Devil I suppose, and even then, he once was an angel, who now has a beef with God. His feelings were hurt because God loved us more and so he was punished, because he wanted more affection and attention, which I think is a shitty deal, don't you? (Disclosure: I am not preaching or trying to convert anyone to Christianity. I am using God and the Devil as an example. The Bible after all is a book, right?) So, my point is the Devil has a reason for being evil. He is resentful, hateful, and seeks vengeance which are all humane emotions. The Devil has a reason for being all pissy with us and wanting to torture us for all eternity, he's jealous.
This led me to create my villain as someone who will boil his enemies in a vat of fermenting beer and eat their skin off without feeling bad at all, because they stole something of his and he needs it to destroy the world...which, I know seems evil, but he was very hurt that they stole his treasures, which I think readers can understand.
Now, I'm talking about extremes here, because that is what I have trouble with, creating an evil villain who isn't a cookie cutter cutout of gooey evil dough. I know the antag can be the lawyer defending a homicidal maniac, who, besides defending a sociopath, isn't really evil, or even the homicidal maniac who was abused as a child and has a mental illness, but those types of antags are another story all together.
A good example of making an evil villain understandable is Voldemort. He is a scary, evil, bald headed dude. Nobody likes him, besides Bellatrix who is out of her mind. But, poor, poor Tom Riddle is the little boy who had the troubled upbringing, which is at the root of his evilness.
Cheers!
Toni
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Joined: 4/7/2013
Posts: 26
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A good villain is someone we see early and often in the story. At least, that's my view of creating a good villain. Finding a villain that we never meet in person rarely works, with the exception of perhaps Sauron from Lord of the Rings.
A good villain, just like any other character, has traits that we come to recognize, like Darth Vader's raspy mechanical voice or a black hat or twirling the ends of a mustache. I want to be able to instantly recognize and hate the character.
And I think maybe some sort of antisocial behavior immediately upon introduction to the villain helps. Again, think about Darth Vader storming aboard the Rebel ship and choking the life out of a guy while demanding to see the ambassador. It can be subtle, but at the same time it makes you want to punch the villain.
And finally I agree with what Toni state above -- there has to be a believable motivation, but in a way that does not make the villain seem too sympathetic. Why does the villain act they way that he/she does? Is it to right a ill-perceived wrong? A self defense mechanism taken too far to avoid being hurt again? A deep seated guilt for something done in the past that leads to an unnatural obsession? Abuse or neglect as a child that twisted all sense of social norms? Or maybe something physically or chemically wrong in the person's brain?
Just my two cents worth.
Dave
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Villains have always been easier for me to write than heroes (well, interesting heroes, anyway). It's easy to understand why someone would join the Dark Side. A number of my villains are driven by ambition or ideological extremism, and they don't care what happens to other people as long as they get what they want. (It's not that they're actively trying to steamroll other people - they just don't care if they do or not.)
One favorite villain of mine is a 19-year-old prodigy, who could have easily grown up to be just like the protagonist of the story, who's pushing 40, or even surpass said protagonist - were it not for the ailment that will kill him within months. He hates the protagonist for having all the things he's never going to have the chance to have, and he has a pathological hatred for the protagonist as a result. --edited by Ian Nathaniel Cohen on 6/24/2013, 4:15 PM--
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Joined: 8/28/2012
Posts: 6
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Wow, what a great post! And a very good question. When it comes to me, I want my villains to have motivation; as you said, a human purpose behind their actions. Doomsday rays and world domination are fine, but I prefer the villains whose side you could almost understand. Those are the types of villains I like to construct. There is no black and white in the world, and I when I write I try to bring that grayscale attitude into my stories and my characters--consequently, my villains too. They make choices based on their personalities and based on what THEY think is right--not what necessarily is right. And it's a question too, of what is truly right or wrong. The good guys may be saving the day, but is it possible that the villain merely had a different solution to the same problem? These are things that I consider when I construct villains. When they kill milllions of people, is it because they're evil. . . or is it simply because they were trying to solve a problem. In the eyes of the good guys, they're murderers and wrong, but my villains don't see themselves as villains, they see themselves as people trying to fix an issue, whether it's with society, the world, etc.
It's the disagreement in views between protagonist and antagonist that afford them the labels "hero" and "villain." But, is the hero not the villain in the eyes of the antagonist?
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Joined: 8/18/2013
Posts: 31
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I like my villains to be evil by design. They have no past a human might understand, and they wouldn't care for you to. The every day person is nothing more than and ends to a means, like an animal they kill for a fur coat, or a cut of prime meat. People have no feelings they care to understand, they are nothing compared to their superiority, or beauty. You might stop to look into his beautiful dark eyes, or watch the sun play across his dark silky hair. You might even stop long enough to wonder how any one man can be so drop dead gorgeous, but it would be the last thing you ever do.
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Joined: 11/27/2013
Posts: 4
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Exactly!! That's how I feel about my "villains". Everyone sees them as the bad guy but is the most morally sound of the bunch..
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Joined: 4/28/2011
Posts: 24
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The bad guys in my stories developed into villians over time. With rare exceptions, there isn't one triggering event that makes them suddenly go evil. Like my protagonists and supporting characters, my villians are shaped by their family dynamic, who they tangled with or got along with in school, the neighborhood they live in, their IQ, disposition, and emotional maturity/stability. My goal is to make the villian as realistic and complex as the hero.
Sometimes villians are more like foils than evil incarnate. Their battles with protagonists are the result of misunderstandings or false assumptions.
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How do I write my villains? I am not sure. All I know is they are there. I am writing the draft of a book where the conflict was all suppose to be cultural and personal. Can love defeat all sort of thing. No. Can't do that. Nope. Nada. 
Instead here comes the Borderline with sociopathic tendencies who wants to murder the love interest because he's fixated on the MC.
My last book which is in first rewrite was about two detectives and the Serial killer was so strong, he almost took over the book which I didn't want. So I ended up promising him a sequel of his own with the characters.
The Borderline, I'm not sure of his whole story yet.
The Serial killer is killing his mother who drown his older and younger brother and tried to drown him. He kills teen age redheaded girls. He's killing his mother before she has children. His younger brother was 9 months old and his older brother was almost 4 years old. His mother had red hair. Why did she do it? She wanted rid of them. What was her goal when she got out of jail? To get married and have more children.
My other sort of Bad guy on the romantic side of it ranges from 'I hate Mac to I like Mac to Sometimes I hate him and sometimes I really like him" I get a whole range of feelings about him. His goal is simply to get back the one he is in love with since he screwed up the relationship. I think he's probably the best job even tho I write the evil guys much better but I should I worked for 14/15 years in forensic psych --edited by philo on 12/6/2013, 4:03 PM--
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Joined: 9/9/2013
Posts: 6
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I
like to start with an Archetype from another medium, since most of my stories tend
to involve people with magic and super powers of some kind; I look to comic and
movies. Then I place these characters in
my story and figure out what I want them to be to advance the plot and
challenge the hero. Once I figure that
out I work backwards through the villains life to figure out how he got the way
he is. I try to come up with a back
story that fits what I need, but what usually happens, which I feel is a good
thing, is the back story gives the character a life of his/her own. Most times the character I end up with is
nothing like the character I envisioned.
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