Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
Villainy
Character nitty-gritty
Several questions have come in to the blog about villains, like this one from Jenna R.: “Does anyone have ideas on how to craft a believable villain?”
Actually, sometimes—in a superhero comic book, for example—a villain doesn’t have to be believable. If Superman can change from meek and mild mannered to staunch and courageous just by changing his outfit in a phone booth, the villain doesn’t have to have much depth or motivation either. This kind of hero is born good and the bad guy is born bad. As Kirk Douglas says chillingly in the old movie The List of Adrian Messenger, “Evil is.”
Our villain may operate in the background of the story and never even show up in person. For example, in the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle, the reader never directly meets Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarty. In this bit of the story “The Final Problem,” Holmes is speaking about Moriarty to Dr. Watson, his faithful assistant and the narrator of the series:
“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans.”
Holmes goes on to describe a meeting he had with Moriarty, and the reader learns that the villain is tall and “his forehead domes out in a white curve,” a vivid detail. But the man isn’t shown in action or in his customary setting or in much conversation. He may boast to his accomplices or be silent for hours on end. His mansion may be filled with antiques, which he dusts to calm his nerves, or he may live in an attic and own no more than a bed and a dresser, and he may never be nervous. And so on. The ordinary clues that build a character are missing. Arthur Conan Doyle relies instead on the reader’s imagination to make Moriarty threatening, and we jump in, building monumental evil.
When the reader does come face-to-face with a villain, however, he should be interesting. In my book Dave at Night, the main villain is the superintendent of the orphanage where Dave lives. He is a terrible man. His name is Mr. Bloom, but the orphans call him Mr. Doom. Here are snippets from his monologue before he beats Dave up:
Mrs. Bloom and I love the finer things in life, the theater, concerts. . . . Mrs. Bloom’s little hobby is following the doings of high society. . . . So one might wonder at my choice of vocation. I admit it’s a sacrifice, but someone has to do the dirty work. Someone has to take in children like you. . . . Otherwise you’d have nowhere to go. However, it’s like putting a rattlesnake to your bosom.
He’s awful, but he has a personality, and the reader hates him even more for it.
Of course, in order for Mr. Bloom to be understood as evil, Dave has to be sympathetic. If he’s a young thief who likes to rob old people, Mr. Bloom’s sacrifice may seem real.
One way to craft a complex villain is through surprises. I’ll show you what I mean.
Ordinarily the villain won’t be our MC, so we probably won’t have her thoughts and feelings to work with, but we do have all the other tools of character creation, like action, setting, appearance, and dialogue.
Let’s call our villain Monique. She’s already burned down a barn, a tree house, and the tree it was in, and she’s plotting to set a series of fires in the nearby city of Makville. Some of the story takes place in her house, where the reader is surprised to discover that she collects teddy bears—and she doesn’t hang them by the neck in her bedroom. She bakes cookies—not poisoned—for a homeless shelter and feeds oatmeal cookie dough to the family beagle.
In dialogue, she can be witty and interested in other characters, which may be creepy. When your hero says something that puts him at a disadvantage, Monique can astonish the reader by letting it slide—although she may use the information later.
We can reveal her diary, in which she writes only about her visits to the homeless shelter and nothing about her fascination with fire. Or maybe she alludes to it in a vague way, like “Mother scolded me today. I have no idea what she was going on about, but she was very angry.”
Yikes!
Even description can make her more complicated—dark eye makeup with pink lipstick. Pudgy face, muscular body. Terrible posture. An unexplained bandage on her arm.
If Monique is sympathetic, there is a danger that the reader won’t understand when she acts on her wickedness. He may think, “I identify with Monique, and I like her; I don’t believe she’d behave so despicably.” If we want to mislead the reader for a while, that’s fine. But if not, the solution is to introduce Monique’s evil side as soon as the reader meets her. We show her being awful, or we have a character the reader trusts talk about some vileness she’s committed. Right from the start we’ve established that she isn’t good.
The villain—or if not the villain, strictly speaking, the foe—doesn’t even have to be a character; it can be a disease (as in The Two Princesses of Bamarre) or weather or a cosmological force. In Norse mythology, as I understand it, evil is destined to win eventually—not a particular embodiment of evil, like Loki, but evil itself. Political theories—communism, Nazism, to name two—can play the part of the villain.
The foe can even be a belief. I once worked with a man who believed himself unlucky. Whenever anything bad happened to him, he blamed it on his rotten luck. This belief robbed him of hope and stopped him from taking action to help himself. If he were my MC, he would be his own worst enemy. We see this kind of internal foe often in fiction. In superhero comics again, villains come and go, but loneliness is often the enemy that can never be defeated.
Although it’s fine to create villains who are simply evil, diversifying is good. Try your hand at a sympathetic villain. Make her more than likable; make her lovable. Maybe she takes such delight in her dastardly deeds that we can’t help but chortle along. Maybe he harms people, but his remorse makes us forgive him again and again.
When I was a young woman, I knew a real-life villain who had no one’s best interest at heart but his own. He took people’s money and persuaded them to devote their lives to him. He was wicked, but, oh my, he was fun. A conversation with him kept you on your toes and made you think. His sense of humor was complicated but not mean. At first I wouldn’t get the joke; a few seconds would pass, and then I’d be laughing my head off. When he wanted to, he could make me feel as smart as he was, and when he wanted to, he could make me feel as dumb as a termite. He would make a great character. The reader would enjoy being in his company even while recognizing what a miserable person he was. So one strategy is to make our villain delightful on the page.
Most readers of The Two Princesses of Bamarre fall for the dragon Vollys even though she intends to kill the MC, Addie. Vollys’s tragedy is that she always incinerates the people she loves. She traps them, comes to adore them, and spends every minute in their company until they start to drive her crazy. Then she kills them and misses them instantly and mourns them eternally.
One reason the reader loves Vollys is because she appreciates Addie, just as the reader does. That’s a second strategy. If our villain hates the world with one exception, our MC, the reader will discount the world.
Vollys is also expert at showing her side of the story. Dragons and humans have battled for centuries. She reveals the dragon angle on the conflict so that the reader has to sympathize. Here are a few lines of the poem Vollys recites about her mother’s death at the hands of a human hero, Drualt:
Swift-flying Hothi,
Slain by Drualt.
And Zira, flame
Of fury, young beauty,
Her he slew also.
Men call him
The Laugher, the Hero.
Drualt, stifling fire,
Snuffing life,
No hero to dragons.
So that’s another strategy: to show events from our villain’s perspective.
Even a whiny, annoying antagonist will be better tolerated by the reader if our MC loves him. Let’s imagine that our MC, Thea, baby-sits a troubled seven-year-old, Ricky, who is in a terrible mood when the reader meets him. Thea may be mad at him, but she still loves him, and in her thoughts she tells the reader why. It could go something like this: “Thea sat back in the couch, stunned. When she’d told Ricky about feeling stupid, she’d never thought he’d use the information against her. From his triumphant face, she saw he’d been saving it up. Then he ducked his head as if he expected her to come at him. She saw the curls at the nape of his neck and his T-shirt label sticking out. Her fury melted.”
Along the same lines—and this is one more strategy—an outside, omniscient narrator’s affection for a character can make the reader like him. This is from Peter Pan again, a few pages after Captain Hook has wantonly killed one of his own pirates:
Hook heaved a heavy sigh; and I know not why it was, perhaps it was because of the soft beauty of the evening, but there came over him a desire to confide to his faithful bo’sun the story of his life.
Later on, because of Peter’s wiles, Hook believes himself to be a fish. Who can hate such a silly man?
Consider fictional characters you know who are mixed blessings but beloved anyway. Think about how the author has reconciled you to them. Go back to the books and examine the way it was done, the sentences and incidents that created the effect.
We don’t need a villain or evil in every story. There’s no evil when the enemy is a circumstance, like a storm. What there always has to be is struggle, something or someone our MC has to grapple with.
Writing time!
We’re going to use clichés for these prompts. Clichés are expressions that we’ve all heard tons of times. They continue to be repeated because they get an idea across neatly and quickly. Some, like “blanket of snow,” are just catchy ways to capture an image. But others, like “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” have tremendous depth. They’re great, except for the small detail of having been way overused. We’re hauling a few in here for our villains.
• “Makes him (or her) tick.” Visit your villain’s childhood and write a flashback that shows how he became bad, or when he first acted on his evil.
• “Calm before the storm.” Write a scene with rising tension that sets your villain off. Bring a victim into this scene.
• “Can of worms.” The brain of a villain is likely to be an unpleasant place. Her thoughts may be different from the thoughts of ordinary people—more chaotic or more disciplined or more or less fully formed. What goes on in the mind of your villain? Write what she thinks before she falls asleep or when she wakes up or walks down the street.
• “24/7.” Show how your scoundrel never has time off from his evil. Maybe as soon as he performs one heinous act, the urge rises to perform another. Maybe he ticks off his villainy the way we check off items on a to-do list.
• “World class.” Show your evildoer getting the best of another stinker or a clever and powerful good opponent. Let your reader see what your hero is up against.
Now, put all or some of them together in a story.
Have fun, and save what you write!