Getting to Know Villains
Today I’m blogging about creating complex villains because as a professional writer, I am an expert on the subject. Ha! Quite the opposite. I chose this topic because it’s super hard and I’m trying to learn more about it myself. I’ll make a deal with you: I’ll share with you what I’ve picked up, and maybe you can offer me some tips, too. Yay, teamwork!
I blogged once about how writers can be horrible friends because we may use aspects of people we know when developing our characters, and those characters may not always be the most wonderful people. In that post, I shared how I’d modeled a villain after someone I admired because I was attempting to give the villain some depth and charisma. Well, guess what? I decided the plot wasn’t working, so I made that villain (let’s call him Character A) a good guy and then took another character (let’s call him Character B, who started out as a REALLY good guy) and made HIM the villain. I almost feel guilty about it because I liked Character B so much. When I created Character B, I wanted him to be really cool and really sweet, so I loosely based his personality on someone from my high school and college days who was—you guessed it—really cool and sweet. I gave Character B charming quirks based on this real-life person, made him the most likeable character EVER, and then decided the plot worked better if Character B were only pretending to be cool and sweet. My plot now ROCKS. Why? Because Dang! Who saw that coming?! (Originally, not even I did, and I wrote it!)
Point is, a stock character with a handlebar mustache does not a complex villain make. (Although now that I type “handlebar mustache,” I suddenly want to create a teen character who has one because that’s kind of so weird I’m intrigued. Hmmm….)
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to create a compelling villain is to walk around inside his/her head for a while. Get to know him/her. Find the intrigue among the evil. Not fun. If you knew a villainous person in real life, you’d want to avoid him, but as a writer, you have to know him well and find out what makes him tick.
If you know of a better way to create a complex villain, please share. I’d like to spend as little time with evil people as possible—real or fictional.
