Writing a Good Villain
How do you write a villain in a believable way, so they are not stereotyped or predictably bad?
I have struggled with bad guys, in my fiction (and nonfiction too). I want to give villains some depth, make them real enough to scare even me.
But sometimes they’ve ended up a bit cartoonish, if I’m honest with myself—more like characters in a kids’ TV program. Either I’ve infused them with too much melodrama to really get the repulsiveness across to the reader or I’ve made them so ho-hum nobody would buy their sketchy decisions.
With this recent novel, I learned so much about writing good villains. It has everything to do with the quality of longing. That may surprise you! It certainly did me. Let me explain.
I’ve learned from editors, my agents, and beta readers that my strength as a writer is not in the thriller plot. But that’s what I was depending on to fuel the villainous part of the story. I created edgy actions and hoped the reader would understand why the abusive guy was bad. No other work/explanation needed, right?
Not so.
Longing is what drives behavior, good or bad. Longing inside the person is what makes them choose an action. The reader needs the background of longing to understand the “why” of a villain’s choices.
This didn’t sit well with me for quite a while. Truthfully, I didn’t want to spend time in the interior lives of these rather abhorrent people in my story. Who’d want to hang out with someone with zero morals or caring for others, who does terrible things? I preferred to view them from a distance—far distance—and just have their actions speak for them.
But it never worked. The comments I’d get were all about stereotypes and predictability, at best. Confusion and disbelief at worst.
Distancing myself from my bad guys distanced my reader from my story.
Those of you who have read this newsletter for a few years (as a paid subscriber you can access it back to 2008!)) know my fascination with something called false beliefs. Learning about false beliefs let me understand character-writing at an entirely new level. I think this is when I turned a corner as a writer, in my ability to write believable people. So I want to take a moment and expand on the idea of false beliefs, share some new insights I’ve gained from working with them, especially for writing villains.
False beliefs and how they create believable characters
A good story is a journey—it takes the reader from a certain place to another place, and characters are the guiding force along the way. Yes, definitely, action (plot) can help the reader travel from beginning to end of book. In fact, one of my biggest complements to my recent novel was that readers stayed up all night to read it! That page-turner aspect is important if you want tension in the journey.
But character is what we relate to as we travel. We get involved with them, we worry about them, we hope they’ll succeed or crash and burn, depending on our relationship with their story. “Red was so self-centered in the beginning; I’m glad she changed by the end and cared about others,” is a comment I’ve also gotten a lot about this recent novel. That tells me Red is a character that engages the reader at some level—they may not like her at all times, but they are following her decisions.
When I started out writing Red, I first thought a lot about her false belief. False belief is a term I use for the emotional status quo of each character at the beginning of the story. Some writers call it misbelief. Same thing. It’s where we are, when we start the journey.
If you can sum up a character’s false belief in one sentence, it can tell you a lot. Red’s might be “People have always left me, so I can’t depend on anyone but myself.”
Think of one of your characters. What might be their false belief at the beginning of your story?
Two important things to realize about false beliefs:
They need to change by the end of the story. They can get worse (if the character is on a downward trajectory and will lose) or get better (if the character is going to win).
Behind each false belief is an unstated—often unrealized—longing.
The graffiti above translates to “I want love.” Most characters do—this is their secret longing. They may outwardly reject it, but however love is defined for them, they long for it.
Red longs for a family. This longing drives every action she takes in my book. When she’s running from the law, she flees to her estranged sister, Kate. Kate has been the object of Red’s longing for most of her life. They have never met, and Kate would never want to meet Red (the product of her father’s affair), if she knew Red existed. But Red could flee to so many other places, safer places, where she’d do less damage. She doesn’t. She goes to Kate and causes all sorts of trouble.
Longing is tied to that false belief. It cancels out all logic. The character acts from longing even as they try to talk themselves out of it.
Red isn’t the bad guy in the story I wrote. That honor is given to another person, Billy Cotton, who is in jail for arson. Billy’s longing is about Red. He wants Red, badly. He’s willing to jeopardize everything to get her. He believes it’s for revenge. That was the action side of things, but it didn’t touch the real longing, which I knew I had to get closer to.
Longing is often behind the harsher emotions of anger, rage, fear, jealousy. As I look deeper into character, I find that most of these stem from something more complicated.
Longing is important to understand any character, but when you understand a villain’s longing—and where that longing stems from, whether it is hidden or obvious—they become more human to the reader, less stereotypical. I think the villains that are driven only by outer action—revenge, as an example—don’t become as human and scary as they could.
The most challenging bad guys, the ones that really creep me out, are those who have that complicated interior expertly revealed by the writer.
I could write tense scenes of Billy stalking Red, of Billy trying to break into the cabin where she hid, of Billy trying to burn that cabin down. But Billy never really became alive for me until I dug beyond all this outer stuff to ask Why? Why is he wanting revenge? What’s behind that?
If you are struggling with your villain, take a minute and ask that Why? question. Why does this person, so repugnant to you, do what they do?
To find out my Why? for Billy Cotton, I had to go back to his childhood, his roots, the false belief he grew from that time when he was vulnerable and very young.
I don’t know anyone like Billy, to model from, so I had to really do some fictional research to come up with who he was. I like to use a character questionnaire, such as this one from Reedsy, to start.
Here’s what I got:
Where did your villain grow up? Billy grew up in rural North Carolina, went to school to tenth grade.
What was your villain’s family like? What aspects influenced him the most? Billy’s father was an unhappy man, his mother frail and sickly, so Billy was cared for by neither. (In a way, he and Red had parallel childhoods because Red was also an abandoned kid. She had her mother, but she didn’t have the father or sister or legitimate family she longed for.) Billy had a family on paper but not in spirit. He lived in danger from his father, and he felt powerless most of the time.
What events were began your villain’s fascination with the dark side of life? I didn’t get that much, but I got enough from this question to make Billy’s longing make sense: When Billy turned six, his father took him hunting. Billy’s sensitive hearing made him cower at the sound of gunshot. This infuriated his father who held the shotgun to Billy’s head and forced him to retrieve the dead animals, skin and gut them in the woods. When they camped, Billy had to make the fire. Unexpectedly, he loved this—fire was so clean to him, so thorough in what it consumed, compared to the messy process of killing with a gun. So he became an expert who could build a fire from almost nothing, even wet wood, and that earned a tiny although grudging respect from his father.
What event ignited his longing as an adult? Billy knew Red from childhood and loved her wildness. He loved that she was also fascinated with fire. They were a couple until the night Billy coerced her into helping him set a fire that burned a building. Red turned him in and pled state’s witness; Billy went to prison. He vowed he’d find her when he came out and take her away.
This got me started on Billy’s longing, which was for Red. And if he couldn’t have Red of her own free will, he’d have her anyway. He’d set up a situation where Red couldn’t escape and he alone could rescue her. And so he did.
How to demonstrate a villain’s longing in the story
None of my chapters are from Billy’s point of view; he is never the narrator. I am writing in third person limited, which means I’m not hopping heads. The only pov characters are Red, Kate, and Kate’s daughter Molly. So how was I supposed to reveal the longing that would make Billy a believable bad guy?
I would have to use one of the main pov characters to reveal Billy’s longing to the reader. And the only person who gets close enough in any scene is Red. She is also the one who has the memories of him, and flashbacks can be quite effective to demonstrate longing—the narrator flashes back to a time when the bad guy was vulnerable, describes it in some way as memory, has an emotion about it or a realization, and that clues the reader to the take-away from that flashback.
For instance, in one flashback, Red remembers how Billy accused her as a child of not having a real family—her parents weren’t married. At the same moment, young Red noticed the strap marks on Billy’s legs from a beating. She almost says something like, “You don’t have a real family either,” referring to the obvious evidence that Billy’s father beat him. But she holds back—and this, at least in my hope, demonstrates her realization of Billy as a vulnerable person, someone who can be hurt himself as well as someone who easily hurts her.
Real-time scenes are even more effective, though, especially if they happen after the flashback is planted in the reader’s memory some chapters before.
There’s a face-off between Red and Billy in the final third of the book. I won’t share too much about it, in case you want to read the story! But what Red notices about her old, prison-worn enemy conveys the real Billy to the reader, in all his longing and the desperation that longing causes inside. Revenge turns out not to be what he’s after, after all.
Stereotyping villains is such a pitfall for writers. We have to carefully examine our motives for writing these characters. What person or persons in our past are informing how we describe them?
So many writers, fiction and non, carry a conscious or unconscious revenge motive that creeps into their literary bad guys and makes them less believable than they could be. Those writers want to be sure there’s no mistake about how terrible these villains are—and the people they represent in the writer’s past.
We’re going to end with a few ways to keep from falling into that trap. This isn’t an easy exercise but it’s proved extremely therapeutic to both my life and my writing, reducing the bad guys in both arenas to their proper size. That said, read through the instructions and think about whether it’s for you.
First, write about the real-life person in your past who was truly a bad one. Write with every detail you can muster. Write about behavior, abusiveness, even outright evil. Get as much detail on the page and out of your memory as possible. You may find this incredibly cathartic but if you have trouble with this part of the exercise, only proceed if you feel enough emotional stamina. Watch your body reactions every step of the way. I took my time trying this with a former boyfriend in high school, someone who did me harm and I’ve spent years writing about. When I take it slow, it’s been incredibly helpful to heal from those memories and make my bad guys more believable on the page. The key to this exercise is to make sure the writing includes (1) how you felt about this person in the past, (2) how you feel about them now, and (3) a clear description of what happened between you. These three elements, not just one or two of them, create a kind of alchemy of healing. (See the work of UT Austin professor James Pennebaker and writer Louise DeSalvo for more information.)
Now try to go beyond the person’s behavior and its effect on you: write their history. Where did they come from? What influenced their life the most? Write down any background you know, in as minute detail as you can.
The final step is to free write (explore) this person’s desperation and any longing you can guess they experienced that stems from that desperation. What did/do they want more than anything and how does this make them human?
I find that doing this exercise with a real-life bad guy who has personally affected me helps me write those gnarly fictional villains with more accuracy. The exercise, if taken slowly and carefully according to my emotional stamina, can bring me to a more detached place. From there, I see how human beings can be fascinating to a reader, no matter whether they are heroes or antagonists.
I have to give a shout-out to teacher and writer Josip Novakovich as we end. (Here’s a great review of one of his books for fiction writers.) I took an online class with Josip many years ago through the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. I was struggling at that time with parts of this novel, trying to get a sense of one of the bad guys, Mel Fisher, the straying husband of main character Kate.
I discussed my challenge with Josip and he read parts of my scenes with Mel—fairly rough back then, nowhere near what they became for this recently published novel.
I was quite surprised that Josip encouraged me to push the dark side of Mel even further. I had held back, because so many of my readers (writer’s group at that time and others in classes) disliked Mel intensely. Josip guided me towards more exploration rather than backing away—he saw something valuable in diving deeper. From him, I learned more about writing villains than anyone else.
Recently, I got an email from a reader of A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, which includes the finished scenes with Mel. This reader talked about my “unique way of bringing out the goodness” in my characters. Even if they are not good at heart, she said. To me, that goodness is what lies beneath all their outer actions, the decisions they bring to the plot tension, the longing they carry. Finding out what caused it is the key to making them believable.
To perceive longing inside a person who seems lost to humanity means seeing them as more than their misdeeds or false beliefs.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Two options for this week’s exercise.
Use the steps above to research your bad guys, if you feel ready. It’s a great first step to understanding how to write them in literature, but if digging into your past is too much, use the same steps with someone fictional.
Free write about what you are struggling with right now, with your bad guys. Based on the ideas above, what do you think you might try next to give them more believable characteristics?
Share any comments below, and feel free to ask questions too.