Writers and Authors

Showing posts with label creating villains. Show all posts

Writing villains is one of the guilty pleasures of the novelist. It can be fun to plan nefarious doings that you would never carry out in the real world, but it can also be a challenge for those of us who are happily law-abiding to craft believable villains. It’s tempting to draw from real life, looking to news accounts of the latest horrific crime, but take care. It is a writer’s job to craft a story of justice, and many of the best explorations of justice explore a villainous character who is contradictory. For a writer, a contradictory character is fabulous raw material, because you are never sure what that person will do.

Very few bad guys are all bad, guest post by Mary Anna Evans

Several years ago, a friend told me that her editor had asked her to write a serial killer book. She was three or four books into her series and her editor thought it was time to do something a little different. Serial killer books were hot and it would be easy to find a way for her series character, a private detective, to get crossways with a demented homicidal maniac.

My friend told me this with a sigh and I couldn't figure out why this was such terrible news. As we talked, I began to understand her pain. If the writer is operating on the presumption that the serial killer kills because he or she is evil and crazy, then what is there to write? There is no conflict. The book quickly devolves into fear, stalking, killing, and horror, over and over again, and it's all the same. There are obligatory flashbacks to terrible events in the killer's childhood that might explain the madness. The killings get more grisly, because there's no other way to ramp up the tension, but honestly. The reader has been here before, many times. How much better would the story be it was never clear whether the good or bad portion of the villain’s character would win? Uncertainty, after all, drives the reader to turn another page.

This question is not limited to mysteries. In any genre, it's much better to craft an antagonist who is not crazy, then watch that person squirm under the pressure of justifying the unjustifiable. Give the reader a motive for wrongdoing that's at least a little understandable. Let readers wonder whether they themselves could be swayed by money or love or guilt.

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the award-winning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries–Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings, Floodgates, Strangers, and Plunder. She has degrees in physics and chemical engineering. Her background includes stints in environmental consulting and university administration, as well as a summer spent working offshore in the oil fields. Writing lets her spend weeks indulging her passion for history, archeology, and architecture, and months making up stories. Mary Anna is preparing to move to Oklahoma since accepting an Associate Professor position with the University of Oklahoma.

Catch Up:

http://www.maryannaevans.com/

http://www.twitter.com/maryannaevans

https://www.facebook.com/mary.a.evans.5

The concepts and qualities of villains is a subject that is very near and dear to my heart. It’s my belief that the villain makes the story. Without the villain, your hero has nothing to overcome, no challenges to face. And the level of tension and excitement in your story increases along with the capabilities and cunning of your villain. Where would Sherlock be without Moriarty? Without Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker would still be a whiny kid trapped on a desert planet (well, technically, he would never have been born in the first place, but we won’t get into that). The point is that the villain makes the story, but the question remains, what makes a good villain?

I’ve already touched upon my first point. Your villain needs to be cunning or capable or both. I say this because not all villains are criminal masterminds with genius level IQs. In fact, most criminals aren’t very sophisticated or intelligent. For the sake of fiction, we sometimes incorporate characters that exceed their real-life counterparts, but even if your villain is of average intelligence or less, he or she needs to be capable in a way that makes them a threat. Perhaps they are large and imposing, frightening, psychotic, ruthless, good with a gun or knife or fists. Whatever the case may be, they need to stretch the limits of your hero’s capabilities to deal with them.

The bigger the hero, the bigger the villain. For a rookie detective, a rapist or bank robber may be enough. But think of Superman. It would be a boring story to have a character with Superman’s abilities flying around stopping purse snatchers or even rapists and bank robbers. He can handle these tasks without breaking a sweat.

This brings me to a concept that I call “The Heroes Conundrum,” based upon the TV show Heroes. In that show, they created “good” characters that were too powerful or capable, then they had to invent ways to strip those characters of their powers. This quickly became tedious. As I said, the bigger the hero, the bigger the villain. Sherlock Holmes needed someone to match his intellect in order to make a truly great villain. This can work from the opposite direction though, where you have a villain that is so powerful that you don’t know how the hero can match them. This creates a daunting challenge that our hero must rise to face, and readers will keep turning pages into the night to see how our ordinary protagonist can stop the criminal mastermind. Of course, if we take that approach too far, it creates some serious believability issues.

Something that many writers don’t understand is that the villain must also be a “real” person (of course, this excludes fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc where your characters aren’t human). Your villain had a mother and a father, friends, hobbies, interests, fears, etc. Even the most frightening villains need something to connect them to the real world. I call this “giving them a dog.” The best example of this is from Silence of the Lambs where Buffalo Bill is a brutal killer but also loves a little dog that he showers with affection. Obviously, I don’t mean that every bad guy needs to have a pet, but every bad guy should have something such as this that makes them feel like more than evil personified. Remember that in the villain’s mind, they are the star or hero of their own story.

In the end, I think the key to writing any character well is first for the author to care deeply about that person, otherwise the audience never will. Therefore, love your villains, and your readers will as well…or at least love to hate them.

Bestselling author Steven James says, "Ethan Cross is one of the sharpest emerging writers on the thriller fiction scene today.” Bestselling author Anthony J. Franze concurs, saying, "Ethan Cross is one of the best damn writers in the genre.” They're not alone. Others have compared this international bestselling author to James Patterson and Thomas Harris. Ethan Cross's work is an unforgettable combination of high-intensity thrills, memorable characters, and complex scenarios. The Bookworm called his first bestseller, The Shepherd, “a thrill ride that takes off from page one,” and that’s the experience you can expect from everything Ethan Cross writes. http://thestoryplant.com/our-authors/ethan-cross/