A post on Killzone looks back to some prior articles providing advice on writing villains.
Clare Langley-Hawthorne offered four tips for creating a believable villain, including:
- Don’t have villains act stupidly simply because the plot calls for it.
- Give your villain a strong motivation, other than “evil.”
- Give your villain clear goals and objectives, even if it’s not readily apparent to your hero.
- Give your villain a backstory.
James Scott Bell also says it’s a mistake to make your villain pure evil or crazy. He suggests:
- Giving your villain an argument. “Every villain feels justified in what he is doing,” Bell says. “When you make that clear to the reader in a way that approaches actual empathy, you will create cross-currents of emotion that deepen the fictive dream like virtually nothing else.” During his trial for war crimes, Hermann Goering tried to justify World War II by claiming that Germany merely desire to rid itself of the constrictions of the Treaty of Versailles.
- Have your villain make choices. Backstory is important, but your villain should have the agency to make choices. “What was the first choice your villain made that began forging his long chain of depravity?” Bell asks. “Write that scene. Give us the emotion of it. Even if you don’t use the scene in your book, knowing it will give your villain scope.”
Debbie Burke says that the antagonist drives the plot (especially in crime fiction) and should be treated accordingly. “If an author roots around in the antagonist’s brain for a while, background, reasons, and rationalizations for antisocial behavior bubble up,” Burke wrote. “Armed with such knowledge, it becomes impossible to write a two-dimensional character.”
