Yuffie's Writing How-To's

How to write VILLAINS

When your story has a villain/antagonist, their development is usually lost because we focus so much more on the protagonist. Here's how to develop your villains and make them really deep and interesting.

 There are two types of villains:
1. People who do bad things for a legitimate reason
2. Pure evil Satanic spawn who create strife for the sake of strife

Characters become deep when we feel more than one emotion toward them. Look at Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter. He was considered a villain (or at the very least, an antagonist), but we came to sympathize with him. He was raised to serve the Dark Lord even though he didn't want to. He wanted out, but his fear of Voldemort motivated him to follow orders. We saw his conflicted emotions when he couldn't kill Dumbledore. That's a deep character. We didn't just hate him as we did with Rita or Umbridge or Bellatrix, who were all just plain evil for no explained reason. We sympathized with the decisions Draco was forced to make. If we were put in his situation, we might've come out like him, too.

This goes into my next point of backstory and motivation. No one just walks out of a lake pure evil. Something must have happened to make them the way they are. Something bad that can elicit rage, revenge, grief. Then they make choices that hurt other people--a working definition of evil. Interesting villains have a motivation and goal that readers can relate with. If they want to rule the world, that gets boring and cliché really fast. Why do they want power? Was there a time in their life where they felt really powerless, so now they want to turn their life around and gain power? Do they want power to help someone dear to them?

A man robbed a store. Okay, how do you feel about that? At first glance, we look at him with disgust for having no values, but then we see what he does with the money. He uses it to pay for an operation that would save his sick daughter's life. Now how do you feel? Now a woman stole the money for the sake of stealing the money, because she was greedy. Which person are you more likely to remember in the long run? Villains that make you think are usually more memorable. A story that's simply good vs. evil gets old fast. But a villain struggling with good vs. evil within themselves is always fascinating.

Look at Anakin Skywalker (AKA Darth Vader). He was a very sweet little kid with hopes and dreams. But when he got older, Anakin had a vision of his wife, Padme, dying in childbirth. He did everything in his power to save her, and he ended up turning to the dark side, because the Sith lord promised him the power to save Padme.

Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender had a life goal of capturing the Avatar. But why? His father, the Fire Lord, had banished him, and Zuko wants to win back his honor by capturing his father's mortal enemy. If we were in Zuko's position, we may have made the same bad choices he did. Then he starts to question his father's motives and even sympathize with the Avatar a little, and inner conflict and turmoil ensue.

That's ultimately what makes a villain deep: we can see ourselves as them. We can see part of ourselves in them, and under the same circumstances, we may have turned out exactly like them and made the same decisions.

Just as the protagonist has flaws and redeeming qualities, a villain should have both as well. With protagonists, their redeeming qualities would usually outweigh the flaws. With villains, the flaws would outweigh the redeeming qualities. (In general. Exceptions exist, of course.)

Now, you have characters like the Joker from The Dark Knight. He's pure evil. He causes strife for the sake of strife, and yet we loved him. Why?

Because we didn't just feel hatred toward him. There was also intrigue. He was so nuts that his actions were completely unpredictable. That unpredictability made him so interesting to watch. He was really different, really unstable, and characters like that are fascinating. We got small hints of how he got his scars, too, but he kept changing the story each time he told it, so it made us really wonder what the truth was. If you give your villains such unpredictable and unique characteristics, they'll be memorable even if they're just bad for the sake of being bad.

So in summary, to make a three-dimensional, memorable villain:

1) give your villain a relatable motivation to act the way they do--they should be evil for a reason (OR make their personality so intriguing that we want to learn more about them despite them being rotten to the core for no reason)

2) give them a balance of flaws and redeemable traits, leaning toward flaws (for the most part)

3) ensure that when the reader looks at the villain, they can picture themselves standing in their shoes. The reader should be able to go, "I might have made the same decisions if I were in that situation." OR "I may not agree with their logic, but I can can follow it and it makes sense."