Writing Great Villains

Let’s talk about villains for a moment, shall we?

I LOVE a good villain. Someone who makes your skin crawl. Someone whose presence in the lives of the protagonist and her friends alternately infuriates and scares you. Someone who is a legitimate threat to your protagonist.

But how do you create this? How do you write a truly scary villain? I am not an expert on villains, but I have some ideas.

Give your protagonist a weakness.

This is sometimes avoided when we talk about villains. But a good protagonist has got to have a chink in their armor that the villain can exploit. We do this for a couple of reasons.

Chiefly, as Aaron Michael Ritchey always says, “Stories are about change.” If your protagonist is perfect, then you have a pretty boring story. A flaw gives them something to work on and work through. In Game of Thrones, Bran is paralyzed from the waist down. He has to learn to deal with his disability. He doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. He’s got to figure out how to overcome his problem so he can get north of the Wall.

Second, a weakness – particularly a physical one – can give us insights about the character. A woman whom the outside world considers accomplished, successful, talented and very beautiful could, internally, be obsessed about those last ten pounds. Maybe she obsesses at the gym. No one actually sees her eat. Her greatest flaw – in her mind – isn’t an issue to her lover, but she believes they will eventually break up over it. Maybe she makes poor decisions because of those last ten pounds. Maybe she doesn’t trust anybody because she doesn’t understand why people lie about how fat she is. What the rest of the world doesn’t see, the protagonist obsesses over.

Third, a weakness equalizes the villain and protagonist. I’ve always been a Marvel over DC guy, but in spite of that I have always loved Lex Luthor. It doesn’t matter that Superman is faster and stronger, has heat vision and can fly. Superman, as smart as he is, isn’t smarter than Lex. So Lex uses his advantage over the Big Blue Boy Scout every opportunity he can.

Give your villain power your protagonist doesn’t have.

I think this is one of the hardest things a storyteller has to figure out. A good villain must be more powerful than the protagonist. Sauron is always going to be more powerful than Frodo and Sam. It brings tension to the story when our plucky hero has to face someone they shouldn’t be able to defeat. But how can you establish this without making the hero look like a weakling or the villain like an unstoppable force?

You change the type of power the villain wields.

If the hero in your YA novel is a young, handsome jock type who’s super talented, make the villain an egghead who’s got the faculty on her side. Make the nerd so popular for their grades that when the hero is flunking a class (physics, geometry, French, etc.), they have to go to the villain on the villain’s terms.

If the protagonist is socially strong and supported, make the villain physically strong. If the protagonist is a super smart scientist, make the villain a politician who always knows what to say. If the protagonist is beautiful and talented, make the villain rich and socially connected.

I could go on, but I hope you get the point?

Allow the villain to shine in some way that the hero, despite his many victories and skill sets, can’t compete with.

Have your villain make it personal.

You know what I mean. Have the villain discover the one thing the hero is embarrassed by, the one thing they have to protect or hide – and have the villain crush them with it.

In George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, the protagonist is an Englishman living in Burma in relative ease and comfort. There is a small community of English ex-pats there, and he falls in love with the daughter of an industrialist. But our hero keeps an Asian mistress. He’s discreet about it, but he’s still sleeping with her while courting the industrialist’s daughter. In the climax of the book, the mistress shows up at a church where only the English families go. She demands money and makes a scene. Now, our hero has lost the affection of the woman he’s courting. It is now personal between him and the antagonist. The villain has destroyed the one chance at personal happiness for our hero.

There are other things you can do as well. We’ve run out of time, though. Thanks for reading my blog, and I’ll see you next month.