Villains
Sea Lion in Monterey Bay — March 16, 2025
“No-one thinks of himself as a villain.” – Christopher Paolini’s character Oromis in his book Eldest.
Conflict drives most fiction, and who better to create conflict than a good villain. Pitting a villain against your hero will give your hero a reason to act. A villain needs to be stopped.
Maybe you’re thinking of stereotypes from the comic books you read as a kid, but a villain could be the neighbor down the street. Your villain should be characterized with depth and complexity. The reader will want to understand their motivations, their fears and their goals, and also how far this character will go to achieve them. You could, for example, create a villain with good intentions, but who will use any means to fulfill their objectives.
It helps to identify what emotion you want to evoke in your reader when the villain takes center stage. Do you want the reader to feel bad for this person? Admire them? Hate them? If you know this you can design a personality accordingly. You can create a character who feels misunderstood, or alternately one who is charming and charismatic, or one who is known to be evil through and through.
Yes, we writers are manipulative. We create characters and then play them against each other. Our grandest hope is that our readers will want to come along for the ride and will feel satisfied at the end of it.
Suggested link: https://allwritealright.com/how-to-write-good-villains-in-fiction/
