How do I create a compelling villain?
By syntax 6
Homepage: http://www.omniscribe.com
Most actors will tell you that villainous roles are often the most fun to play, and they can be devilish fun to write as well. Villains, with their nefarious characters, enable the author to explore the darker side of human nature as they take the audience on a careening ride through the mind of evil. There are no hard and fast rules about how to create a good villain; no arch villain has ever descended from the mountain top with a "must use" list of evil traits written in blood (or even indelible red marker). That's the exciting part, because it gives you a lot of room to make your villain original. However, there are a few time-honored principles to keep in mind when creating a good bad guy. Rather than simply list them all, I figured we could put them to work right here.
Cue the villain!
Enter Victor Quigley, our villain for today. Right now he's just a nebulous, vaguely unpleasant sounding name. By the time we are finished with him, he will be the epitome of evil.
Step One: Rounding Your Villain
Like any good character, your villain should be three-dimensional. The rabid psychopath in the hockey mask is frightening but not terribly interesting; he's one-note homicidal. Memorable villains have multiple layers, and some of these layers may even be appealing. For example, Hannibal Lecter liked to eat people, but he was also a charismatic, top-notch cook with an encyclopedic mind. Darth Vader was a white knight gone bad. Even Cigarette Smoking Man had frustrated ambitions; the poor man never did get his novel published.
The point is that your villain's bad-guy activities are only a part of who he is, and when we get to see more of his personality quirks, he becomes that much more real. And more scary. To know that a person is capable of good but still chooses evil is perhaps the most frightening thing of all.
Appearance is the first place to start with your villain, but you should also know his or her speech patterns, tics and mannerisms. Height and hair color alone just don't cut it. Let's consider Victor for a moment. Should he be a looming, menacing kind of villain, or a deceptively mild-looking villain? I think his name suggests someone of a smaller build and an unassuming demeanor -- the quiet kind of killer who surprises everyone when the truth comes out. He is on the young side, say twenty-four, lives in a suburb of Baltimore and works in a tiny bookstore most days. On Sunday, he plays the church organ. Let's drop in on him there, shall we?
Victor sits in the secluded alcove behind the velvet rows for the choir benches. His eyes are closed in concentration as he moves bony fingers over the plastic organ keys, but no music echoes in the hall. The only sound is his feverish half-whisper as he sings along with the imaginary tune, "Under the sea...under the sea..."
"Victor, hello."
He coughs, nearly choking on the lemon drop in his mouth. "Mrs. Beasley, I didn't see you there."
"I came to give you Sunday's hymns." She eyes him warily, and he realizes that his hands are still resting on the soundless keys. He jerks them away.
"That's very kind of you," he replies, pulling his left cuff down with a hard tug. Had she seen it? His heart thumps against his ribs in fear. Go away, go away, he thinks wildly. But his smile is calm. "Lemon drop?"
Mrs. Beasley bumps into the pulpit in her haste to escape his outstretched hand. "NoÖno, thank you."
This passage gives us a sense of Victor without going into a lot of detail about his looks. In general, it's better to give examples that give insight into a character's personality, and this is especially true with villains. "The man was around fifty, about 5'10'' tall and had brown hair" is not as informative as "The scrawny Asian man wore a comb-over and a sky blue polyester shirt straight out of the '70s." You do not need lots of gory description to paint your villain. Often the smaller, creepier details are more telling. For example, Victor might be the kind of person who sits right next to you on an empty subway train. It's these little quirks that set him apart from every other mass murderer that comes down the pike.
Step Two: The Rap Sheet
The next major task in creating a villain is figuring out what terrible thing he did to whom, and why. Villains can do all sorts of nasty crimes, ranging from kidnapping and robbery to arson and murder. Once you have determined your villain's preferred criminal behavior, it's a good idea to know his or her history with it. When did she set her first fire? What was the first thing he stole? How did they feel about their crimes at the time? Have their motives changed since then? Even if you never give the reading audience these kind of details, it is a great way for you to know your villain.
As for Victor, let's make him a murderer, since that's the kind of villain I know best. Let's say Victor kidnaps young girls, pierces their ears and then drowns them in a bathtub. Why? We'll get to that in a moment. First, a word about detailing your villain's crimes. Long, graphic passages about dismemberment or strangulation are disgusting, but they aren't all that scary. The reader's imagination is almost always better than anything you could write, so it's often best to just give them a push in the right direction and let them go from there. For example:
As his organ music sighs to a halt, Victor hears the tinkling laughter of a child floating through the open church window. A girl. He swallows hard and grips the edges of his organ bench.
"Don't look, don't look," he mutters, shaking his head back and forth for emphasis. Outside, the girl shrieks and then dissolves into a fit of giggles. "I'll bet she's a blonde," Victor whispers. His feet are already carrying him toward the window.
One pane is open, but he stares at her through the closed, pink tinted glass. Eight years old, he guesses, and just cute as a button in her polka-dotted dress and butterfly hair clips. Around his wrist, his watch seems to throb in recognition. He brings it up to the window so the mermaid can get a better look. "You see?" he whispers as he presses his palm flat against the glass. "It's her."
The music starts in his head again, and he spreads his fingers wide to hit the octave. Not large hands, he knows, not ideal for playing his music.
But just perfect to wrap around a silky, eight year-old little neck.
With this passage, we get deeper into Victor's psychosis without any blood and gore. It gives the reader that creepy-crawly feeling, but does not give away Victor's whole story. This technique not only allows readers to imagine the horror of the girl's death on their own (in whatever amount detail they wish) but also allows the writer room to escalate with Victor. With each death, the audience gets a little more information.
Step Three: Motive
This step is closely related to the second one, determining the villain's crime. Just as you need to know *what* he's doing, you must have some sense of the reasons why he does the things he does. But here is where motive gets rather blurry in many mysteries and thrillers: the reason the killer commits his crimes is NOT the same thing as the reason he became a killer. You must know the former; you need not explain the latter. What the heck am I talking about? Let's use Victor as an example.
Victor is a murderer, and there are really only three basic motives for murder -- revenge, profit and insanity. CSM would be someone who kills for profit. He doesn't have anything against his victims personally; they just stand in the way of him achieving his goals. Victor is going to be a serial murderer, and therefore gets a check next to the "insanity" box. Why is he kidnapping young girls? We'll say that his sister drowned in the family pool in his care when he was fourteen. He still wears her "Little Mermaid" watch, broken and rusty, under his long-sleeve shirts. Sometimes, when Victor sees a little girl, his watch tells him that it is actually his sister. So he kidnaps the child, only to drown her later when she turns out to be a "fake."
This is why Victor does what he does, and we would need to know this before starting our story about him. What is less clear is why Victor became a murderer in the first place. Maybe he has a brain tumor. Maybe he has a mental disorder that makes him hallucinate. Or perhaps he was abused as a child. These details are less important, and I would be careful about trying to explain Victor to the reading audience. Sometimes, as Clyde Bruckman so eloquently pointed out, "You're a homicidal maniac" is truth enough.
Step Four: That Little Villain in all of Us
To be truly frightening, a villain should be recognizable. The aliens with the Freddie Krueger nails in "Fight the Future" are flash-in-the-pan scary, a quick thrill that doesn't linger or make you think very hard. The XF villains who have stayed with us over the years had human faces and familiar motives. Pusher, Pfaster, John Lee Roche -- these kind of villains fold you close inside, right down into their murderous little hearts. They could be your delivery man, your salesman, or the guy next to you in line at the supermarket. And some villains, if you look at them in the right light, can even show us reflections of ourselves. Lost in a large, noisy family or eking out an existence in confines of a tiny cubicle, many people can identify with Pusher's hunger for respect and recognition, even if they don't support his methods. These villains, the ones who cause you to look at yourself and your loved ones and wonder, "what if?" are the ones who haunt you long after the story is done.
The well-rounded villain will seem naturally more human like, but there are some other tricks you can use to suck readers more deeply into the villain's world. The easiest of these is to use the first person point of view (POV) when writing from the villains' perspective. Not only does this make the reader privy to the villain's depraved thoughts, it is a creates an intimate narrative in which it often seems as if the villain is speaking directly to the reader.
It was a Tuesday afternoon when my sister went away, a lazy end-of-summer day that had sunshine stretched into every second and banana tree leaves waving against the sharp blue sky. The winds from the night before had tumbled many of them down into our backyard, curled and dusty in the hot sun. I was supposed to be sweeping them away, but instead I let the cool scent of chlorine lure me into the rippling pool.
Andrea laughed and slapped her hand against the water, sending icy drops arcing toward me. "You're gonna get it, you're gonna get it!" She bobbed like a cork in the shallow end.
"Quit it, or I'll hold you under 'til you turn blue."
"Gotta catch me first!"
She dog-paddled away from me, and I contemplated grabbing one white foot and pulling her back. A quick jerk, and she'd be under, gasping, choking, and knowing who was boss. But I decided not to bother. I did several quick laps while she watched me, teetering on the edge between the shallow end and the sharp plunge into 10 foot water. Six weeks of classes at the local Y and the scaredy-cat still wouldn't brave the deep end.
Through the water rushing past my ears, I heard her yell. "Victor, Victor!"
I stopped, treading in place. "What?"
"My Mermaid watch! It fell in the deep end!"
"So go get it," I replied, bored with her drama.
"I can't, you know I can't!"
I could see the watch from where I stood, its armbands wafting with the pump's current. "I guess it's just going to have to rust there."
"Victor!" Her face scrunched up with tears. I turned away. Gotta grow up some time, little baby, I thought. I felt lean and powerful as I moved my body through the water with strong, swift strokes.
I felt her thrashing before I heard the screams. I pushed my head down further into the water, where she was just a faint gurgle. How long I was under, I couldn't say. But when I rose again, the only sound was my harsh gasp for air. Andrea was silent, a tiny body in a pink swimsuit floating farther and father away...
The girl under my hands now is not silent. Her whimpers turn to screams and then to shrieks as the chlorinated water rises up around her ears. She pushes and kicks, but her polka-dotted dress is heavy and tangled in the tub.
Bubbles, bubbles. Wide blue eyes that shimmer under water. Silence.
There is an immediacy and urgency to the first person POV that makes is especially effective for mysteries and thrillers. You are not just *watching* the killer commit his crimes; he is sharing them with you from the inside. Plus, it's a good way to avoid naming your killer or giving him/her a specific gender.
One final note to making your villain familiar, in a scary kind of way: it is often interesting to watch the heroes struggle with specific aspects of the villain's character. Victor kidnaps and murders little girls, so we could make a story in which his crimes force Scully to confront unresolved issues about Emily's death. Alternatively, we could focus on Mulder's obsession with lost little girls and the search for his sister. These are both good ideas, but they have been done repeatedly in the fanfic world. I would try to find a slightly different angle. Perhaps instead of identification with the victims, Mulder could feel some connection to Victor. Both had little sisters harmed while in their care, and both men have walked around searching faces for her ever since. Victor could represent a path not taken for Mulder, a terrible portrait of what he might have become if he had lost a little more of his sanity. This kind of connection would give our story depth and make Victor more memorable.
Step Four: Unmasking the Madman
I don't want to get too bogged down in the mechanics of plotting, but there are a few useful tips to keep in mind when writing your villain's climactic scenes. First, standard mystery etiquette says that your villain should be introduced to the reader by the third chapter. Your reading audience will generally feel cheated if the hero rips off the villain's mask only to reveal a character they have never heard of before. This kind of "eleventh hour" villain is possible to do well, but usually these kind of stories are investigation intensive. "Post Mortem," the first of the Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell, is a good example of a successful last-minute villain. We did not know the villain per se, but we got a good sense of him through his crimes. However, in stories where the audience is meant to guess the villain, early introduction is a must.
Second, it is a good idea to try to avoid the clichÈ ending where the villain ties up the hero and/or heroine and spends two chapters explaining his crimes. If Mulder and Scully were to anger Victor to the point where he felt he needed them out of his way, chances are good he would just try to kill them and be done with it. He would not give a ten-page monologue on the death of his sister and how his mother never treated him right, etc. The best way to show your villain's motivation is subtly, through various scenes over the course of the story. This way, you have your ending free for all sorts of good action sequences.
Final thoughts: A Little Light Reading
These suggestions are simply that -- ideas to keep in mind when you are creating a villain. One of the best (and most enjoyable) methods of studying villainy is to read stories by those who have done it well. As such, I would recommend Terma99's "Aftershock" for an especially good X-File-ish villain, Joann Humby's "Past Imperfect" for a surprising villain with interesting ties to other characters, Analise's "A Thin Veneer" for a ghastly villain and marvelous use of the first person POV, Mustang Sally and Rivka T's "Iolokus" for a terrifically original villain, and "Carol Lee" by Westshore for villains with amazing voice and depth.
That's it from me. Now go forth and be evil.
syntax6
I would like to thank Dreamshaper, J3, Lysandra, and shannono for help with Victor's evil persona. The Little Mermaid, indeed. You all are more sick and twisted than I am, and I say that with the utmost respect and admiration. Many thanks also to Alanna for helpful comments on a draft of this essay.
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