To write a Villain...



Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

 I write stories, and perhaps my favorite part of writing stories, other than getting the dang thing out of my head, is the inventing of good characters.  Each character is a unique creature that evolves as the story gets told, the events and understandings within the plot impacting on them according to the nature I've given them just as they would on any human being.  Heroes and heroines are of course where the majority of the focus must fall, they're who carry the tale.  But for a hero to shine that character must be matched against a villain believably evil enough, believably powerful enough, to make his defeat a major accomplishment.

To create a believable character is an excellent exercise in introspection, for the fact is that all any writer can do by way of creating a character is to take some portion of his own persona and build it a different path of evolution whereby the character came to incorporate that fraction of the writer.  To write a hero or heroine is safe enough, most generally what you're doing is amplifying what you'd like to believe are, or would be given the situation, your more noble traits.  The only real risk is allowing ego and wishful thinking to take your character beyond the believable.   But to write a good villain is a decidedly more risky endeavor, for that involves a dance with your dark side, it involves taking what you'd consider one of your weaknesses and building a character where that facet came to be the driving force of a major player in your story.

For this reason a great many villains are flat and rather one dimensional, but the truly great villains are not.  They are full human beings, often almost a sympathetic creature the reader can full understand, understand and empathize with well enough to demand the reader condemn the villain not for any one choice to action but rather with the many choices and actions that all reflect the same weakness never challenged, never mastered.  Where a good hero may carry the plot and action of a story a good villain is as often as not where the moral of a story will ride in the form of a character who portrays the ultimate consequences of allowing some weakness, some deformity of psyche or soul to maintain dominance over a life.

I'm paying a bit more attention to my villains these days than I used to, and with very deliberate good cause.  To build a well crafted villain is to understand the human condition from the perspective of your own weaknesses and insecurities, it is to take those less than sterling attributes and set the chosen one into a scenario where that test of life will be failed and the character sinks rather than ascends. 

To write a working and believable villain is to understand how to understand the real villains in your life in such a manner that they might be defeated.  To write a solid villain is to understand how to avoid becoming one in reality, and when you're in the process of overhauling segments of yourself to go into battle against the evil and pathos of what you perceive as villainy full and complete that understanding is a very good thing.  It can, in the end, save more than your life.