By Eric Johnson
What makes the best villains work? The simple answer can be summed up in one phrase: lots of things. There is, however, an even simpler answer. Dread is what makes villains work. A good villain is a villain we dread, a bad villain is one we don’t. So how do you make your villain dreadful? Good question.
The most obvious question that needs answering is this: Why should my hero dread my villain? If you can come up with a convincing answer to this question, you’ve probably succeeded in making your reader dread your villain too.
Hopefully, your villain will have some unique trait or traits that makes him or her more dreadful. However, there are a few basic dos and don’ts that will make almost any villain more intimidating.
First, the don’ts. It’s probably convenient to mention here that there are definitely exceptions to these guidelines. I don’t always follow them myself, but I think that even going against these concepts can be done better if you know what you’re contrasting.
That being said, here is the little list of don’ts that I have compiled. Results may vary.
DON'T Let the Reader Know that Your Villain is Beatable
It may seem obvious, but I could probably think of several examples of stories that I have read, watched, or written where the villain is the underdog throughout the entire story.
Everybody loves an underdog, they say, and that’s part of the reason why you want your hero to be the underdog, not the villain. It’s great to show that your hero is strong, but if the only way to do that is by showing that your villain…isn’t as strong, skip out on writing that scene.
Let’s say your villain has come face to face with your hero in chapter four of your novel. The villain has decided to kidnap the hero’s love interest. He’s not interested in keeping her alive for a dramatic rescue scene later. However, you don’t really want the love interest to die yet, so the hero channels his love for, well, his love interest, and soundly defeats the villain in a fist fight.
Once this has happened, your reader has probably made a mental note of the instance. The villain just lost. They’ll come back in a dramatic way later, but why should we think that they’ll do any better in chapter eleven?
This is not to say that the villain can never be outsmarted, outmuscled, or outanythinged, but I would recommend avoiding this when possible. Especially avoid having the villain lose when they’re in their element. Every time your villain is beaten, both the hero and the reader can rest just a little bit easier. That’s bad.
DON'T Let Your Villain Go Soft Just to Save the Story
Admittedly, this one is hard to avoid. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a way around having the killer eliminate someone who is valuable to the plot before the hero ever has a chance to rescue said person. Even so, the more instances of softness you can destroy, the better.
If you want to have the villain go soft for a scene, you definitely want a solid reason; you may even want to foreshadow this moment. Make the villain’s seemingly out of character moment somehow believable. Now I know that I have definitely written more than my fair share of these soft villain scenes, but truthfully, they probably made my villains a lot less dreadful.
Finally, here is the third don’t, the last of them.
DON'T Let Your Villain Be Scared of Your Hero
What reason is there for us to fear the villain if the villain is afraid of the hero? It’s fun to have that scene where the villain jumps at the hero’s approach, but it definitely isn’t going to make your reader dread him or her. More likely, it will make your reader smirk or laugh. Even if this is the intended response, the overall effect may be negative.
You may be thinking of some great villains that are outmatched by the hero in some way or another and yet still work as villains. It’s true that it’s not always inappropriate to have the “jump back” type scene, but I would recommend being cautious in how you use it. It’s probably best not to use it in a place where we’re supposed to think the villain is strong. But I would also recommend caution in pointing out or especially spotlighting the villain’s weaknesses. If you do this we may think “Well the villain may be a genius, but at least the hero is twice as strong and a much better marksman.” This is not what I want my reader to think about my villain on most occasions.
Now that the don’ts are out of the way, here are a couple of dos.
DO Keep Your Villain a Step Ahead of the Hero (Or at Least at the Same Place)
Some of the best middle-of-the-book scenes are the ones that can actually convince us that the hero will best the villain, but end up with the villain succeeding instead. In those scenes, the author points out that the villain is untouchable. This creates dread.
DO Make Your Hero Dread the Villain
I love writing courageous heroes, but the fact of the matter is this, unless we recognize the hero is prideful, cocky, or somehow dangerously overconfident, we’re, oftentimes, not going to buy that the villain is dangerous if the hero doesn’t. If your hero dreads just one thing and nothing else, make that one thing the villain.
If your villain is holding the hero’s closest friend at gunpoint, and your hero still feels confident that he or she will succeed in stopping the villain, your villain probably isn’t the type to follow through on dreadful promises. You may end up with a reader feeling as confident as the hero. That’s bad.
Another possible explanation for the hero’s confidence in this situation, of course, is that he or she doesn’t really care about the ally all that much, and wouldn’t be too torn up over their death. That’s another topic entirely, though.
So that’s it. Five things that I have to say about villains and the dread factor. I hope that you feel that your writing is somehow improved as a result of reading this. That was the point of it, after all. May your next villain be better than the last!
Check out more articles about writing riveting villains:
Beyond the Evil Overlord: Three Dynamic Character Arcs for Villains
How Villains and Side Characters Can Deepen Your Protagonist’s Character Arc
Three Reasons to Make Your Villain Sympathetic (and Two Dangers to Avoid)
Become an Unstoppable Writer!
I find it funny that in order to have a good (erm… spectacular…?) villain, we must make the reader quake in their boots. And yet they still love us.
Exactly! It’s that dread and fear that makes the reader want to KEEP READING to find out what’s going to happen to the hero/protagonist.
Awesome advice! Thanks for sharing! Hey, do you think it would be interesting to write a book from the villain’s perspective? Or would that just leave the reader upset and confused?
That depends on how you do it, Erin. If your “villain” is the main character and the story is from their perspective, then that character technically isn’t a villain anymore. A villain is someone or something that is trying to prevent the protagonist/point of view character from reaching their goal. So if the “hero” is actually preventing your “villain” from achieving a goal, then the hero becomes the villain becomes the hero, if that makes sense.
So then my question to you is this, if you are writing from the perspective of the villain…what makes them a “villain”? Is it that they seek to do evil? If that’s the case, then by having the evil-doer as the “good-guy” then you can actually be advocating evil.
Now, if you have the bad-guy lose, even if it’s written from his/her perspective, I think that could be very impacting. I’ve considered doing that myself.
Basically, my point is, the character who’s perspective you’re primarily writing from is your hero, they are the protagonist, the good-guy, even if they do bad things. As Christians, we have to show God’s truth. Therefore, if our main characters are going to do bad things, there has to be consequences for those actions, just as there are in real life. Too often in secular literature, characters do bad things, but good things happen to them as a result. That’s not reality. So in this aspect, we as Christians really have the potential to write the most realistic and impacting stories out there.
I probably didn’t answer your question with that long rambling post. If I didn’t, just ask me again and I’ll try again. Haha!
Good question,
Reagan Ramm
Ha, Reagan, glad to know I’m not the only one who can’t speak concisely. 😛
Another thing to consider, something which may not make sense as of yet, and I’ve been mulling over lately, is what defines a hero.
Like you said, a book’s hero is normally the main point of view. A possible theme to make this hero/villain swap work is lies vs. truth. To me, a hero is somebody who SEEKS TRUTH. If that can somehow be integrated into the way the villain’s “villain” beats this guy, it could work… (02% – 60% chance)
So now that I’ve confused anybody that’s read this, including myself, I think I’ll try and untie these knots in my brain.
Right, you can have a “hero” (MC) who acts like a villain, who does bad things.
In the Hunger Games, Peeta really was the moral compass, while Katniss was actually rather selfish and unheroic…even though she was technically the “hero”.
You often get a protagonist who’s not quite perfect.
To the original question: There is, for example, the matter of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. And in that case, there is also the matter of truth. Just how truthful/reliable is the narrator? You would somehow have to pull it off in such a way that, by the end, the reader would realise this narrator has not been telling the whole truth…
Actually, I’d say that that would be a great idea. I want to do this myself. If you look as Sherlock Holmes you see that the view point character isn’t always the main character. Also, showing what the villain is thinking and such can make an extremly compelling story, especially because villains are often liked because they are so cool. (because they are so dreadful) My plan is to have the villain be obviously be bad, but have him eventually redeemed.
Is anyone else oddly drawn to writing allegories, yet once you try to cultivate the Villain to be as dreadful as you hoped, you find that in THIS story, what I call The Greater Story, the Villain doesn’t even compare to the Hero, so your climax goes from dualism to domination- by the Hero! Hmm…
Anyway thanks for the great tips! Very helpful!
@Erin: If you can find a way to do that without making the villain go soft in the end, let me know. It’s been something I’ve been toying with for a while, with no success as of yet. 😉 It’s worth a try, though.
Right, if you are going to have the bad-guy be the “good-guy”, he has to either lose at the end, or go soft.
This proves to be very confusing, but more so for the reader or writer?
It doesn’t have to be confusing. As Christians, we want to communicate God’s truth, and God’s truth is that good will win out over evil in the end. We should reflect this in our novels.
People like to say that it’s unrealistic having the good-guys win. I disagree, I say–for the Christian–the reality is that Christ will always triumph over evil.
So I think each of our books should leave the reader with hope. Even if you have an evil person as the “hero”/Main Character and you have that character defeated in the end, it could still potentially leave the reader with a sense of defeat. So that’s the risk you run.
Or you could have the evil Main Character win in the end, but then you’re communicating that evil will triumph over good, which is not Biblical and not writing for Christ.
So writing with a bad-guy as the “good-guy” is very difficult for the writer, and potentially unsatisfying for the reader, but if done well, I think it could be very powerful.
A hero is not so much someone who seeks truth: A Hero is a righteous person, a person who does the right thing regardless of the consequences. If you look back at all the great “villains” of history, you will find that most of them had good motivations, in a twisted kind of way. Hitler wanted his people to succeed; he wanted them to be perfect, to get what he thought they earned. Yet the way he went about it is what made him a villain. If he had encouraged arts and science with the same goal, would the world remember him as a terrible person? Yet his motivation would have been the same. He was not a villain because of his motive: He was a villain because of his actions.
The viewpoint character of a novel is not, by default, a hero: He is the PROTAGONIST, but not necessarily the hero. By calling the protagonist a hero and the antagonist a villain, you are confusing the true meanings of the two words. A hero is, like I said earlier, someone who does what is right. A villain is someone who does what is wrong. The bad guy CANNOT be the good guy; he can be the protagonist, but not the good guy.
As Christians, it is of UTMOST IMPORTANCE that we do not confuse light and dark, which is what your discussions of heroes and villains has done. To say that a villain is a hero if the book is written from his perspective is to say that evil is only evil if it goes against your beliefs: Yes, in this instance, your choice of words is vitally important.
A very good point (very good points) that needed to be said.
But the original article is also very good. 🙂
I understand what you’re saying, however, by definition, the “hero” of the story is the protagonist. The “hero” doesn’t have to be hero, if that makes sense. “Hero” is just a technical term, interchangeable with “Main Character.”
There are plenty of novels out there with “heroes” that have very poor character. I think the last book in the Hunger Games Trilogy is a perfect example. Katniss was unbelievably selfish, and yet, she was the “hero”.
The Hunger Games series is not Christian, though. I agree, that as Christians, we need to understand that the morals/themes we communicate to our audience will come through the main character (hero) usually. There are some rare books that have another character be the moral compass and they work. “A Separate Peace” is a good example, however, this is very difficult to pull off.
So I agree, we definitely cannot confuse light and dark. But “hero” is just another term for “main character” in fiction writing. Just wanted to make that clear.
Unbeatable hero is way worse in my opinion. They’re sooooooo annoying and make the story dull. An unbeatable villain, at least, will make the reader want to keep reading to see if the hero can beat them, though both are dead weights on a plot line.
When the author has the villain do something stupid so the hero can defeat him, it not only makes the villain look stupid, it makes the hero look weak. (The author looks lazy, too.) And fake brains don’t count. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell the reader that your villain is the most brilliant mad scientist who ever created a world-destroying megaweapon–if your villain acts stupidly, then he’s stupid. I recently read a novel where the heroine “played on the villain’s ego” by “challenging him” to hunt her in the woods. When the villain accepted the challenge I wrote both of them off as idiots. By the time the heroine had dragged several people (who had no woodland skills) out to the woods with her to act as villain-fodder I was plotting out exactly what the villain should do to render the heroine complete defenseless–and really hoping he’d do it, because she deserved to lose! This is not the state of mind in which you want your reader going into the climax. I don’t care if your villain has an ego the size of Mount Everest, or is totally obsessed with his evil goal, he should never act like an idiot. Not because villains in real life never act like idiots–they frequently do. But because the moment you paint your villain as a fool, you cheapen your hero. The smarter your villain is, the better your hero looks when he wins.
I have a scene where my villain is pointing a weapon from a further but not too far distance from my hero. In the hero’s own house. How do I make my villain not be stupid and yet make the hero escape and make it out alive?