Good luck and courage! to all who will be starting NaNoWriMo before I post again. I admire you!

On January 13, 2020, Chechu wrote, Sorry if I write something wrong: English is not my first language. I am from Argentina, I speak Spanish. I have a question. I’ve started a novel but I’ve got stuck.

I’ve got the two MCs defined and a less detailed image of other characters. I have an idea of the conflict. I know what the MCs want and, of course, is related to the conflict. I want the characters to grow, to get better, to overcome themselves and I want the conflict to push them in that direction. The problem is that, though I know what the villain wants, I can’t picture what he would do to try to achieve it and, in consequence, the obstacles the MCs are going to have to fight.

Some months ago I wrote the first chapter. And I couldn’t start the second because there’s going to be a conversation that’s going to introduce the main girl to the conflict. And I don’t know how to do that conversation because there are a lot of things that I haven’t decide (or found out) about the conflict yet. Specially because I am not a very political or strategic person so I don’t know what a man who wants to obtain a place of power would do to achieve it (the villain).

Also there’s magic in this world, for the main masculine character is a mage. And the girl is very artistic. So I want to focus on things that I really like, like magic and art, and bravery, heroicity and magnanimity. But there is a politics conflict and they care. They want to bring the true king back to the throne, though it may be difficult and dangerous.

I don’t know what to do. Any advises?

Writing Ballerina wrote back, I would say to write the chapter anyway, as much as you can, then go back and fix it later.

You can also do some planning on a different document to figure out the conflict a little better before writing the chapter.

I’m with Writing Ballerina on writing notes in a different document.

When I start a story, I don’t know much more about my characters than age, gender, and the situation I’m going to thrust them into. I discover them through their actions, reactions, thoughts, feelings, and what they say.

For the villain, we might focus on the challenge he faces rather than on him and get to him through that. All we know about him is that he’s power hungry, he lives in a monarchy, and the true king is not on the throne.

We can ask what the obstacles are to his gaining power. Let’s imagine for starters (because we have to start somewhere) that the true king went hunting one day five years earlier and didn’t come back. His grieving queen sent out search parties, but every lead turned into a dead end. The queen has been ruling in his absence and doing her best.

Our villain will look for weaknesses that he can exploit. Time for a list! We can list the possibilities:

• The queen doesn’t have the common touch. Her subjects think she’s stuck-up.

• Skirmishes have broken out on the border with a neighboring kingdom.

• Unlike the king, she knows no magic.

• Before he vanished, the king nearly emptied the royal treasury.

• A drought has brought about widespread food shortages.

You think of five more.

But we don’t want to make things easy for our villain. Another list. What obstacles will he face?

• The western provinces where the queen grew up know her best and are fiercely loyal to her.

• She is very smart and a good strategist.

• He gets bored easily.

• Her son and daughter are skilled at magic.

You think of five more.

We can stare at our lists and think of strategies a villain might use to exploit the kingdom’s weaknesses and get around its strengths. This may call for lists for each weakness and each obstacle, because there probably are several approaches to every one.

Next, we stare some more, looking for links among the strategies. Might the same person who is fabulous at bringing people to his way of seeing things also be wealthy enough to replenish the kingdom’s coffers–or have a magical power that will help him do so? We’re not going to use all the ideas we came up with in our lists. Once we begin to flesh out the villain, we can let some of them go.

Naturally, we can’t give him all the power. We need to think about what he’s bad at too, what may trip him up. This calls for another list, considering as we write it how our new ideas fit in with what we’ve already decided. Once that’s done, I’d suggest writing the next chapter.

Success, alas, isn’t guaranteed. We may have to rethink and revise and go back to earlier chapters to plant things that we didn’t see ahead to. The great (and terrible) thing about writing is that it’s endlessly fixable. Pity the poor actor who garbles a line in front of a full house. That mistake cannot be unmade.

Here are three prompts:

• In the scenario above, your villain, Boran, spies on Serena, the captain of the queen’s guard, and discovers that she spends half an hour alone every day on the castle ramparts, planning the day’s deployment of the guards. Boran goes up there to meet her and see how persuadable she is to helping him–what levers he can pull with her, how she might be vulnerable. He plans to kill her if he can’t use her. Write the scene and show both his strengths and weaknesses. You decide if he succeeds with her or not.

• Boran, in armor, rides to the border where the skirmishes are taking place. Write a scene showing what he does when he gets there. Does he fight on the side of the queen, or on the other side? Does he fight at all?

• Boran convinces the steward of the castle that he should be appointed the prince and princess’s tutor. Write what happens during the first lesson.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Two events to tell you about before the post:

On Saturday, May 18th, from 12:00 until 4:00, I’ll be signing books at the Millbrook Literary Festival, held at the Millbrook Public Library, 3 Friendly Lane, Millbrook, NY. From 1:30 to 2:30, I’ll be on a panel about novelizing fairy tales.

This is a time change: The next day, Sunday, May 19th, at 4:00 (not 2:00), I’ll be among a group of poets reading at Byrd’s Books, 178 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, CT. There will be time before or after to chat.

Hope you can make one (or both!) of these!

On February 14, 2019, Writing Ballerina wrote, I have a great plot; great conflict; great evil scheme — but why on earth is the bad guy doing what he’s doing??? I have trouble coming up with motives. I find an evil plan, then try to shift around the pieces of my story to find a motive that makes sense, but I just end up expounding on the plan — making it more “elegant” (to refer to A Tale of Two Castles) — or making a new one, but I still don’t have a motive. For example, in my WIP, there’s this king that turns out to be evil and basically wants to kill off the whole kingdom — but why??? The best I can come up with is that he’s bored with royalty, but who’s that cold that they would kill thousands of people because they don’t like their job?? Help!

Thanks for the shout-out to A Tale of Two Castles!

Villains always seem to fascinate us on the blog. What does this say about us? What is our motive? Mrrah ha ha!

Lots of you weighed in.

viola03: Maybe this evil king’s motive could be that no one wanted him to be king (or thought he had what it takes or something), and now he wants revenge. Or maybe he’s an impostor from an enemy kingdom which wants to annihilate the other kingdom.

Writing Ballerina loved this but still wanted her general question considered.

K. R. Garcia: For motives, I find you have to start with the character. It helps me to find something painful in a character’s past that they either work to improve for the benefit of others (hero) or improve for the worse for others (villain). Here are a few common motives for villains: revenge (my favorite) is a fun one because the cause can be revealed as a twist. Thirst for power can be done very well and make terrifying villains. Stigma or vendetta against a group or population (for example, an evil wizard who despises muggles) can make for a fascinating radical/political kind of villain. In real life, motives are complex, so it’s a good idea for a character to have multiple motives. For example, my WIP’s villain wants revenge on another character as well as power.

Jenalyn Barton: A lot of time motive stems from a character’s background. For example, if the bad guy is a former slave who was treated poorly by the royals, he probably wants to get rid of them out of a desire for revenge. If he was once one of the royals who was banished for refusing to conform to society’s expectations of him, perhaps he desires to change society to fit his lifestyle and wants to expose all the corruption that he knew went on behind the scenes. Perhaps he was bullied and treated poorly as a child and ends up taking out all of his pent-up aggression on his subjects. The possibilities are endless! If you figure out his background, his own personal story in which he thinks of himself as the protagonist, you may find out his hidden motive.

Christie V Powell: I’ve recently discovered the ennegram personality system, which is kind of like Meyer’s Briggs if you know that one. They give a primary want and motivation for each personality type, as well as what a ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ person looks like. I find it really useful for motivations, especially for villains. Here’s the long version: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions/
Here’s a quick break down:
Type 1: Idealistic reformer. Basic Desire: To be good. Basic Fear: To be evil.
This is actually my main villain’s type. They believe that the world is black and white and they are motivated to shape the world into the way it should be–in a villain’s case, through inappropriate means.
Type 2: Caring Helper. Basic Desire: to be loved Basic Fear: to be unwanted.
Type 3: Driven Achiever. Basic Desire: Success. Basic Fear: to be worthless.
My love interest and one of my villains both have this type. They struggle to be authentic and can be manipulative. in order to appear successful.
Type 4: Artistic Individualist. Basic Desire: To be themselves. Basic Fear: To be insignificant.
Type 5: Intelligent intellectual. Basic Desire: To be competent. Basic Fear: To be helpless.
Type 6: Dedicated Loyalist. Basic Desire: Security. Basic Fear: Being unsupported.
Type 7: Fun Enthusiast. Basic Desire: To have basic needs fulfilled. Basic Fear: Deprivation and Pain.
Type 8: Dominating Challenger. Basic Desire: Freedom. Basic Fear: Being controlled by others.
Type 9: Easy-going Peacemaker. Basic Desire: Peace of mind. Basic Fear: Conflict and Loss.
It’s really hard to write a type 9 villain because when ‘unhealthy’, they tend to disassociate from the world.

Melissa Mead: A type 9 villain would probably be clingy and try to make everyone conflict-free, even if it meant, say, lobotomizing them. All for the greater goal of Peace, of course.

Kyryiann: When I was struggling with this problem in my WIP, I decided to learn more about my villain. With me, a lot of brainstorming happens when I’m just thinking about the story. I had already decided that the villain was brothers with one of the main protagonists, a king, so I was trying to figure out why he was trying to destroy everything his brother loved.
The king’s wife is an important character, and as I was thinking about the three of them, I figured that she would have come in contact with the villain. The woman had spent some time with the king and his brother because her father wanted to arrange an alliance with their two kingdoms. She would have spent time with each brother individually.
That’s when it hit me: what if the villain had fallen in love with the woman, but she chose his brother instead?
This put a whole new spin on the plot. I eventually decided that the villain thought that his brother had forced the woman to choose him instead of the villain.
That’s basically a step-by-step process that I go through for most of my novels.

I’m struck by the potential for tragedy as well as for villainy in Christie V Powell’s list. Some of those basic fears are very sad and also touching–worthlessness, insignificance, helplessness, etc. A villain may become villainous because the only other option she sees is her deepest fear, as in: At least if I kill everyone in the castle, no matter what happens, I’ll be famous. I won’t be insignificant. Shakespeare in King Lear, if I remember right, rolls both the villainy and the tragedy together. Lear fears being unloved, and everything follows from that.

We don’t always need motive for a villain. I’ve used this example before: Sherlock Holmes’s adversary, Moriarty, the great criminal mind. I don’t think Arthur Conan Doyle ever gives him a motive. We can intuit a motive, though–or maybe Doyle suggests one or two indirectly: greed and the challenge of getting away with his crimes–being smarter than the agents of the law.

Sometimes we can deduce a motive in the results. This happens a lot in murder mysteries. Somebody has been killed, and the detective hero works backwards to find out why, how, and who. The why is the motive. At first our sleuth suspects the heirs to the fortune of the victim. Then she comes to find out that the dead man was funding civil rights lawyers in a totalitarian state. Agents of the state come under suspicion, too. There are more surprises, fresh suspects. The motive isn’t discovered until the murderer is identified. In this case, we, the writers, have to know the victim as well or better than we know the perp.

Some real life villains, like the Unabomber, for instance, write manifestos that go on for hundreds of pages and attempt to justify their acts. In the Unabomber’s case, he was opposed to technology and expected to start a revolution. That was his motive, though lots of people are Luddites without being violent.

So how do we get from motive to action? I think expert opinion is divided about whether one has to have some sort of psychological disability to carry out terrible acts. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s worth thinking about as we craft our villain. Is a compulsion operating? Now I’m thinking about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Is Mr. Hyde capable of not being evil? We get into predestination and free will. This is deep!

We can decide one way for a certain story and another way for another. In one, our villain’s motive can rise out of his compulsions. She doesn’t feel safe unless she’s in control, so she’s controlling. Another can feel dead inside. He needs to inflict pain in order to come to life. Eek! With this kind of reason for villainy, we don’t need much more in the way of motive. Just pity the poor person who crosses this villain’s path at the wrong moment.

We don’t have to go far from here to the question of evil. Terrible things happen to people in fiction and real life. Is there evil? What’s its nature? How does it operate in our story? In our villain?

Writing Ballerina liked Viola03’s impostor suggestion because it helped her plotting. So we can think about the kind of villain who will send our plot zooming in the right direction. In the fairy tale “Rapunzel,” for example, we need a witch who wants a child and then, later, wants to imprison her in a tower. In the fairy tale, her actions are unmotivated. She just does what she does. But for the story to work in a longer adaptation, her motives are key to everything. Who would want a child and than want to jail her? We don’t necessarily need a back story. Basic character will do. She may love babies and hate children, for example.

In my loosely related version, Lady Klausine takes Perry because she wants a child, but she isn’t the one to shut Perry up in the tower. That’s her husband, Lord Tove, whose motive is extreme prejudice. So I divided the two villainous acts (and the reader comes to sympathize, if not excuse, Lady Klausine).

In Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel, the witch’s motives are entirely different-fascinating and unexpected.

So a single fairy tale plot can support multiple motives. To come to the one that we want to work with, we can consider the world of our story and the values of the people in it. We can think about the challenges this villain with his motive will present for our MC. We can make a list! Like this:

Smart villain
Bumbling villain
Resentful
World view that makes him act as he does

And so on. We can elaborate on the ones that appeal to us and see how they will affect our plot.

Fun can come into it. What kind of villain with what kind of motives will we enjoy writing? Because villains are often a delight to write. More than any other character, our villains give us permission to write over the top. They are generally an extreme, so we can be wild writing about them.

Here are three prompts:

∙ The parents in “Hansel and Gretel” abandon their children in the forest. The reader is told that this is because the family doesn’t have enough food, and that the mom is more willing than her husband to leave them. But the witch is cast as the major villain. Come on! Who would abandon children in a forest or anywhere else? Who would go along with such a plan? The parents are villains! What’s their motive? Write a scene or the whole story, revealing the real motive.

∙ Your world is a dystopian bureaucracy with a jillion departments . Your villain is the Minister of the Department of Transportation, whatever kind of transportation is used in this world. And he, deviously, makes transportation a misery for everyone. Goods are late getting where they’re going. People’s commute quadruples in length. The tiniest aspect of everyone’s life in this world is disrupted. Write a scene in which you show the reader how he operates, and why.

∙ The sirens of Greek mythology sing sailors to their death. Pick one and make her the villain of your story. Invent her motive and write a scene or the whole story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

On September 21, 2017, Carley Anne wrote, All right, so I have a fabulously difficult journey that my main characters are going on, full of life-threatening natural obstacles, with time slipping quickly through their fingers, and an ever-looming bad guy (not to mention, getting chased by castle guards, who don’t realize that the mc’s are trying to do good!). My problem is, I feel like (although the bad guy wants to GET mc’s personally), the difficulties aren’t personal enough. I wish there was more of a Hattie versus Ella sort of thing going on, and I was hoping for some advice on getting that vibe, without changing the entire course of my plot-line.

A little lecture is in order. Sorry!

Everything is up for grabs when we write and when we revise. If a character isn’t working, we have to fix her, even if she has to change gender, go from hero to villain, get older, get younger, lose a finger or two–whatever! If our plot needs a complete overhaul, which it may not, we have to give it one.

If we don’t, as I know from sad experience, our story will bog down. We’ll feel like we’re typing with mittens on, afraid to touch this or that. When this happens to me, I get bored and sleepy. My forehead hits the keyboard. My snores resound.

Sometimes we (I) have to rewrite hundreds of pages, change tense or POV, add characters, cut characters. We have to serve our story, no matter what.

End of lecture.

I love the guards’ confusion!

I’m understanding Carley Anne’s question as being about emotional connection, and when our characters connect emotionally, in a positive or negative way, our readers will connect, too.

In the case of Ella and Hattie, the negative connection works two ways. *SPOILER ALERT!* Skip this paragraph if you haven’t read Ella Enchanted and plan to. When Hattie takes Ella’s necklace, Ella’s dislike of her is sealed and hardens to rock as Hattie continues to order her around, playing on Ella’s obedience. Hattie may not be naturally villainous, but she’s profoundly jealous of Ella, who has more charm in a fingernail than Hattie has in her entire body. Also, to Hattie’s dismay, Ella doesn’t have an embarrassing mother and sister, either. Then, at finishing school, Ella makes a real friend, a comfort and pleasure Hattie has never experienced. In persecuting Ella, she keeps trying to even the scales, which infuriatingly continue to go the other way. Ella remains appealing, and Hattie worsens because of her own cruelty.

The reader sides with Ella, and so did I while I wrote the book, although I also pitied her.

In Peter Pan, the original by James M. Barrie, Hook is always striving for and failing to reach something called “good form,” which Peter possesses effortlessly, and it’s this quality that stokes Hook’s hatred. In an interesting twist, Hook goes to his end pleased in one regard: he thinks Peter has violated good form at the final moment. Barrie himself doesn’t take a position on this and suggests that the good-form standard is just Hook’s fixation. Barrie is such an original writer, and this is one example.

So how can we get an emotional connection working for us between our villain and our MC?

Jealousy stokes both Hattie’s and Hook’s enmity. We can come up with a reason for our villain to envy our MC in an overwhelming and obsessive way. Any quality in our MC can do it: beauty, brains, charm, wealth.

Other emotions can motivate our villain as well. Let’s try fear. Our MC, Carole, is the first Martian to be elected to head a planetary council. Our villain, Griffith, fears, baselessly, that this election is just the beginning, and Martians will take over and enslave the earthlings. Griffith and Carole meet at a public event. Carole, unsuspecting, says something that’s interpreted by Griffith as a put-down of earthlings. Now it’s personal for him. He starts to take steps.

The fear can work both ways, and we get more tension if it does. Carole can–realistically–pick up something off, something fanatical, about Griffith. She’s seen it before and recognizes it and becomes afraid, too. She starts to take steps to protect herself and other Martians, not always wisely.

For our villain, we can use any negative emotion or state of mind: rage; prejudice; despair, thwarted love; even obsessive love, which is creepy. And we can use negative and positive emotions and states of mind to fuel our MC, too–such as protectiveness, determination, stubbornness, a commitment to justice.

It helps if we can bring our villain and MC together at least once when we’re building their animosity. They may become enemies at that point, or the animosity may already have been festering The air can sizzle with their antagonism. What was theoretical before becomes intensely personal.

Even the natural obstacles mentioned by Carley Anne may sometimes be made to be challenging in a personal way. When we can do it, we’ll ratchet up the tension. Our MC has to scale a sheer cliff wall, but she’s terrified of heights. Or she’s trekking to save her family when a hurricane blows in. She takes it personally, believing the universe is against her and the people she loves. A forest fire breaks out, and she loses focus, overwhelmed by memories of her brother’s death in a burning building.

Here are three prompts:

∙ When the mirror tells the evil queen that Snow White is the fairest, the queen doesn’t decide immediately that Snow White has to die. The queen hasn’t killed anyone before. She loves her husband and knows he’s fond of his daughter. She invites Snow White to the throne room for a chat. During that meeting something happens that seals future events. Write the scene.

∙ Write a campaign speech for Carole and write the scene in which she delivers it, with Griffith in the audience, misunderstanding, drawing wrong conclusions.

∙ Your MC and her antagonist have never heard of each other. They meet as a result of an online dating site. They arrange to meet for coffee. Write their meeting and their rapid progression from neutrality to dislike to loathing. If you like, keep going.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Last day of my tour! I was delighted to meet those of you I met! Thank you for coming! Remember, I have more events coming up in my local area, so I hope to see even more of you. And then, after that, there’s the rest of our lives…

On November 23, 2016, Failed Villain wrote, What about the motivation for an antagonist? They’re always harder for me because I personally have no desire whatsoever to kill someone or rule the world, so I can’t figure out how to express those motivations. Or are they even realistic motivations? Sometimes I get stuck because my villains seem too pure evil. I try to give them some sort of backstory, but again I can’t really relate to that. It’s one thing to write about a character with a dark side, but it’s another to write a character that is pure (or mostly) evil.

I’ve noticed a disturbing side in many of you here on the blog: mrah-ha-ha, you love to write about writing villains! And I love to, too. Does this make us… evil?

Hmm… I’ve selected a few from your pages of excellent responses.

Melissa Mead: Maybe they started with ordinary motivations that got out of hand. For example: “I’m tired of being pushed around. I want some control over this bullying.”
:Punches out bully:
“What a rush! That bully will never bother me again. But there’s this whole gang of bullies…”
:Plan to stop bullies lands the whole gang in the hospital:
“Well, I stopped the bullies, but now the whole town’s mad at me, and I can’t stand it, so…”

And one bad choice leads to another, and another, until the villain’s so caught up in his bad choices that he feels like the whole world’s out to get him, and the only way to make it stop is to rule the world.

Or when he punched the bully, the bully fell and hit his head on a rock, and eventually died, but the villain-to-be was the one who called 911, so no one suspected him. And the next time it was easier to punch harder…

Jenalyn Barton: My favorite villains are the ones that have noble intentions, but go about them the wrong way. Some good examples are Darth Vader (he wanted to save Padme), Light Yagami from Death Note (he wanted to rid the world of evil), Zuko from Avatar: the Last Airbender (he wanted to regain his honor; although he does eventually become a good guy, he starts out as the antagonist), Professor Callaghan from Big Hero 6 (he is bitter over the loss of his daughter and wants revenge). But don’t forget that even the “pure evil” villains have something they want. Captain Hook wants to defeat Peter Pan and get revenge for the hand Peter cut off. Shere Khan hates Man. The Firelord from Avatar: the Last Airbender wants to expand the territory of the Fire Nation. Hans wants to rule his own country. Syndrome from the Incredibles wants to be a superhero. The possibilities are limitless.

StorytellerLizzie: We also hate Old Toad Face because, as it was explained to me once, Voldemort is like a serial killer you hear about on the news: scary but distant. Toad Face is that co-worker that you can’t get to like you, the Manager who gives you extra work because they can, The boss who made you work on Thanksgiving: scary/mean/evil and up close and personal.

I love that, StorytellerLizzie!

Not sure why I’m remembering this, but it seems somehow germane. A fellow children’s book writer once asked me if I would rather be a victim or a perpetrator, if those were the only options. At first, it seemed to me that the only ethical choice was victim, but the more I thought about it, the more I came around to wanting to be the perp. The victim is acted upon, the perp is the actor. Most crucially, the perp gets to pick the crime, which can even be victimless. I can be the perp who decides that my crime is to jaywalk! My crime can be to remove the label from a mattress that you’re warned never to remove!

Suppose my crime is to park my car in front of a fire hydrant and, in a rare tragedy, a fire starts and the fire truck can’t get to the hydrant and people die. Of course I didn’t mean that to happen. How do I move forward? The fault is mine. Do I grow from a perp into a villain?

If the perp isn’t me but a character named Phil, we have the beginnings of a story.

Since Failed Villain asked about motivation, I think this is one that’s easy to get inside. A judge recognizes that Phil didn’t intend to kill people and gives him a mild sentence, say probation and community service. One way–a common way, I believe–our formerly run-of-the mill Phil can turn into a villain is if he doesn’t accept responsibility for what he did–and doesn’t forgive himself, either. These two go together, I believe. We have to accept we did something wrong before we realize there is something to forgive. Maybe since the judge didn’t take his crime seriously, he decides he doesn’t have to–but I don’t think anyone can really disregard an event like this. It burrows inside. It becomes a kernel with a hard shell around it. Tentacles push out from it.

There may be someone on the planet who has never done anything bad or unkind, but I am not that person. Though I’m not a villain, I’ve let a friend or two down. I’ve been thoughtless, rushed, unkind. When memories of these failures bubble up in my mind, I feel awful, and I try not to repeat–but I have to recognize that someday I will. Maybe next time, though, I’ll be better at apologizing or better at making things right, better at taking responsibility immediately. Or not. I’m no world-destroying villain, but neither my acts nor my motivations are always pure.

Back to Phil when he blocked the fire hydrant. Let’s imagine that he has been driving around for twenty minutes looking for a parking spot, and his date is waiting for him, and she’s going to be mad if he’s late again, and his cell phone has died, so he can’t call her.

What can we conclude about him? He runs late, gets people mad at him, doesn’t think ahead sufficiently, doesn’t want people to be mad at him, doesn’t want to face the consequences, tends to do what’s expedient, is perhaps self-centered. He may also have wonderful qualities, be generous, kind to people in trouble, may run late because he can’t refuse to help anyone.

The backstory I provided two paragraphs ago doesn’t go into past trauma or childhood experiences. It’s minimal. We don’t need much back story, if any, for our villains or our other characters, in my opinion. I don’t think I know the back stories for any of my villains. For example, I have no idea why Sir Peter, a minor villain in Ella Enchanted, is so calculating. I sure don’t know what makes Lucinda tick. If it helps us, we can figure out our characters’ pasts, but the reader doesn’t have to see our discoveries unless they come into the story. I don’t even think we need to know or understand our good characters’ motivations, except for our POV’s, whose head we’re in. Back to Lucinda. She ruins people’s lives, not for gain, not really to please them with her gifts. I don’t know why she does it.

Can I find myself in her disastrous gifts? A little. I like to be right as much as she does. I can be a tad impulsive. But I would never ever do any of the horrible things she does, even if I had the power. I can still write her, without knowing why she does anything–or without wanting to ruin people’s lives, too.

As we saw with Phil, our starting point can be the first bad act, whatever it is. As we work out the consequences, we can decide how Phil will respond to them. Through his actions we’ll figure out his personality, which will move us forward into our story’s future with a character who gets more and more complete and real.

When it comes to a purely evil villain, unless we’re writing from her point of view, we don’t have to know her motivation. We have to know only that in a given situation she will go for the worst outcome. Naturally, we do need to know her purpose–what specific harm she hopes to impose and on whom. Our other characters can speculate on her motives and methods so they can come up with strategies to thwart her, but they and we don’t really have to know.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Turn Phil into a villain. List five ways his careless (and selfish) act develops into villainy in his life. Pick one and write a scene or his whole story.

∙ Go the other way and write about Phil coming to terms with what he did and becoming a better person. Make this hard. Have him stumble. If you like, bring in family or friends of one or more of the people to whose death he contributed.

∙ Make Phil’s story really complicated by mixing it up with the circumstances that led to the fire in the house he parked in front of. If you like, a more deliberate villain can have been at work to start the fire. Have Phil get involved.

∙ Expand Phil’s future so that he becomes supremely bad–threaten-the-survival-of-the-universe bad. Write his story along with the story of your MC, who, through small acts of decency, becomes the force for good opposing him.

∙ Take a minor bad characteristic, maybe something that drives you crazy when someone does it. For example, could be tickling people whether they want to be tickled or not. Make it bigger and write a scene or a whole story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

First off, I will be speaking in the Oak Room of the public library in San Mateo, California, on May 5th at 7:00 pm. The library is at 55 West 3rd Avenue. If you are in the area, I would love to meet you!

On March 16, 2016, Poppie wrote, Has anyone ever redeemed a bad guy? The villains in my fanfic story have once been good, then they were turned evil by dark magic, now they need to become good again. How can I make that happen in a convincing, non-magical way?

Several of you weighed in.

Christie Powell: I did a short story where the main character is extremely angry. It grows through the story until she snaps. She set a house on fire (magically) without realizing her little brother is inside. So she has to save him, and as she does she sees the consequences of her anger tearing everything apart, and that helps her to set her anger aside and start to forgive the people who hurt her. “The Christmas Carol” is a good example of a book with this rebirth plot. Even kid movies like Frozen or the Lego movie use it.

If this is a really bad person, I’d think it would have to be something pretty dramatic to be convincing. Shakespeare got away with “I ran into some monks and converted and now I’m going to make everything right again,” but that was a long time ago. Realizing that their actions are harming someone they care about seemed like a good one.

Bookworm: Poppie, here are some ideas:
Your villains could:
∙ notice something your good character(s) did that made him/her see the error of his/her ways
∙ get a nightmare that snaps them out of it

Your other characters could:
∙ slap him/her (literally or figuratively) out of it

If you want to be extra convincing, maybe a character can rant about it to the villains, giving the villains new POVs.

Jenalyn Barton: My favorite example of a villain gone good is Zuko from Avatar: the Last Airbender. It is a TV show, so they had a bit more time to work with his character, but there is still a lot to learn from it. I’ve watched the show over a dozen times now (yes, I’m slightly obsessed), and I’ve observed that Zuko’s character arc basically went through three stages: Establishment, Fall, and Redemption. In the first season, the story focuses on establishing his character. You will notice that even though he is a villain, the creators of the show waste no time in creating sympathy for the character. In fact, they do this from the start, by explaining his motives and giving him a rival villain who is even worse than he is. His back story is established in the first season as well, helping us understand why he is so determined to capture Aang. In the second season he has a fall from grace, where he loses his status and is forced to live the life of a fugitive. He learns some lessons on humility and such because of this, then has his major fall when he betrays his uncle in his attempt to regain his status. In the third season his character goes through redemption, when he realizes that having his status back has not made him happy at all, and that true honor comes from being loyal and doing the right thing despite the opposition. He then switches sides, and spends the rest of the season earning the trust of those he once hunted. By the end of the show, his change from bad to good feels ultimately satisfying. If he had skipped any one of these three stages, his change of heart would have felt hasty and contrived.

Emma: One of my favorite methods I’ve heard of goes like this:
The bad guy is forced to help the good guy in some way (either the bad guy is captured, and is literally forced, or because of unfortunate circumstances has to help the good guy… This could go in a million different directions). While helping the good guy, the bad guy either realizes 1) There is no reason to remain evil, 2) They actually agree with some of the things the hero does/says/believes, 3) They actually have come to care for the hero because of their kindness (whether this is through a brother-brother relationship or a romantic one is up to you). Because of a realization, perhaps the bad guy actually saves the good guy without really realizing what they’re doing. This could be a literal rescue or an emotional “rescue”, or anything along those lines. The bad guy comes to the conclusion after the rescue that they no longer want to be a bad guy anymore, and end up the hero’s sidekick, romantic interest, mentor, or even the hero him/herself.

Now, this does involve a relationship of some kind, and it would really work best on a quest story. But of course, the hero doesn’t have to change the bad guy. The bad guy could change because of his/her new found relationship with another good character. Anyway, I just like this idea because it highly involves sympathetic/likable characters, and would work best in a quest (my personal favorite type of story). It also doesn’t have to involve magic, and can be very convincing.

These are great!

I’m assuming that the original black magic spell can’t simply be lifted. Here are some more strategies that may help:

∙ If we can, it’s often best to work from character, so we might think about what’s least bad about each of our villains. For example, many years ago, before I became a writer, I had a bad boss: egotistical, self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-important–self, self, self! The only admirable quality I could detect in him was generosity. If he were a character and I wanted to turn him, I’d work on that, because generosity suggests a smidgen of empathy–and empathy is villain poison.

∙ I notice a common thread in most of the post comments, particularly in Emma’s: relationships. The villain is changed by her connection to another character, who isn’t a villain. I used this in my Princess Tale, For Biddle’s Sake. The fairy Bombina, the villain, takes the child Parsley from her parents. Bombina’s evil stems from the joy she takes in turning people into frogs, for which she has been jailed by the fairy queen. When the story begins, she’s just gotten out. All this is lighthearted, unless you’re a current frog/former person. What starts to turn Bombina around is her love–which takes her by surprise–for Parsley. I won’t give away the turning point, but by the end Bombina is thoroughly reformed. She’s still sharp and prickly–we don’t want to make her unrecognizable–but she’s given up her frog misdeeds.

So our villain can care about another living thing, which doesn’t have to be a person, can even be a plant. The villain’s beloved is a tiny crack in her shell of badness. We can make the story widen the crack until our villain finds it impossible to keep being evil.

∙ We may be able to change him through reason. Our villain is very smart, but he hasn’t thought through the world view that underlies his villainy. If we can undermine his assumptions, we may turn him around.

∙ We can get to her through her self-interest. She wants power, for example. We may be able to show her through events in our story that she’s more likely to gain power by being a humanitarian. It may be a pretense at first, but we can nudge her toward more honest kindness with our other strategies.

∙ We can give him a flaw that we can exploit. Maybe he’s vain. In the fairy tale “Puss ‘N’ Boots,” for example, Puss works on the ogre’s vanity to get him to turn himself into a mouse. In a more serious story, we can use our villain’s vanity to our MC’s advantage, too. When he discovers the consequences of his vanity–or of any flaw–he takes the first step toward change.

∙ Magic has been disallowed, but maybe other outside interventions can be brought to bear. For example, her brain could be changed surgically or with medicine (modern or from another time period) or through hypnosis. If we go this route, we have to establish early that such a thing is possible, and there may be suspense over whether the procedure will work on her.

∙ If these characters were once good, we may be able to persuade them to remember their old selves, as long as their memories are intact.

∙ Here’s a weird one. Let’s call it The Silver-Lining Effect. The bad boss I mentioned above had the good effect of spurring me to find another job, which was a much better fit for me. I think this is common, a good outcome arising from bad behavior. Our villain, who is smart, realizes that his destructive actions may hurt some, but they also strengthen the forces arrayed against him, which is the opposite of his intention. Diabolically, he decides he has to embrace virtue. Then, he can be brought to turn truly decent–or not, if we want to keep his evil in reserve.

The Silver-Lining Effect is an example of the complexity in moral issues, which we can use to create layered stories. An example I think about regularly is homelessness and the beggars that one sees on the streets of many cities, especially in decent weather. I’m a big walker, often in New York City. New York, to its credit, is a great walking city, so it’s also a great place to panhandle. If I have change, if I’m not in a gigantic hurry, I’ll drop a quarter in a beggar’s cup. When I don’t, I feel guilty. When I do, I feel uncertain. I definitely haven’t changed anyone’s life with a quarter, and will my quarter go for cigarettes or worse? And I don’t make the interaction human, either. I drop in the coin and move on, rarely saying anything, rarely making eye contact. So I wind up guilty again. Was this a good deed or not? Upstanding people can argue both sides.

With villains we sometimes bring in moral complexity by revealing backstory. There are other ways as well. If we’re in our villain’s POV, we can show her thoughts and feelings, which can be different from what the reader expects. But even if we’re not in her heart and mind, we can demonstrate what lies beneath through dialogue and action. For example, the villain may be kind to his henchpeople; opposition is what brings out his despicable side.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Dark magic has made villains of Robin Hood, his merry band, and Maid Marian. Think of an un-magical way to turn all of them back at a single stroke. Write the scene in which this happens. You may need to start at an earlier point to set this up. If you’re inspired, write the entire story.

∙ Pick one of the characters above, could be Robin Hood or a band member or Maid Marian. Develop the character and work the transformation gradually.

∙ Reform the evil queen in “Snow White,” using her character as we know her: jealous and rageful. Use one or more of the approaches suggested above, or another that you come up with, but no magic allowed.

∙ Using the complexity of moral questions, create a switcheroo. In the course of an investigation, make Sherlock Holmes evil and Moriarty good, and totally confuse Dr. Watson!

Have fun, and save what you write!

On November 19, 2013, J. Garf wrote, I was wondering if anyone knows how to make evil beautiful. I don’t mean making the villains physically beautiful, that’s relatively easy. I mean the act of evil itself. For example, in the Phantom of the Opera, the phantom calls light “cold, unfeeling” and “garish”, while he calls darkness and evil “sweet intoxication.” Is this simply his mad opinion, or could you write something like that? I plan to read the book soon which will hopefully give me some ideas, but does anyone have any advice? Also, how difficult is it to write a protagonist as a villain?

Bibliophile commented, I would say, pretty difficult. I mean, we all want to root for the protag, but can we if they’re evil?


I think that good examples of this on TV are Breaking Bad and definitely Dexter. Don’t watch those shows if you’re squeamish. But in general, if the evil is backed by some good, then we might be able to relate. Like when we had to read Mein Kampf by Hitler, he kept stating his mission over and over again. It’s a good read, there were some things in there that you wouldn’t have expected of him. 


If you were to write a story like that, it would definitely need to be in first person. Otherwise, the character wouldn’t come across as well as he could have.

In the nick of time, Bibliophile clarified: Reading that over, it sounds like I agreed with Hitler, I DO NOT!!!!! It just was interesting to see how his mind worked.

And Michelle Dyck weighed in with, I’m not sure if you can make evil TRULY beautiful. I think you can make it understandable, or beautiful from the perspective of the evil character. But at some point in the story, the readers will begin to see the evil for what it really is.

First off, I want to mention that Dexter and Breaking Bad are both TV series for adults, and for adults with stronger stomachs than mine!

Villains are fascinating! But I’ve never tried to create beautiful evil or an evil protagonist, so what follows is just speculation.

Say we have a species of intelligent cockroaches locked in a war with humans for dominion over the earth. The roaches hope to wipe humanity out, except for a handful who will be kept in zoos. Our MC, Hunneeha, is a young roach lieutenant, who has risen in the roach ranks by dint of her enthusiasm, skill, and team spirit. She and her squad have been assigned to infiltrate an elementary school and kill all the adults and children. In the first scene Hunneeha and her squad are getting ready for their mission. Let’s say the story is written in the first person, and it begins like this:

We gathered in the basement sink. Eleven of them looked at me, waiting for my orders, but Jujo, youngster that he was, sucked on the end of a feeler. I waited for him to come to attention, grateful for the time to think of what to say, how to prepare them. Pretty Panay’s carapace sparkled. She must have spent half of yesterday polishing herself, thinking, perhaps, that cleanliness might contribute to victory. Gross feet thundered overhead. What chance did a shiny carapace have against the filthy soles of a human shoe?

Can we make these cockroaches beautiful? I bet we can, although we may have to get past our own revulsion first. We may write about shine, delicacy, big eyes–and not highlight the icky aspects. We’ll have to individualize the bugs. Some are probably better looking than others. Hunneeha may obsess over her skinny legs.

Are they evil? Suppose we alternate chapters from Hunneeha’s POV with chapters from the POV of Marcy, a high school student who has a part-time job in the school cafeteria, which is the roaches’ target; they’re intending to poison the food. Marcy and the children suspect nothing. We make the reader admire Marcy, too, and his brain somersaults whenever the chapters shift.

The point is, everything depends on perspective. We have to get inside our evil MC’s world, understand his goals, discover what he treasures. As an example, let’s make a hero of a tyrant, one who practices genocide, who by any reasonable standard is evil. His most important characteristic is that he’s an extreme nationalist. At the beginning of our story his people are poor and divided into factions. He realizes that the economy needs a war and that people won’t come together without a common enemy, so he, quite deliberately, picks out a tribe of his own people to demonize. Let’s call them the Bup tribe. Suppose he shines a spotlight on the wealthiest Bups. He publicizes their wealth and contrasts it with the plight of the poorest in the other tribes. As the writer, we don’t show members of this tribe who are poor or charitable or struggling or sympathetic in any way. Instead, we highlight the slow steady improvement in the economy. Maybe we zoom in on a delightful family that’s benefiting from the tyrant’s policies. We show violent acts by Bups but not the treatment that led to the fighting back. For the beauty part, we show a ceremony that unifies the other tribes. There are marches with candles and children singing in enormous rooms with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows and banners. There is an air of solemnity and purpose and occasional joyous laughter.

I think we can make this evil beautiful. In addition to perspective, we’ve been selective. We’ve chosen not to show the whole picture of the Bups. By selection, we can make the tyrant sympathetic and heroic. We can make him handsome and even lovable. I bet we can even confuse ourselves.

If we write something like this, are we evil? Maybe not. Are we doing something wrong? I think so.

And I’m not sure we can produce great stories this way, because we may have to try too hard to make the point. We probably have to make our tale less complex in order to force the readers’ feelings. We shift closer to propaganda than to true story-telling. It’s not very different from writing a moralistic story. In both cases, the subtle grays that make fiction thrilling are sacrificed. It’s why I prefer MCs who are a little flawed and villains who are somewhat sympathetic.

Having said all this, we always stack the deck to some degree in our stories. We definitely want the reader to like certain characters more than others. But we also let our stories find their own way and surprise us sometimes.

Here are five prompts:

• Write the scene in which pretty Panay is killed by a first grader. Make the reader feel terrible. Make him hate the child who killed her. For extra credit (ha!), make the child seem as disgusting to the reader as roaches usually feel to us.

• Decide who wins the school battle. Write the final scene. For more extra credit, make the reader have mixed emotions about the outcome.

• Write “Little Red Riding Hood” from the POV of the wolf. Make him more than likable. Make it a tragedy when the hunter kills him.

• If you’re in the mood for historical research, read up on the American Revolution. Pick an MC on the side of the British, and make the reader root for the cause of the monarchy.

• Write “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of the angry fairy who wants the baby to die. Make her sympathetic. Make her even correct.

This turned out to be a pretty serious post. But have fun and save what you wrote!

On November 2, 2011, Rina wrote, I need motivations for my villains, you see. If anyone has any good motivations for villains…?

This is a perfect companion question for last week’s post about backstories. Motivation can be backstory, or front story. Let’s put front story up front and take it first.

Here’s an example:Training in alien communication at the Starship Academy begins with a placement exam, part of which is a chess game. First-year student Anthea intuits the meaning behind the game and intentionally loses to her opponent, Bennett, whose triumph twists into rage when she’s assigned to a higher study group than he is. Thereafter, he’s her enemy, the villain of the story.

Lots of front-story events can motivate a villain. Chuck can inadvertently witness something that no one was supposed to see. He can accidentally say the wrong thing. He can be new in town and just be his adorable, outgoing self, which may threaten Dava, the reigning popular kid.

Going back to Starship Academy, now we know Bennett’s motivation: anger at Anthea for divining what he failed to understand, and fury at himself for being used by her. But we don’t know why he responds with rage. Instead, he could concede with good grace. He could even admire Anthea and ask her to explain how she understood the test when he hadn’t. The writer can provide backstory. We can learn that Bennett’s father, who was constantly passed over for promotion, called almost everyone else a loser. Or his mother used to beat him whenever he brought home less than an A on his report card, or, for you homeschoolers, whenever she found fault with one of his projects.

The writer can put this information in, and the knowledge may enrich the story or may make interesting reading, but it doesn’t precisely explain Bennett; we all respond uniquely to our histories and our circumstances.

Motivation doesn’t always matter. Think of Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes stories. He’s simply bad to the core. There’s a chilling moment in the wonderful old movie, The List of Adrian Messenger, when Kirk Douglas says, “Evil is.”

The motivation can be lost in history. Think of feuding clans. The parties may not even remember the reason they hate each other, but the hatred is carried forward from generation to generation until something breaks the cycle.

Power is a frequent villain motivator. Villainy itself requires a degree of power. The villain doesn’t float in the river of time; he puts his oar in. Real-life historical villains, many of them, are motivated by power.

Indifference can be a motivator. The villain wants what he wants and doesn’t care who’s hurt.

Prejudice can be your villain’s goad to action. Inga hates everyone in the Yunnu tribe. When a young Yunnu boy enters the village she behaves despicably toward him.

Lack of empathy, even solipsism (look it up, if you don’t know – it’s a great word) can cause a villain to act as he does. Georgio doesn’t necessarily mean to do ill, but he doesn’t believe that Helena will feel unhappy if he kidnaps her. He just wants the ransom.

As important as motivation, in my opinion, is consistency. Bennett is going to be a certain kind of villain. He’s gotten into Starship Academy so he’s smart. Is he patient or impatient? Does he enlist henchpeople who do his villainy for him, or does he work alone? Does he pretend to be Anthea’s friend to get under her guard? Whatever you decide, he should always be that. Moriarty will always be subtle and clever. Hattie in Ella Enchanted, not so much, and Olive, never. The ogres in Ella are sneaky and crafty; in The Two Princesses of Bamarre they’re brutish and doltish.

Complexity in a villain is nice but not necessary. The decision may rest on how close or how distant he is. In the Sherlock Holmes stories again, he’s distant. In the Starship Academy example he’s close, and the reader will probably need to know him well, so he should be well-rounded. You may want to give him a good quality or two. The pirate Smee in Peter Pan is lovable, at least partly due to his spectacles. Captain Hook is lovable too, I think, even though he kills without mercy. Maybe it’s because he’s pathetic. After all, his ambition is to kill a little boy. And he has good manners.

What good quality might you give your villain? I’ve known a few baddies (not many). One was very generous, and another had a great sense of humor; the others had no redeeming qualities that I could discover.

An element to consider may be the power relationship between the villain and hero. Anthea and Bennett and Chuck and Dava are equals, but Edwina could be Fred’s horrible boss. Or Fred could be the horrible one, undermining everything that Edwina is trying to accomplish. A powerful villain can exercise his villainy out in the open, not always, but often. An underling villain has to be sneaky. The need for subterfuge can be part of Fred’s motivation.

We look for motivation in a villain, but I’m not sure we do in a hero. Anthea does her best in the chess test. Her goal is to show her skill in nonverbal communication; she isn’t out to defeat Bennett, even though he sees it that way. We don’t generally ask, however, why the good character is good. Interesting.

Sometimes the villain motivates the hero and shapes her actions. Edwina, as the good boss, has to learn how to succeed in spite of Fred. She has to become the kind of supervisor who knows how to deal with subtle insubordination. She can become better or worse because of Fred.

And sometimes the hero shapes the villain. Peter Pan is unchanged by Hook, but Hook is profoundly affected by the sort of enemy Peter is. He becomes a tragic figure (in a lighthearted way) because of Peter.
  
Here are three prompts:

∙    Anthea’s mentor, who sets her course through the academy, assigns her to use Bennett’s enmity. For training purposes, he’s her alien, and she has to manipulate him through understanding. Write the story.

∙    Bennett’s mentor sets him up for repeated failure. His task is self-understanding. He’ll never succeed with an alien until he understands himself. Write his story.

∙    June’s cousin Kyle comes to live with her family for the summer. Kyle is a year older than June, bigger, and a bully. June, however, has inner resources. Decide what they are. Write what they do to set each other off. Tell the story of their summer.

Have fun, and save what you write!