How does one write relatable characters? It isn’t easy to translate the characters from one’s imagination to the page. Today, Chris Culver, author of the bestselling Ash Rashid series and the just released Nine Years Gone, brings his viewpoint to one particularly challenging subject for character development: the villain.
What makes a good villain?
Like a lot of people reading this blog, I’m a book fan. In fact, if you stepped into my house, you might suspect that you had somehow stepped into a small branch office of my local library. Everywhere you look, my wife and I have bookshelves, most of which we’ve stacked with so many books that they’re in danger of collapsing. Thankfully, the advent of eBooks has enabled to curtail our addiction to hardcovers somewhat, but between the two of us, we still probably bring a hundred books home a year.
Despite a house full of books and a Nook with an ever expanding library, I have no problem picking out my favorite novels. I reread them so often their spines break, their best lines become a part of my vernacular, and their characters become as present to me as flesh-and-blood persons. And all my favorite books have one thing in common: characters I love. Plot matters, don’t get me wrong, but the most intricate, suspenseful plot in the world would still fall flat with the wrong characters.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about characters and what makes characters work. Most of the time, I think about the heroes of my books, but the villains play just as important a role. Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Iago, Sauron, Phyllis Nirdlinger, the Joker, Helen Grayle. If you’ve read the books or seen the movies from which these characters come, you probably remember them. Because villains are so important, I thought it’d be fun to spend some time thinking about what makes them work. So, without adieu, here’s the start of a list:
1. Good villains are exceptional persons
I’m sure we all have run into people who say and do things we only wish we could do. I used to teach, and I remember overhearing another professor argue with our dean about the very large size of his classes. He proposed various things to alleviate the difficulty, even offering to teach a class for free if it meant the rest of his classes would be a more reasonable size. The dean shot down every proposal he made without giving reason. I wouldn’t have remembered the conversation except that the professor ended it by saying, “Our students deserve better than this, and your faculty deserves better than you.” He then stormed off.
I don’t know if that professor did the right thing, but I remember him for it. He had the guts to do something many members of my department wished they could. This professor was exceptional. Good villains should also be exceptional; in other words, they need to stand out.
Now, as a thriller writer, I’ve got to be careful here. It’s tempting to make a villain stand out by making him do exceptionally gruesome or grotesque things. I find this with serial killers in books a lot. The author spends comparatively little time developing the killer himself, but he spends page after page describing the manner in which this guy kills. Frankly, it’s enough to make me yawn. I don’t expect everybody to craft as memorable or chilling as Hannibal Lecter, but a good villain is one who’s exceptional for something in addition to his villainy. He’s witty, he’s charming, he’s, quite possibly, the most interesting man in the world. A good villain isn’t just a regular person who does bad things.
2. Good villains are fathomable
As human beings, we all want stuff and we all form plans to get stuff. Most of us desire financial security, so we get jobs and save. We want to feel loved, so we go out and meet people. We want to stay out of jail, so we avoid murdering people.
Villains, too, should also have understandable goals and plans to achieve those goals. Furthermore, these goals should be rooted in that villain’s psychology. If a villain wants to take over the world, I want to know why. I can’t remember how many times I’ve read a book and found myself questioning why the villain would do the things he’s doing.
This leads to the next point. . .
3. Good villains get screen time.
In order to appreciate a good villain, I have to know that villain and what makes him tick. This doesn’t mean the villain has to get as much screen time as the hero, but he needs some time.
John Sandford does this very well in his prey books. Take Rules of Prey. The villain is a lawyer named Louis Vullion who derives rules about how to kill people by examining past murders. Vullion doesn’t get nearly as much attention as Lucas Davenport [and nor should he], but Sanford shows me who Vullion is by writing a couple of chapters from his perspective. It gives me just enough of him for me to appreciate how meticulous, intelligent and mad he is. I know him well enough to know what he wants and that he’s a suitable foil for the hero.
4. Good villains are multi-faceted.
Hannibal Lecter isn’t just a cannibal. He has a rich life aside from his murderous side, a life that, if anything, magnifies how depraved he is. Same thing with Darth Vader. He’s not just an evil galactic overlord. He’s a complex character with some serious issues in his past.
As a reader, I want villains who are more than merely villains. A villain is so much more chilling if I could envision him as my next-door neighbor or as a high school chemistry teacher who’s nice enough to tutor his students for free.
I guess the takeaway, at least in my mind, is that a good villain looks a lot like a hero with a moral compass that rarely points true. I could probably go on for quite a while, but that’s the start of a list. So what do you think makes a good villain?
Chris Culver is the New York Times Bestselling author of the Ash Rashid series of mysteries. After graduate school, Chris taught courses in ethics and comparative religion at a small liberal arts university in the south. Between classes, he wrote The Abbey, which spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He and his family live near St. Louis, Missouri, where Chris is working on his next novel.
