Villains Are People, Too

Since the last post was all about (okay, mostly about) our hero (the main character protagonist we want the reader to identify with), and since we don't want to throw the balance of the universe out of whack by hanging out with Yang and ignoring Yin, I guess we'd better give equal time to the Other Side, the villain. And let's be honest: We all love a good villain.

Villains Are People, Too

A recap: All stories are about conflict—that is, what does your hero want, and what’s in the way of her getting it? A story is filled with obstacles for your hero to slam into, and usually there’s more than one character getting in your hero’s way. But there’s one who is scarier, more powerful and meaner than the others: The Big Bad Wolf of Bad Guys.

Of course your hero’s super important because that’s who you want your readers plugging for. But your Big Bad Wolf (or the antagonist, as he’s more properly called) is key because he provides that vital conflict. The plot hinges on your BBW—what he’s doing to the hero, the battles they fight, how it all turns out—which means your BBW is a Very Important Person.

Flat is Boring

We all know flat villains. They're the ones that don't change; they're evil and nothing else. Think Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and pretty much every fairy tale villain you know. (They're flat because they’re archetypes, but that's a-whole-nother discussion.) Sometimes a flat villain works (see President Snow, below), but usually the more interesting the villain, the better. The way to write an interesting villain is to remember that villains are people, too.

Villains have their own story, and in that story they’re the hero and the hero’s the bad guy. That means they need to be as fully developed as the hero. How do you do that?

• Ask the same questions of your villain as you do your hero: What does my villain want? What’s in the way of my villain getting what he wants? Does my villain get what he wants in the end?
• Ask what the hero (or the world) did that ticked the villain off so badly. How did the villain become the person he is?
• Villains aren’t perfectly strong (that’s a yawn). They have weaknesses. What are they? How can the hero exploit them?
• Villains have their own character arc. A hero changes; a villain does, too. Just like a hero, a villain can be conflicted, vacillating between doing evil and giving up on his evil plan. Sometimes they see the light at the end and redeem themselves (think Darth Vader). Sometimes they get meaner and angrier and more hateful during the story.

  

  To wreak havoc, or not to wreak havoc?

One way to develop a great villain is to have a look at your hero. A villain and a hero are often two sides of the same coin: The villain is who the hero might have been (or might become), if she made other choices. Sometimes, what a hero despises about a villain is something she despises or fears in herself.

The Villain’s Gig: Sewing Discord

A villain’s job is to get up in the face of the hero’s goals. To make trouble for the hero. To tempt the hero. (And just a sidebar here, because I can't help it: Heroes need to be tempted. Perfectly good characters are even more boring than perfectly evil characters.)

What all this means is that throughout the story the villain has to win against the hero more often than not; otherwise, he’s not strong enough; he’s not enough of a challenge to the hero. Whether the villain wins in the end is up to you, but during the story, it has to be a good fight.

  

When Villains Aren’t People

Of course, the villain of the piece isn’t always a person. It can be an idea (like racism), an institution (like the government) or a natural force (like a tsunami)—but it should always have a human face. The villain in The Hunger Games is the government, a faceless thing. That evil, corrupt system is embodied in the person of President Snow. He’s the current BBW, but the system would exist and be evil without him. He’s just the human face we see, someone we can root against.

  

Who Else is Out to Get the Hero?

The BBW isn’t the only one throwing obstacles in your hero’s way. In addition to the BBW and your run-of-the-mill minions—those minor henchmen—any good hero also has a pretty hefty assortment of antagonists (characters acting against them in some way). Not all of them are evil; some of them don’t even dislike the hero.

• You’ve got your shapeshifter, someone who seems like a friend but is actually an enemy (or seems like an enemy but turns out to be a friend). You can’t pin a shapeshifter down; often they’re conflicted themselves.
• You’ve got your allied rival, that annoying character who's ostensibly on your hero’s side but
  either doesn’t like your hero or disagrees with your hero’s methods. Think Gale and Peeta from
  The Hunger Games. They both love Katniss and hate each other. That kind of rivalry distracts the hero from her goal and can be dangerous to her.

  

  "I like her best! "No, I like her best!"
• There’s the crazy friend, who starts off helpful or means to be helpful but is always somehow getting in the way or accidentally helping the bad guy. This is often a comic character. Be careful with this one: The crazy friend can be flat or too annoying. There has to be a reason the hero keeps her around; the crazy friend has to be useful in some way. Peregrin Took from The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great example of the crazy friend. Pippin bumbles around, knocking a stone down a well in Moria and bringing the goblins right down on the Fellowship; he steals the palantír from Gandalf and draws the eye of the dark lord Sauron. But he's brave and loyal, too, and has an important role to play in the quest.
• There’s the temptress, someone from the other side who wants to convert your hero rather than destroy her. At some point, a hero is tempted to give in and stop fighting or is confused and questions her goal. This is when the temptress is most dangerous.

At the end of the day, your reader should feel strongly about your BBW, one way or the other. Some villains we love to hate because they’re so deliciously evil. And some villains creep us out because we see ourselves in them. 

Story Bones (Or: The Ankle Bone's Connected to the Foot Bone)

The first time I sat down to talk writing with The Three (we'll call them M, L and S for the mystery), there was a common theme: They all love developing backstories for their characters, and they all love miserable endings, but they weren't sure how to get from one to the other.

There are a million ways to parse plot, but we can start with three questions that every story hangs on.

Question 1: What Does My Hero Want?

The answer to this question is the essence of your story because it's at the heart of what motivates your protagonist (who we'll call the hero here). You can look at the entire plot as just a series of events preventing your hero from getting what she wants.

Seems straightforward, right? Not so fast. A lot of the time, what the hero wants at the beginning of the story is not what she wants in the end. But let's talk about that a little later.

So how does the question What does my hero want? illuminate a story? Let's take a look at the Cinderella-meets-cyborg novel Cinder by Marissa Meyer. [Spoiler Alert! If you haven't read Cinder (and if you haven't, you should), you might want to skip the indented bits in this post.]

What does Cinder want?

For most of the story, Cinder just wants to get the heck of New Beijing. Everything she does is aimed at escaping the life she's leading—and pretty much everything that happens to her gets in the way of that. 

By the way, this question of what your hero wants isn’t just for your hero. Every character in your story—the sidekicks, the love interests, even (and especially) the villain—wants something. Your reader doesn't need to know what every character in your story wants (unless, of course, you're James Michener), but you'll create a deeper story and more believable characters if you know and show what the major characters want, how they're going to try to get it and how their actions to get what they want help or hurt your hero.

Question 2: What’s in the Way of My Hero Getting What She Wants?

When you’re worried your story’s moving too fast, your hero is probably getting what she wants too easily. Take Cranky Rah. If Cranky Rah wants a taco and all she has to do is get in the car, drive down to El Cerro Azul and get a taco, that’s boring. (Not to Cranky Rah, of course. Cranky Rah's thrilled to have a taco. She might even have two. But no one else wants to read about it.) Now, if Cranky Rah goes out to her car to go for a taco and notices someone slinking away from it and some suspicious wires dangling under the bumper and that causes her to think about how she had really hoped all that would be over once she had changed her name and gotten that facial reconstruction—well, that is definitely not boring.

Plot is the spine of the book; the scenes are the vertebrae. Each one is its own thing but is connected to the others. Together they’re the structure of the story. Each scene needs to make your reader care about your hero because if your reader cares, she’ll keep turning the pages to find out whether Cranky Rah gets her taco in the end. (She does.)

“But wait! How do I come up with all those scenes?” Chill out. I’m here to help. Scenes can be categorized in infinite ways (of course), but I like this one: Each scene involves an obstacle, a test or a tool.

• An Obstacle: Lots of things will get in the way of your hero getting what she wants: the villain or the hero’s well-meaning but clueless mom; a natural disaster or a closed restaurant. Maybe it’s the hero herself: Suddenly she can’t save the world because she got thrown into detention for mouthing off to her writing teacher. Obstacles push your hero further from her goal. To get back on track and move forward, she needs tools.

• A Tool: Tools take different shapes. Some are literal tools: Your hero needs to figure out how to grow and harvest corn to make her taco shell. Or she finds a clue that makes the prophecy make sense. Some tools are allies, the helpful friends your hero meets along the way. Some are lessons: Before she can get what she wants, your hero has to learn to trust or overcome her prejudices (maybe not all aliens are evil creatures who destroy tacos).

• A Test: Does your hero have the strength and conviction to get what she wants? Is what she thinks she wants really what she wants? Did she actually learn to trust? Can she sacrifice her own desires to do something Good? We only find out if she’s tested.

What's in Cinder's Way?

Cinder’s got obstacles a-plenty: Peony getting sick; Dr. Erland wanting to study her; Kai flirting with her and needing her help.

Tools? The too-small foot; the orange car; Peony’s dress (though Cinder doesn’t see it that way until she needs it). The information Cinder learns about who she really is comes in handy in the end. Cinder comes stocked with a couple of allies (Iko, Peony) and accumulates others, like Kai, Dr. Erland and the voice on the D-COMM chip, along the way.

Cinder faces a lot of tests, but the final exam is the ball. Cinder has to overcome her aversion to wearing Peony’s dress. She has to sacrifice her desire to escape. She has to risk being seen by Queen Levana. She has to face the disgust of others at what she is.

Question 3: Does Your Hero Get What She Wants?

Remember what I said up top about what the hero wants at the end often not being what she wanted at the beginning? This is generally because what the hero first wanted was self-serving, shallow or naïve. Overcoming obstacles, learning from her tools and enduring all those tests changes our hero. She has a greater perspective and realizes there’s something bigger she is called to do.

Ack! Does that mean a happy ending? Nah. Maybe the hero fails to do what she was called to do. Maybe she succeeds but ends up broken and alone. Maybe she gets exactly what she wanted in the beginning, but now she wants something different, something she can't have. Maybe in the end it’s not clear whether Good or Evil triumphs. But regardless of how your story ends, we need to see how your hero has changed.

So What About Cinder? Does She Get What She Wants? 

Yes and no. At the end of the first book in the series, she’s getting out of New Beijing and her beleaguered life like she wanted to at the beginning, but now what she wants is different: She wants to stay and help Kai. She accepts that she has a role to play in the salvation of New Beijing and maybe the world, and she has to sacrifice what she wants and what might make her happy for this Greater Good.

What If I Don't Know What My Hero Wants?! No Worries.

You don’t have to have all the answers when you start writing, and you should never not write a scene you’ve imagined just because you don’t see a purpose for it. Its purpose might develop as you write, the same way your characters develop as you get to know them. If you have a scene in your mind, write it. You can clean it up later; that’s what editing’s for. These questions can get you thinking and help you out of a jam when you’re not sure where to go next. Ask yourself: What does your character (or your villain) want? How can you mess up her day or send in some help? Where do you want her to end up and how can you get her there?