How To Write a Believable Villain

Guest Post by Amanda Cockrell –

In truth, I prefer not to write about a villain. I like an antagonist much better. An antagonist doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking that today he will do Bad Stuff to Our Hero. He thinks, “I want X and deserve to have it—or my country depends on it—and so I will do what it takes to get it.” Generally unless his motive involves revenge, Our Hero is just in the way.

I will pause here to admit that it’s tempting to use revenge as a motive for your villain. It’s simple, and everyone understands the urge. The trouble is that it’s too simple, and the urge is most often fleeting. Revenge is just a lot of trouble to pull off. Hardly anyone but a psychopath will spend months or years plotting revenge for its own sake.

So where do you find something more solid?

I heard Barbara Kingsolver speak some years ago, talking about her novel The Poisonwood Bible, and she said that if you want a character to do a certain thing in order to advance your plot and vex your hero, you must back up and give him the damage he needs in order to do that.

We can see skillful use of that approach in Nicola Griffith’s  seventh-century novel Hild, for example, when King Edwin of Northumbria forces his niece Hild into a marriage with her half-brother. That’s about as awful as you can get. But here’s why: Cian, the half-brother, is the son of Hild’s own father Hereric, Edwin’s brother’s son. It’s one of those secrets that everyone knows and no one speaks of. If Cian’s bloodline is made public, Cian becomes a threat to Edwin, and Cian will die. Edwin has already suffered exile and an assassination attempt to hold onto his kingship. The marriage is seen as proof that Cian is not Hereric’s son, and gives Edwin a hold on Hild, whom he values as a seer. Throughout Hild and its sequel Menewood, Edwin is Hild’s antagonist. We watch him try to enlarge and then defend his kingship and when he finally is killed we feel that someone important has died, although like Hild, we cannot grieve for him.

Sometimes history provides you with the requisite damage ready made. A famous example is King Henry II of England, a man whose damage was tragically self-inflicted. Jean Anouilh’s stage play Becket and Christopher Fry’s play Curtmantle both give us a Henry annoyed by the power of the English bishops, who appoints his friend Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting that Thomas will do what pleases Henry. Thomas warns him not to, but Henry won’t listen. When Thomas puts the rights of the church before the wishes of the king and Henry, stung by what he sees as Thomas’s abandonment of him, famously snaps, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!” he dooms his former friend to murder. And himself to  a public penance and a haunted conscience. In both Anouilh and Fry it is clear that Henry loved Thomas and loves him still. The fact that the original damage was self-inflicted makes the outcome even more poignant.

An antagonist can still be an awful person. In Katie Daysh’s Leeward, Captain Hiram Nightingale’s antagonist is his father, who whipped his son’s back to the bone for catching him with another boy, and forced him into a marriage to stop any rumors. Here again historical fact provides the back-story damage: the father is not homophobic simply by inclination; he is terrified. The penalty for sodomy under eighteenth-century British law is hanging, and career-ending disgrace for everyone connected to the condemned.

 Even a minor character may be an antagonist rather than a villain. Professor Fontaine, a Belgian refugee in Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War, is a skillful portrait of a man whose attachment is not to people, not even the daughter who is pregnant from a rape, but to learning. Late in the novel when we discover that he gave her to a German officer in exchange for help in preserving the ancient books in his university library, we find that all too believable.

Kingsolver’s advice has stuck with me throughout all my own writing.

In Coyote Weather, my novel of the Vietnam war years, the antagonists (and villains if you will) were the war itself and the institution of the draft, helped along by a few misguided minor characters. In my Roman Britain trilogy, the antagonists have been the British kings who understandably do not want Rome, and by extension Our Hero, Faustus, to conquer Britain. He serves Rome, they serve their tribes, and as Pericles said, “Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.”

As a result, we sympathize with the Britons at the same time that our loyalty is with Faustus. This is much more interesting. And much more affecting when we have a hero who can weep at the death of his enemy, rather than gloat over it.

People are the combination of their circumstances and their experiences, although with a good chunk of natural inclination thrown in. There are psychopaths certainly, and if you are writing about one of them, then you come far closer to an actual villain who simply enjoys villainy. That can result in a masterful portrait of a human horror, but it’s not what I’m talking about here.

I am speaking of the common or garden villain/antagonist: the developer who wants to buy the last green space in town because he can turn a profit and he finds his own needs more compelling than anyone else’s; the woman who is jealous of her daughter because she is terrified of aging; the politician who passes a dangerous law he doesn’t believe in, for the votes that those who do believe in it will cast in the next election. Or worse, and even more interesting, the politician who passes the law because he does believe in it. All of these hypothetical antagonists give you a chance to devise their back story, the reason they are the way they are, and to slip it in as you go along so that the reader slowly begins to understand why the antagonist is causing so much trouble for everyone.

Here are three more examples drawn from my own books:

•  A prince who sells his sister to a rival ruler for an alliance. (The Border Wolves)
•  Another woman who makes a marriage that endangers her own people to spite her brother. (Birds of Prey)
•  A man who is willing to turn his son in to the FBI. (Coyote Weather)

All of these antagonists pushed my plot in the direction I wanted it to go, but all of them needed back stories, the why of what they did. They would be far less interesting, not to mention far less believable, without the damage that Kingsolver talked about:

• The prince wants to be king and the father he wants to overthrow has taught him that women are bargaining chips, beginning with his mother.
• Every man the woman has looked to has betrayed her in one way or another. Now she will take something she wants for once, and all the better if it spites them.
• The man’s son has refused induction and the father’s friends are supporters of the war, men of power in their town. Their boys enlisted. He can’t afford to be the one with a coward for a son.

Your novel will have more depth if all your characters, even the ones we’re rooting against, have the damage they need in order to do what they do. It doesn’t have to clog the story; you thread it in a line, a reference, a brushstroke at a time. Once you start thinking about what makes your villain a villain, he (or she) becomes an antagonist instead, a complicated, interesting person with even more ways and reasons to trouble your hero. The antagonist is also a lot more fun to write. You may even find you like him.