“A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.” Agnes Repplier
It’s been a day of working on my revision and short projects, then during a respite in the weather I tackled plants in the backyard, hacking and trimming, hauling out piles of dead and soggy branches. Then I whipped together batch of vegetable soup and visited the grocery store for more supplies for the Thanksgiving feast. I returned home and went out walking at dusk and the sky was a fright show of clouds dipped in gloom, all hanging low; the moon playing peek-a-boo amid the clouds; and damp seeping past my skin as my breath clouded the air. The recent rains have washed through here and the creek has spread wide and puddles are everywhere. I was walking past the creek when I happened to look into the water and spotted a great blue heron in the water just below me.
Now, it seems that every time that I’m thinking deep, worried thoughts that I spot the heron. Tonight he wasn’t moving much, merely gazing around, seeming unbothered by me as I played statue nearby. Part of me wanted to scream or make a sudden movement so that he’d soar aloft with all the grace that this world contains. But I kept still until he slipped downstream and I crept around in the park trying to spot him, but he became invisible in the gloom. And after chatting with a neighbor I continued on, touched by hope and something unnamable.
I returned home and flipped on NPR and heard that the National Endowment of the Arts has released a new study about the decline of reading in the country. The deciding factor in who reads and who doesn’t is not socio-economic factors, but rather how many books are found in a family’s home. Then Alice Brock who is now a painter of “Alice’s Restaurant” fame came on and talked about her philosophy of cooking and life and talked about how culinary mistakes lead to discovery and how she had no regrets walking away from her restaurant because now she paints and lives in a place she loves. Then a story about record numbers of deserters in our much-troubled military.
But I want to talk about villains because when I was out walking and all through this day, my mind has been percolating on the topic. I’m still in the thick of revising my Bad Guy book for my Writer’s Digest editor and I’m trying to restructure four chapters that cover villains so that the logic has a different progression. When a villain is in a story as with a monster, his presence capitalizes on our fear of death and being vulnerable prey. If you study ancient myths you’ll find a pantheon of them, in varied and hair-raising forms. They will showcase humankind’s basest desires and passions. You’ll find monsters that cause us to shiver and demons that haunt our nightmares, but you’ll also find ordinary folks who took a wrong turn somewhere and landed on the wrong side of morality.
The ancient Greeks were famous for their bad guys. There were the three Gorgons, three monstrous sisters whose glance could turn men into stone. The most famous of the Gorgons is Medusa who was once beautiful but Athena transformed into a hideous visage complete with a head of snakes instead of hair. In fact, she was so odious, that she was often depicted on Greek armor to frighten their enemies. The Greek culture also brought us sea nymphs like Calypso who imprisoned Odysseus, sea monsters and sirens who lured sailors to their deaths with song and wiles, Hydra, the many-headed snake killed by Hercules, fire-breathing oxen, the Enchantress Circe who changes Odysseus’ men into pigs.
From the Greeks we can learn to create imaginative foes that torment our heroes and simple people trying to get by in life. From the stories found in all cultures we can learn that fate dishes out harsh lessons and trials, that we humans sometimes need superhuman strength to navigate the perils of living and that as often as things can right, they can more often go wrong.
When you use a villain in a story it’s because the story needs evil deeds and intentions and no one else will do. As a storyteller you have many choices about your villain—do you make him or her sympathetic, or cold as an iceberg; sane or at least normal-seeming, or a raving lunatic. Is your villain young or old, attractive or ugly, benign to those who don’t know better, or beastly.
There are several traits that villains all share—they enjoy their villainy and are often motivated by power, revenge, or profit. They are anti-life or anti-social, and have some special form of intelligence. Stupid people make lousy villains just like in real life because they’ll get caught. A villain is not someone you can reason with or dismiss. They make conflict visible. And of course you want your villain rampaging, pillaging and swashbuckling through your pages. Or perhaps he’s the quiet, spooky type. With a cold blue stare that chills your blood. Wait a minute, that cold blue stare has been done before.
Since most of have been raised on Disney movies, Marvel comics, Grimm’s Brother fairytales and the like, it seems to me that most writers need to unlearn what a villain is. And travel toward a character that is much more nuanced, complex, vital, and exciting. I’m writing these chapters because it seems also that many writers need to think hard about the motivation and the why of villains. To think as the villain thinks, feel as the villain feels instead of imagining him or her as some monstrous Other. Or as Elmore Leonard once said, “All villains have mothers."
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