Of Motivation and Villainy

Characters need to be real people, leaping off the page as if you might bump into this person on the street. Disregarding fantasy elements, of course.

You will not bump into a white-haired girl with a magical violin, or someone with the power to use emotion and music as one into magic in your everyday life. I believe, though, that magic can exist in our world.

Fiction is one of the places where magic makes itself at home.

But sometimes, the greatest magic of all is making characters real. I love character-driven stories, stories that study what makes up the psyche and history of a man or woman. My novels will always be character-focused, rather than plot-focused, but the two must coexist, despite the opinions of some who think it’s one or the other.

Follow the characters’ wants, needs, and desires, as well as clashing goals. Flat, cardboard personalities, or even cookie-cutter tropes don’t have the same impact as sprinkling a bit of your own experiences—as well as the experiences of others—into the words on the page.

The goal is to make the reader forget that they’re reading at all. It’s the same with movies and games, too. The artist must strive to erase the boundaries of reality and fiction.

J. K. Rowling did this so well in the Harry Potter series. I remember not moving an inch when I was reading Order of the Phoenix when I was far younger and going through the entire book in one sitting.

After Goblet of Fire, and the way it all wrapped up at the end of that novel, I wanted more of her world.

Why did I do that?

Because she made the characters, world, and story come alive in a way that made me forget I was reading. I was there with the characters. Harry was my POV character in third-person limited with hints of omniscient and I loved every second.

Many of us write the main character with passion, treading that path of making someone memorable that readers can connect with. Mary Sue characters don’t do this, although it is possible to set a character up as something like this, only to shatter everything about their strengths and apparent lack of flaws for maximum effect when they are humbled by the story.

But villains need to be just as complex as the main characters, with their own arcs, goals, desires, histories, and philosophies.

A horrible character hell-bent on evil is certainly capable of helping a child on the side of the road who had just had his parents murdered by bandits. Perhaps their version of help would create another person in their image and molding them into something that would make their parents gasp with horror, but we need to remember even evil has a code of ethics, if sparse.

The main villains in my grand novel series are interested in far more than wreaking havoc upon the spheres. Their interests lie with philosophy and the depths of the human condition as much as the “rule of cool” decimation upon the chief heroes.

Villains aren’t evil for the sake of it. They need their own life story, their own missed opportunities, lost loves, and PTSD about something in the past.

Some villains might want to help the world, make it a better place in ways that even the heroes might not be able to carry out.

“Aha ha, I’m evil.” Those characters can certainly work and sometimes work well.

But what about: “When I rule, the weak will have a place among the strong, the world will have its fill of food and shelter, and humanity can unite as one species, reaching greater heights than division can offer.”

Something along those lines.

Villains aren’t stand-ins, they aren’t mannequins, they’re people.

Screwed up people many times, but human.

Unless your villain isn’t human.

But even then, what does that species or type of being offer the story?

Does the creature not have human emotions?

What replaces them?

Is there a superiority complex, or inversely, an inferiority complex?

What are the weaknesses of this being? Flaws? Hopes? Romantic ideals?

Villains are fun to play with, because you, as the author, may not agree with their worldview, but you must place yourself in those shoes to see how someone with that thought process and paradigm really sees the world.

Remember that villains are as much an entity as you are, serving the notion of character over plot threads, and desire over moving the story from A to B.