Heart of Villainy

I'm not a bad person. I just write that way.

Yes, I do have a penchant for writing villains. Angel of Death focuses on a serial murderer, and Death's Disciples on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Thran tells the origin story of Yawgmoth, lord of the Phyrexians, and Le Morte d'Avalon tells the Arthurian story as if Morgan le Fey were the hero. In many of my novels, in fact, the people you first consider to be the good guys turn out to be the bad ones.

It's easily enough done. After all, villains think that they are the heroes. What did Hitler call his biography? Mein Kampf.

The realization that villains think they are heroes first occurred to me as a teenager. It was 1977, and the original Star Wars had just been released. I loved it. The valiant struggle of the young knight and the beautiful princess against the evil Lord Vader resonated with me. Star Wars provided what Tolkien called "moral recovery" -- lifting me out of the gray relativism of my world and into a place with clear good and evil.

Two years later, the Iran Hostage Crisis began. Iranian students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. What evil people! What villains! How could these terrorists justify charging in on U.S. soil and endangering innocent lives just because of a political disagreement?

But part of me remembered another group who charged into a foreign base, released a terrorist prisoner, and killed tens of thousands of innocent people just because of a political disagreement. The terrorist leaders were named Luke, Han, and Chewy. In fact, they had done all of those horrific things while being certain that they were the good guys. They were as self-righteous, as cocksure, as confident as those Iranian students were -- as I was.

Such idealistic young men also committed the attacks of 911.

It is a very dangerous thing to believe in absolute right and wrong in a world of gray relativism.

So, that's the first secret to writing villains: Make them the heroes of their stories. Better yet, make the reader believe that they are in fact the heroes, only to find out partway through that they are not. Readers tend to identify with the main characters of stories, and when they realize they've taken up with the wrong side, they feel very unnerved.

The second tip I have for writing great bad guys is to show their minds. The mind of a monster is terrifying to behold, and not because of cackling and hand-wringing. Instead, the mind of the villain is frightening because it is so understandable. Here's a quick example:

What's frightening about this voice? For one, the narrator sees a woman as an "it," and the words he uses to describe her have connotations of sexuality and brutality. He is cold, premeditated, and predatory, with a self-satisfaction that shows he's proud of what he is about to do. And that's the scariest part of all -- what he is about to do.

So, to write memorable villains, make them heroes in their own minds, and then let us see inside their minds. Trap us there, so that we fear we won't ever get out.