A Guide To Writing Villains

What Kind Of Villain Does Your Story Need?

  "There are no heroes and there are no villains. There are just opposing points of view. That's all history is...the viciously long battle between world views."   - Peter J. Tomasi.

The first step in making a good villain is determining what kind of villain fits best in your story. One story might use a bully that routinely shoves your main character inside a locker, while another may contain a robot that has gained sentience and wants to rid the world of its human overlords. It depends on the genre and world of your story.

(a) It makes much more sense for the villain in your mystery/thriller to be a serial killer than your next-door neighbor who keeps parking in front of your driveway... unless they're one and the same. (It'd be incredibly unlikely, though).

(b) If your book is about a girl trying to find love in a small, prejudiced town, then putting a Chicago mafia boss as your villain doesn't suit the story.

Now, there may be some characters who fit your genre and world but are not the best choices as villains, and as an example, I'm going to use Robin Hood.

Robin Hood has two main people who really want him dead or imprisoned: Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Prince John would not be the main villain, and let me tell you why: at pretty much no point will he go after Robin Hood himself. He may be a threat to Robin, but other than ordering underlings to do something about it, he doesn't act against Robin on his own. In real life, it'd be extremely unlikely that they would ever meet. So this makes Prince John a boring villain-- there is no direct conflict between him and Robin, not in a realistic scenario. And when it comes to stories, a boring villain equals a bad one.

So let's look at the sheriff. He and his men are direct threats to Robin Hood; they chase him down and do everything they can to flush him out and kill him. In some versions of the story, he also has a romantic interest in Maid Marian, and this is another threat of sorts to Robin-- a competing love interest. The two are fighting on both fronts, and both of them have a personal hatred for each other after many, many encounters. You get to see exactly what it is that the sheriff does to Robin, up close and personal, which brings out emotions that the distant Prince John will not.

To conclude, what kind of villain does your story need?

--- One that fits the genre (not Vlad Dracula in contemporary romance, or a drug lord in medieval fantasy).

--- One that fits the world (if it's historical fiction but occurs in the 1000s, then William of Normandy is more likely to be your villain than Prince John).

--- One that is a direct threat to your hero.