There’s certainly nothing like a good villain. From Dracula to Sauron, and Ursula to Voldemort, villains have always added an unfailing ingredient to our favorite stories. Believe it or not, crafting the perfect antagonist can make a huge difference in your story. After all, if villains didn’t exist, your whole plot would fall flat. Your main character would not have any obstacles to overcome to achieve their main purpose, and there wouldn’t even be a chapter three. No antagonist, no plot: as simple as that.
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Whenever you think of a villain, you might do so with a little bit of anger, and perhaps the first word that comes to your mind is “evil.” However, there has always been raw power in contradiction. That is why, at times, we, kind-hearted readers have abruptly caught ourselves rooting for the villain at some point in our lives. The truth is, having a convincing villain your readers can despise turns out to be as, sometimes even more, important than having a captivating heroic figure to adore.
A yin cannot be upheld without a yang. Light needs darkness to gain meaning. The princess needs an evil stepmother to torment her. The innocent love of two young souls needs background hatred to keep them apart and make their impossible love even stronger and more compelling.
When writing our story, we focus on the protagonist’s features from the very beginning. After all, you do want to craft a character your readers can identify with. You want them to suffer, laugh, cry, and get angry when your protagonist does so. However, we sometimes forget we need to do the same thing when creating our antagonist.
Creating a top-shelf villain will boost your story’s plot for a mighty hero. But how do you get good at being bad? For some of us, heroes come as revelations. They represent hope, safety, and honor. But what do villains represent? Evil? Sure. But at a deeper level, they are, without a doubt, the standards of human nature in a crisis.
But fear not. Here at Blue Raven Club, we’ll save you from despair. So grab the sword you use to carve your ideas and come with us as we share our best tips to create a believable villain.
1.Get Inspiration from Memorable Villains
This is the drill. You have to know about great villains to figure out why they worked out so perfectly and how you can get your own creations to stand out as they did. Once again, hitting the books will help you out on your quest to mean. You ought to dig up every detail that catches your attention. Study them and carve them open to see how their minds work. Read up and find out what made them tick, and what forced them to blow up.
There might be a formula for creating the villain style. Dr. Frankenstein would know about that for sure. A man moved by science and obsessed with the creation of life as a way to disprove the existence of a mighty force. Thanos just wanted to help the universe preserve its limited resources, as did Poison Ivy and so many others, misunderstood ecologists with too much power in their hands.
Doctor Freeze needed his lover to survive, so did Darth Vader. Some were mighty and implacable, like Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, the eye who sees it all. Some were carrying a legacy like Kylo Ren. Others were just pushed down that road, like Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
2. Develop Your Hero First
Working on your hero first will help you decide how your villain will compare to your main character. They can either share some qualities, or you can make your villain the antithesis of your hero.
Your villain can share some of your hero’s features, so that it’s easier for the readers to empathize with both of them. Perhaps both of your characters had similar experiences in the past, or they feel the same way about a particular thing. Their beliefs might be the same, or they have similar values.
But here’s where you need to make their differences clear. For instance, you might have a hero and a villain that had the same tragic experience, but one opts to use the trauma as a stepping stone for being a better person, and the other decides to use it as an excuse to harm others.
Also, your hero needs a worthy opponent. Make sure your villain is clever and strong. Consider, for instance, Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, or Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs. These are villains that proved to be as intelligent as their counterparts. They represented a huge challenge for our hero and made the story way more exciting. A capable villain will always be more interesting and captivating for our readers than a silly and stupid one.
3. Work on Your Villain’s Background
Like every other character, your villain has their own story of how they became the way they are now. Knowing their past will make it easier for you to provide your character with more credibility and coherence.
Try to avoid the clichéd difficult childhood. There are many other ways to approach this. In fact, you could have been the happiest child on earth and become a first-class villain. The element of surprise can guarantee your villain a pretty awesome reveal. You want the revelation to impact your readers like a bullet they never expected to be shot from an unloaded gun.
Instead of being born evil, explore their past and try to create an interesting story of what led your antagonist to embrace the darkness. Be creative and try to stay out of the mold.
4. Appearances Matter
Playing with our villains’ appearances or personalities can be the key to nailing your antagonist.
We are wired to take appearances as a go-to when judging someone. hat’s how our brains work. We do not only base our opinions about someone on how they look but also on what type of person they seem to be. That’s why it’s so hard to pick a psychopath out of a crowd. They tend to be attractive individuals or very charming people. That’s how they cover the dark thoughts inside their heads. This is also why some people tend to protect their innocence until proven wrong by uncovering their horrendous acts.
Think, for instance, of Tate in Murder House (American Horror Story’s first season). You cannot help but fall in love with his character as Violet does. He is a handsome boy with a big heart and a charming smile. Despite his charismatic ways, Tate hides the darkest secrets, and it’s not until the middle of the season that we find out about his murders.
5. Give Them Real Motivations
One of the most important things about creating your villain, if not the most important one, is giving them a clear and strong motivation. If you nail this part, you’ll be able to make a three-dimensional character that can be as imaginatively evil as you want. If we make our villains’ motivations appealing enough or at least a tiny bit reasonable, we will have mixed emotions emanating from our readers’ assessment of their actions. What moves them to do what they do? What drives them to the dark side?
Our antagonist will come to life when there is dynamism in their motivations and desires. Your characters are indeed defined by what they want. If your villain doesn’t want anything, there’s no reason for them to attack your hero. Look at it this way: if the antagonist just gets in the way of your main character for no apparent reason and tries to ruin their life, then you’ve created a flat, plain character.
A good villain will always be driven by a reason. Your readers might not agree with them, or might simply not like it, but they will acknowledge the logic in it.
6. Give Them a Human Side
The duality of a character has always been exploited in literature as one of the greatest oily machinery a writer can create. If you succeed in making your villains human enough to have a connection with your readers on a deeper level before or after revealing their true intentions, then you’ll get them hooked.
Make your audience question themselves every time your villain appears. Giving your villain a human side is easier than you think. Human nature tends to shift from black to white, giving you a grey area of golden opportunities to explore. Leave your audience thinking: I would’ve acted the same way in their situation. I completely get why they did what they did. Why do I feel so called out?
Enhance your villain’s inner image, making it relatable at times. Not because they are antiheroes do they lack feelings. Darth Vader was a man in love, trying not to lose his loved one by gaining more power through the dark side.
Give your villain some great qualities so that your readers find themselves at times confused and empathetic. If you add humanity to your villain, you’ll make your story more leveraged and developed. Play around with these grey areas of moral shiftiness and your antiheroes will not be forgotten. You don’t want your audience to just hate your villains. You want them to root for them at times so the disappointment hits them hard when they reveal their true colors.
Humans will be humans. We were not born as perfect beings, and we are not meant to be good or bad. Our morals and choices make us who we are and how we are perceived by others. We are always villains in someone else’s story.
Summing Up…
Creating the perfect villain for your story can seem like a huge challenge. Spoiler alert: it is! However, if you take into account the tips we just shared with you, and you add the trustworthy ingredient of originality, your villain’s success will be guaranteed.
We must remain unbiased as we decrypt and oversee the process of our villainous creation. How can we hope our audience will cheer for our hero if they undermine the horror that our villain should represent?
I hope you’ve found this post interesting and useful. Do you have any other tips for creating impressive villains? Do you have any favorite villains from books or TV? We’ll read you in the comments!
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