Come to the Dark Side, Writer

I know my colleague, Kate Paulk, has gone into the mind of the villain (come back, Kate, we have cookies. Besides, it’s scary in there) in a few posts, but one of our commenters asked about villains and it occurred to me there are other ways to tackle villains.

Unlike Kate’s, my landing bridge in character-land doesn’t fall naturally in the middle of the evil Lord’s palace, right behind the dark towers and forbidding fortresses. Characters who plot their next coup d’etat while imagining their enemies drowned in bouts of malmsey don’t populate my imagination. On the contrary, for the longest time – forgive me, children, I was young and foolish – I couldn’t really write an evil character. Instead I wrote “and then he suddenly goes mad.” (I said I was young and foolish. Put down your rotten eggs and assorted wilted vegetables.)

And then I found the technique that works for me. While I’m not one of those people who believe everyone is good at heart, I do believe that evil people don’t think that of themselves. They don’t usually walk around twirling their moustaches, rubbing their hands and going nyargh, nyargh, nyargh. And dark cloaks and SERIOUSLY out of fashion.

Put it another way, the most fractured people in our society can’t help having internalized some portion of the common morals and widespread beliefs – stuff like, you don’t kick someone when they’re down. You don’t hurt puppies, children, small defenseless whatever. And we simians are, by nature, likely to want to fit in with our group, so there’s a tendency to cleave to those rules.

But, but, but, you say, didn’t I just say I believe in evil? Am I now going to claim that the people who commit horrors are in fact “just crazy”? Or that society drove them to it?

Put down the rotten eggs again. No, I’m not going to say that. Stop trembling your lip. Here’s the hanky. Do not sniffle in that annoying fashion.

I’m going to say that in most cases – there have been one or two historical exceptions, but those are characters I simply couldn’t write – people do evil by convincing themselves it’s good. It’s either good for the or good for the common people, or good for some grand, imaginary future. (The greatest crimes in human history have been committed in the name of future utopia.)

In fact, a great villain – in books at least – often has the makings of a great hero, except for... some “little” thing. Yes, the bad thing might be a hatred of someone or something. Movies tend to go in for this sort of motive. You’re going to kill the man who raped your mom, or whatever, and your hatred distorts everything out of proportion. The thing though is that though this definitely happens, the scarier horrors are perpetrated out of love.

No you say? Perhaps I should let you sleep at night... Nah, you’re writers and you want to know. The worst villains are the ones who start with a goal everyone would agree is laudable. Say you’re going to rid the world of disease. You start by sending doctors (let’s assume you’re very rich and powerful) everywhere that doesn’t have them. You send enormous amounts of medicine. But little kids keep getting sick because they play in the dirt. And you can’t stand to see them suffer. So you have every toddler killed who can’t be physically restrained from playing in the dirt.

This is an extreme example, and there would be various steps in between, as you trespass more and more on the commonly accepted version of good, but all in the name of a greater ideal. In fact, “the end justifies the means” could be the motto of most villains.

There are the exceptions, too – those who are so full of self-hatred and hatred of others that they “want to see the world burn.” But my penchant is for villains who are doing what they think is for the best and go over a little more and a little more because reality itself – human nature; the way societies work; economics; nature itself – is against them. They see the glimmer of the perfect world before them and they’ll do anything to get there. And they do.

On the flip side of that villain is the hero who sees when he’s doing more harm than good, who accepts limitations and reins himself in no matter how passionate. One of the reasons I love Pratchet’s Vimes is that he is that type of hero. I love the Villains in Phillip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers because they are mostly like that.

What type of villains do you love? Can you see them being tragic heroes with JUST a little difference in their lives? What type of villain would you like to write? Can you make one of your favorite heroes just a little less constrained, a little more ardent and see him become a villain?