How To Create A Villain: Who It Is and Why They Are Against the Hero

Creating the villain can be one of the most rewarding and challenging parts of writing a novel.

It’s said that your villain can be a human, an object, or a circumstance. Most often in fiction, the villain comes down to one human who most troubles the hero. Nonfiction uses this same technique of villain-nizing one person (like Hitler) to make a story more personal.

The villain is whoever the hero (who is usually the narrating “point-of-view” character) dislikes and thinks is in the way of their goal.

First, figure out your villain’s backstory. A child growing up during a war will learn to be more cautious than one growing up in peace, so a person’s backstory is key to why they act the way they act.

Karen Richter is the Nazi commander of Ravensbrück. She is also a grieving widow of the Allied bomb runs.

Her backstory — growing up in peace and then losing both Michael and Germany to the war — is what motivates her. In her mind, if she helps fight, the war might end sooner, and she might learn that Michael has been alive all along.

She isn’t trying to be a villain. She is just believing what her past causes her to desire to believe, in order to cope with the horror around her.

Remember. No realistic villain sets out to do evil for evil’s sake, unless he’s possessed. A villain sets out to solve a problem that he or she has, and the solution to that problem happens to get in somebody else’s way.

Second, figure out what they’re doing that contradicts the existing society in a way that other characters in that world will view as ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’.

Usually, the villain is against the hero because their goal is in direct opposition to your hero’s goal.

However, in some cases, the villain has the same initial goal as the hero, but a different, opposing reason for chasing that goal.

• Hero Joe wants to find the Golden Scroll so he can sell it to pay for his brother’s education.

• Villain Ed wants to find the Golden Scroll so he can destroy it to prevent others experiencing the ill it brought his great-grandfather before being hidden.

• Ed wants to find the scroll, same as Joe.

• Ed has good intentions, same as Joe.

• If the story is told from Joe’s point of view, Joe’s going to be pretty angry at poor Ed if he catches Ed destroying the Scroll.

Joe’s view of Ed’s goal is what makes Ed a villain.

What if you want your villain to be a circumstance or object?

I’ve never written a story without some person or personality as the villain, and frankly, I don’t believe it’s possible. Humans can’t sympathize with or despise a hurricane or tornado because it has no goals or feelings, it just is.

However, you can still make inanimate objects and circumstances seem like your villain, and this requires the help of your hero.

To use one of my own characters, a helicopter crash rips apart Cassie Bonneville’s life.

Cassie is an Air Force pilot, but after the crash, the sight of fire or smell of aircraft fuel makes her go into a flashback trauma reaction, unable to function.

She loves flying, so being barred from this is awful, and she blames the helicopter crash for everything that happened to her.

In Cassie’s eyes, an inanimate object — the crashed helicopter — and a circumstance — being unable to fly — have become the source of her pain and the opposition to her goals.

They are her villain.

Even then, though, the villain is Cassie herself.

She is the only one who can move to change the effects of the helicopter crash on her life.

When she doesn’t move, she becomes her own villain, no matter what she may wish to believe.

What makes a villain unique?

A villain’s personality and the social norms that the villain is up against are what make them unique from all other villains.

I’ll use my character Jay Carter as an example, since he was created to be a unique villain.

By all outward appearances, Jay is your average Joe, working the evening shift at a Bass Pro Shops, living off frozen meals, and with a quirky fondness for volunteering to help with charity events.

But unknown to the world at large, Jay is a technology whiz, and a registered member the National Association of Villains’ Allied Liaison (NAVAL or the Association, for short).

Why is Jay a member of this group? He won’t sell his genius to the government to help design new weapons.

Having successfully held off a ‘forceful acquisition’ of his creations with just a quirky AI and few dozen bags of marshmallows, he’s classed as ‘wanted’ and ‘dangerous’. So he joined the Association for the protection of other slighted ‘villains’.

That’s what makes Jay unique. Not because he killed anyone. Not because he plans world dominion. Just because he’s a quiet-loving introvert with a sprinkling of sarcasm and a love of messing around with electronics.

All a villain has to do in order to stand out is break the social norms.

Brooke Johnson, out.