In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about their continued deep dive into writing villains. They discuss who villains actually are in your story, tips on writing them, and things to avoid.
Show Notes
13 Steps to Evil: How to Craft Superbad Villains by Sacha Black
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman
Writing About Villains: How to Create Compelling Dark Characters for Your Fiction by Rayne Hall
You Are a Storyteller Podcast
Three Story Method: Foundations of Fiction by J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon
Your Brand Should be Gay (Even if You’re Not) by Re Perez
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. This is episode 42 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is May 5th, 2021 as we are recording. I am Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: How are you, JP?
JP: I am good. How are you?
Crys: Also good. I just came back from a very relaxing couple of hours at the beach and there was no one there and I just laid and thought things. And that was delightful. How was your writing week?
JP: I had frost this morning.
Crys: Eww.
JP: No, my writing week was good. So I’ve started on revision two after that little like mini break that I had in between revision one and this revision where I did my little analysis. And so I have a really nice set of notes figuring out like where to flush out. I was making pretty good progress. And then I have had a little bit of a pause trying to fit in some of my notes into this chapter naturally. But it’s really awesome in comparison to how I did the revisions last time. Because I know what can be added. And so it’s just finding the right spot and it doesn’t feel forced when it comes in. It’s just, Oh no, this is the right spot, and tossing it in there. It has been a fun journey. How has your week been?
Crys: I didn’t get too much writing stuff done. This is the weekend that I shipped my kiddo off to the States for three weeks with his dad. So we’ve been on the road running around doing those kinds of errands.
And so I got home last night, and today is get-back-to-work day. So I had that kind of cleanse myself of all of the chaos at the beach this morning. And this is my first work activity, which is a great way to start my workday. And I’m really excited to figure out what my new schedule is going to be for the next couple of weeks.
Cause it’s going to be quite different without book-ending my days with kiddo things.
JP: Yeah. I wonder how it will go. I feel like you’re going to be–
Crys: I’m either going to be so productive or get absolutely nothing done. There is no in between.
JP: Yeah, no, I totally get it cause you’ve always focused towards like, when can I get all of this time? And then once you actually get it, you’re like, Oh, but I don’t know what to do with all this time.
Crys: Yeah. I’m shooting towards productive. I’m shooting towards like actually having a morning routine. Cause my mornings will be quite the same every day. So fingers crossed that’s what my brain and body actually need is to be productive because maybe my brain and body need to be relaxed and sleeping. Maybe I can get it all in. That’s what I’m hoping for. Maybe I can get it all.
JP: Yeah. I’m hoping the next couple of days I can get some writing because I’m currently in a different location for the next few days. And I don’t really have a space to myself, where I am like awake alone. And I just, I’m one of those people that like, I actually have come to find, I don’t even listen to music when I write. I am in complete and utter silence and any distraction it pulls me away. So we’ll see how the next few days go.
Crys: Related to that. I made an investment and bought a really expensive pair of noise canceling headphones, like over the ear headphones that will come back when my kid comes back, and I’m so excited about them.
So excited. I think that’ll be good productivity tool.
JP: You’ll have to send me what they are.
Crys: They are Beats Three Wireless, I think. I think that’s what they are. So I’m excited. So our episode today, yes it’s tying into our giant side rail of 2021, which is villainry. And the things that we have learned in our deep dives that’s still ongoing.
But we’ve come a ways from how we wrote villains at the beginning of the year to how we’re writing villains/antagonists now. And so that’s what we’re taking it into and I’m excited and also feel completely unqualified. But that’s normal life and teaching and craft and learning all of that.
JP: I’m just waiting for Sacha Black to just join in the zoom meeting. Like, oh, you mentioned me?
Crys: Exactly. We should have.
So number one question in this is what is a villain? How do you define a villain?
JP: I define the villain as the embodiment of the alternative directive of the hero of the story.
Crys: So sciency. I like it.
JP: I went real sciencey on that one. You threw it on me right on the spot.
Crys: Excellent. I have come to decide that I really dislike the term villain in my writing approach, because that comes so loaded with a lot of internal expectations that I don’t think actually work out for… they don’t benefit me when I’m writing.
After the thing is written, then I can point out and say, yo, here are villains. But when I’m getting ready to write, I feel like that’s very limiting because to me, it means like a villain has to be a bad person. And that’s not necessarily the case.
JP: Yeah. A hundred percent. And that’s why even though my science definition “alternative directive” is not a bad thing.
One of the things that my co-writer and I really focus on is our villain, even more so now, because we want our characters to be morally gray because that’s reality.
People don’t do evil things to be evil, except for certain people in this world, maybe, but other than them people don’t do things for evil purposes. They do the things because they are the heroes of their own stories. And it’s just the point of view in which you’re telling the story.
Crys: A hundred percent agree. And so in non sciencey term, layman’s terms, it’s simply somebody who wants something that prevents your hero from getting what they want.
JP: Exactly.
Crys: Which leads us directly into, like question number two, like what is the villain/antagonist’s purpose in a story.
JP: So I took this from my good friend, Sacha Black, from her 13 Steps to Evil, which probably is where most of my notes come from. So it’s not that I’m stealing. I’m just… stealing.
But “the villain carries the opposing theme” really resonated with me because it was a really good approach to figuring out why your villain does what they do in your story. So simplistically if your hero is all about self-sacrifice, that’s the theme you want to carry, then your villain’s all about sacrificing others.
Sacrificing others, that kind of sounds a little villainous, but maybe it’s a selfish route. Maybe it’s more self preservation as opposed to self sacrifice.
I also picked apart two stories, Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty to try and figure out what kind of themes those characters would have.
Cause I figure everyone has seen those and those are topical in my brain. And I’m just going to quickly try and throw them out there. So with Dorothy, In the Wizard of Oz, she’s all about, basically opening up to others and showing vulnerability, which leads to growth and self-discovery. She realizes that she has the tools that she needs, whereas the Wicked Witch of the West, I don’t know why I said that so slowly, but I did. If we were to tie in Wicked, which I think is slightly important to the story, because in the original Wizard of Oz, especially in the movie, she’s very one dimensional. But if we throw a little bit of that backstory in there, we can see that for her, her opposing theme is opening up to others and showing vulnerability, lets others turn their actions against you.
Because for her, every time that she tried to do good, people always found the bad in what she did. And then if we just quickly switched gears to Sleeping Beauty, it’s a lot about family.
So Briar Rose, if you were to take a theme of like home is where the heart is or family is what makes you stronger, Maleficent, her opposing theme is more of like a perversion of family. She doesn’t have a support system. And really the only support system she has is a pet, which is almost a perversion of family, because it’s something that she controls.
Whereas Sleeping Beauty has this family around her. She’s grown up by fairies. And like she has this loving and supportive family who is trying to protect her, whereas noone’s trying to protect Maleficent. So it’s almost like Maleficent carries that opposing theme, that family is not there for you.
Crys: And I want to jump back to your example of self-sacrifice versus sacrificing others, because one of the things that I have glommed on to between Brian MacDonald and Sacha’s ideas of the villain, the antagonist, is that often the hero or the main character and the antagonists want something very similar. And it’s how they choose different ways of getting about that.
It may not be an object that’s similar, but they both want safety for a certain people, or they want, a society that works. Their definition of working may be a little different, but the self-sacrifice versus sacrificing others is often in service of a very similar goal.
A lot of times you’ll have this theme of, villain will believe that the end is worth the means. Whereas the hero will say, if we don’t get there by noble means than the end doesn’t matter.
JP: Yeah, exactly.
Crys: I would be so interested to see a story flipped around where the villain was the one who said the means matter. So that just popped into my head.
JP: That would lead to the whole concept of villain protagonists, which you know, is what we’re trying to do with our short stories.
Crys: Yes.
We’ve talked a little bit about how the villain is the opposing part or an opposing vision of the hero, but how have you gone about crafting your villains or antagonists? What tools or structures or questions do you use that have been really helpful for you?
JP: I sent you this message yesterday because we were talking about it in TASM, one stop…. one stop shop… what is it called?
One Stop for Writers. And that is the authors, Angela Ackerman…
Crys: Becca Pugalasi. I probably murdered her last name, but that’s close to that.
JP: Yes, those two, Angela Ackerman and Becca Pugalasi? You’re going to say that.
Crys: Puglisi is what we’re going to say. We’re going to say it’s Puglisi.
JP: Oh, sorry. The authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus, and several other ways in which writers can use these references to build better characters through actions and ways that they speak.
They have a website called One Stop for Writers, and it basically incorporates all of those together. And you can create this character chart of a person, including what their wound is and what lie they believe. Before that, when I was crafting my villain, I was focusing on what their emotional wound was and trying to infer from that.
And now this One Stop for Writers is expanding on that. It’s helping me pick those pieces because everything on that website builds on top of each other and links so that if you pick an emotional wound, there are other traits, lies, and things that you can pick from that because it almost filters out what kind of wound you selected.
And I really want to play with that tool a little more to figure out character traits and pieces that I may have been missing. Cause I feel like that will really flesh out a villain.
Crys: I can’t wait to check this out. I completely forgot because yesterday was very exhausting driving back and I’m really glad you reminded me of that.
How I have approached this for my most recent big project, which is the serial project that I’m working on, I need multiple antagonists at different levels because we are going to go through basically several books worth of challenges and antagonists. And so I started out just thinking who are the different kinds of people who will have different goals than my main character will.
And so one of the first goals my main character has is that she wants to get into this mage school. And the first antagonist is her grandmother who, there’s family beef and she and her dad go to her to ask for money to get there. And she’s like, nope, for reasons.
I just started writing down a bunch of people who just are gonna oppose my character. I actually found some really helpful things in Writing About Villains by Rayne Hall.
In this book, Hall lists some archetypes for villains. They also have a similar approach to the lie your character believes, but it’s got a little bit different twist. And so it’s goal and motivation. And also when we get into Three Story Method, this is very similar to when you ask what does the antagonist want and what does the antagonist need?
The goal is what they want. The motivation is why they want it, AKA their need. And then also the means, how they go about getting it. But I only really gave my antagonists the goal and motivation, because those are what I need.
The means will change throughout the story. They’ll use different tactics to get what they want.
What I did for my story is I just listed all of the kinds of people who have opposing goals to my character. And I have a page, two pages of different antagonists, because I know that I’ll need a lot.
Having different antagonists, making a whole list of them made the concept of writing a longer work so much more palatable to me because too often, I think I focus on… and granted, I have written shorter works where you slowly lay out like the big antagonists and there are individual antagonists per book, but I haven’t thought about this comprehensively from the start this way before.
So I combined the goal and the motivation and the archetype that Rayne Hall talks about to create a whole list of antagonists. Now I have just this bucket of antagonists to pull from when I need the character to be opposed. And there are going to be far more than this.
There’s going to be scene antagonists. There’s going to be like, this tiny arc is going to have a different antagonist than these big ones that I’ve put in here.
My main antagonist was one of the last characters I came up with because I was like, I don’t know what’s the big bad that they’re fighting against. I know that they’re fighting against a war priest at some point. That’s the big external thing that they’re building up to, there’s a war going on.
But I knew that wasn’t the big bad, because that wasn’t an emotional big bad. There was this external thing, it’s not directly against my character. It’s against the country, the world as a whole, that affects her and her friends.
And so they’re fighting them. And there will be aspects that do reflect that opposite. But I was like, that’s not the big bad. That’s not the person who is actually the antithesis of my hero. And so I was talking with a D&D friend who’s a dungeon master. And I was like, okay, sit down and talk with me about your theory of villains.
And we ended up talking for two or three hours and we discovered, basically from the story, from the characters, who my big bad actually was, who is manipulating all of the other antagonists in some way, shape, or form to cause all these problems.
Layering antagonists is a tool I think I will always use in the future, and having a bucket of antagonists, because that helps me shape my story so much more and pull out those different elements of things that my character needs to learn on their way to the big bad.
And that’s not something I do naturally. I tend to write happiness and lack of conflict if I don’t think of the conflict beforehand. Other people naturally torture their characters. We talked about that with the trauma episode. But that’s not something I do naturally. It’s something I have to think about beforehand.
I have all these antagonists now with their archetype, and I’ll just read off a few of the archetypes. Schemer, Confidence Trickster, Obsessed Scientist, the Fanatic, Evil Overlord, and Smothering Mother are a few of them. They might be all of them.
I tried to use all of the archetypes in all my layers just to give me an idea of how they approach things and why having those archetypes is really helpful.
This has made me feel much more empowered in telling my story because of all the thought that I’ve given to this. And one of the things that I have done also is once I had that list, then I started seeing how does this reflect an opposite answer from my main character in whatever plot that this person.
I didn’t do that from the start. And I think that’s one of the things that you do from the start is like, how can a character reflect the opposing answer for my main character. We end up at the same place with a character, an antagonist, who is opposing and reflecting a different answer than the hero, but we start with different questions, I think.
JP: Yeah. So this made me think of how my co-writer and I are developing our villains. And really from the start, our big bad villain, we knew was the same and the opposite as our main character. So they almost had the exact same directive, the same goal, but then one was just different or mirrored to the other one.
And then to be fair, like we didn’t really flesh out these characters and I think that’s a key thing for people just figuring out how they want to create these villains is we almost let the stories start to tell where the direction was going. And one thing that I recommend, especially with co-writers, at least for my co-writer and I, is we meet almost weekly.
And we just kinda like talk story. Either we’re talking about like where we are in the progress or we’re talking outline, but eventually we hit these notes where we’re like, okay, let’s flush out this character a little more and we just build this depth into this character. It doesn’t have to be something from the start, but I think it’s something that we know that these characters have more depth and we just need to pick it apart. And then consistent revisions, that’s when we just add in that depth to that character. Unfortunately, what it does to us is it just tells us, Oh, we have another side story that we’re going to tell one day, but…
Crys: That’s not unfortunately, that’s fortunately.
JP: I think now we have six additional places we want to go.
But for our main story we’ve kept it pretty tight. We haven’t had to add in like thousands of more words to just tell this character’s backstory. We just know it and we sprinkle it in there and add it for flavor.
But it really helps figuring out what their motivations are and knowing that the character is never going to view themself as the villain, but we have to know that they are the opposing force to our main character.
Crys: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And even though you guys are doing a lot of plotting, that is incorporating pantsing elements, which I really love. And our friend J. Thorn often says, like he doesn’t believe in the dichotomy of plotting versus pantsing and, yes but no on that. I think some people really like to start with a more structured level, and that’s what we tend to call plotting, but we all at points get somewhere and be like, Oh, I need to develop this further because I didn’t plan for this, which is great.
That’s just the process of creativity and creation. And I, with this particular project, I’m starting at a much higher level of planning than I do normally. And part of that’s that romances is fairly structured already, when you’re going into it, what needs to be there. Whereas science fiction and fantasy is so open and has so many rounds of possibilities that one of the things that’s held me back in the past is decision fatigue, because everything’s a possibility. And so narrowing down and deciding things before I start writing a word of narrative has been so freeing for me. And that’s the key here with any kind of craft, like learning and planning, is what enables you personally to tell your story more fully in the way that you want to, wherever you incorporate this in your planning and plotting, or just go and add, it is totally fine.
There’s no wrong way to do it. These are just tools that are enabling us to tell the stories that are blooming in our heads far greater than just running at them blindly, and then trying to pick up the pieces after.
JP: Definitely. And I think too, like there’s an element of, if you structured it and you feel like all of your pillars are all ready to go, and then you go to the page and you realize you can’t type a single word because now you’re overwhelmed, then go rogue. Don’t worry about it. Because even though you may have spent a ton of time developing this character, once you got to the page, if that character doesn’t fit, if that character doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that you wasted all that time.
It means that you developed a character that you can then manipulate, change, and alter to fit the story that you want to tell. I think any word you wrote is, it’s worth its place and it’s also worth being completely destroyed.
Crys: Absolutely. Find the minimal amount that you need to start telling your story to feel like you understand what you want to do, and then go until you need more.
JP: So I have a question on developing characters. Is it a question? I don’t know if it’s a question or a statement.
Crys: Share your belief of characters with us, JP.
JP: So one big thing about villains that I just kinda wanna to discuss and throw out there is the use of mental health and sexuality as a means of defining your villain.
How do you feel about it? I think that it can be used, but I think that there’s a level of use to it, and I just kinda want to get your opinion and then kinda want to throw out mine.
Crys: Yeah. I guess I’ll start out with the problem that has been in fiction for decades and that’s the queer coding of villains which is what you’re kind of drawing from here, I think. And let’s take Ursula from the little mermaid to start. She’s clearly a queen and this is a really easy example to point to of when we say queer coded villains.
A lot of times to indicate that a character is a villain/evil before it’s revealed, or even like from the get-go it’s been historically common for these characters to have archetypes that are portrayed in the media, outside of villainry as gay or as queer. And so that could be like somebody who’s very flamboyant. It can be straight up someone who’s just gay and that’s like their only “evil” traits that you see before they’re revealed to be evil. This is just a really bad pattern that has been super common for decades that thankfully we are moving away from. But that’s the history of where this comment is coming from. And so what is your answer to not doing this?
JP: If you’re going to have a character with either a mental health illness or representing the LGBTQ community, and you’re going to have them as a villain, then have a good character who also has one of those traits. Because there is a level of bucketing these minority groups into the bucket of evil. And one thing, I’m not going to say that there’s a correlation to it, but there is this, especially with the trans community, there is this gay panic defense that still exists today in law where straight men basically kill either gay people or trans people. And the defense they use is that they didn’t know that they were gay or they didn’t know that they were trans, and so they panicked and they killed them. And to the point where in 2015, there was a case where a man got off from manslaughter to like it was accidental or something. Like, no, you still killed them.
Whatever. But regardless, the problem I would have here is if you are going to write a trans or gay villain who maybe is using their sexuality, maybe they’re covert about their identity and they’re using that as their tool of villainry, you could be feeding into this continued fear or this continued hate. And so it’s just being mindful of the fact that like, when you write these characters, I’m not saying you can’t do it, but what I am saying is that maybe you should also represent those characters in a positive light, or maybe different characters with those traits in a positive light, just so that you’re not running into the fact that you may be saying, this mental health illness or this sexuality is the evil trait.
Crys: Yeah. I’m going to take the maybe out of that and say you absolutely need to.
JP: I agree. I like to be a little…
Crys: You’re wearing Midwestern, sir.
JP: I’m basically almost Canadian. I’m like a Canadian.
Crys: So I’m going to take the maybe out, because I was raised in New York and we’re going to say that if you have a villain who happens to be queer or mentally ill, and like a lot of times, let me share an example so that people can visualize this. A lot of times serial killers are portrayed as having OCD or they’re depressed or manic bipolar. There are plenty of people with these mental states that are not serial killers and it has given society a really negative, fearful view of people with these disorders. So what we are saying is, if you have a character who is queer or has a mental disorder, if you have a villain who has these things, you also need to have characters who are not villains, who are also parts of these communities, members of these communities.
This is another example of the reflection element of where we’re talking about often the villain and the hero have similar goals in life or end goals or things that they want. This is also a problem for society in that we need to normalize humans in all ways, shapes and forms.
And so if you are having villains, because there is such a problem in our history of portraying mentally, not mentally challenged or ill people, what’s the right word… what is the word I’m looking for? Who are…
JP: Non neuro-typical.
Crys: Yeah. With people who deal with mental illness or simply neurodivergence or people who are queer, you can’t just have them be villains because of the history of how people with these have been portrayed as villains and how negatively that has impacted our society.
You also need other characters who are not portrayed in a negative light who have these disorders or are queer.
JP: And so I was thinking about an example that I didn’t notice until more recently when I rewatched it. But Silence of the Lambs, if you watch it in the light that it is transphobic, you realize that the only character who basically doesn’t like their own stuff skin and wants to be female is the serial killer. And there’s no other representation of someone who is trans in that movie. That can be very damaging to people because it can force people into believing that anyone who is not comfortable in their own skin is potentially a killer or someone who is dangerous.
That may seem strange to some people, but that is definitely a belief that I have seen around me. That’s just, that’s a thing that can happen and can foster from media like this.
Crys: And the most dangerous part of this isn’t like the overt belief that people might pick up and say, Oh, I think trans women, are just men who are trying to get access to women-only areas. That’s an overt belief that many of us have heard. But the subtextual beliefs that people have, the subconscious beliefs that people have that they don’t even know are there. That trans people aren’t safe, that mentally ill people are not safe, that people with bipolar are dangerous. Like these are subconscious beliefs that people often pick up from our media. And that’s why we are harping on this so strongly because we have so many people that we love and adore who have had to deal with these subconscious beliefs that are absolutely not true.
JP: Yeah. And so I think the key thing about crafting a villain and potentially using one of these traits is to just also reflect it in a positive light. It shouldn’t be the core drive or the core reasoning towards their villain, it is just another facet of their existence that is reflected positively in your story as well.
Crys: Absolutely.
Now clearly JP and I are still in our deep dive of villains and antagonists. So we would love to hear what is a tip that you have or a tool you use in crafting villains in your own stories?
JP: Yes.
Crys: Next week will be our book club, which is Your Brand Should Be Gay, Even if You Are Not. And soon we will be transitioning from Substack to a Patreon. And once we do that, in the Patreon, we’ll be posting every month a link where you’ll be able to join us for a live recording of book club, be able to contribute your questions.
We’ll have more information on that when we actually launch the Patreon but I really hope that you will join us and leave your comment for this week’s episode. Thank you so much.
JP: See ya later!
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