Arvidnelson.com The online home of Arvid Nelson, writer of Rex Mundi & Zero Killer

Building the Perfect Bad Guy

Looks like Oblivion has a home at Disney, and I'm thrilled to quivering little pieces. We're working hard on the novella right now, and it gets better and better with every pass.

Emily, Joe’s assistant, has been working very closely (and patiently) with me on the revisions. She sent me this great piece about how to create a convincing, interesting bad guy.

I totally agree with everything Scott, the author of the piece, says. At the same time, I wonder if his “big five” for creating villains can’t be boiled down to three. I'm doing this at my own risk, given Scott's long list of writing credits, but it’s never stopped me before. So here goes, my unholy trinity, the Three Ss of Good Bad Guys:

Seductive

I don’t mean “Cassanova” seductive by this, although that’s certainly a possibility. Rather, the reader has to be enticed by the bad guy’s point of view. In the first Star Wars movie, practically the first thing Darth Vader does is strangle that rebel trooper who refuses to tell him what he wants to know. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that to an annoying bank clerk or flight attendant? You can't, but Darth Vader can.

Maybe that’s why people like rock stars and basketball players so much: they get to live the life, do everything us normal people can't do. But all that liberty comes with a lot of jealousy and resentment, too. When Tiger Woods or Darth Vader or Axl Rose get ground beneath the heel of Fate there’s a savage satisfaction, a “told you so”.

But the seduction has to go even deeper than that. There’s a certain amount of validity to how a villain views the world. The Joker confronting Batman with “You’re just like me! Why bother saving Gotham, you hate it just as much as I do!” is a cliché, but hey: he’s got a point. He's right, in a way. The Joker is seductive that way.

Bad guys never think they’re the bad guys. In their minds, they are right, they are the heroes. Hitler and Stalin believed they were doing the world a favor, after all. Even a psychopath or serial killer thinks what they do is natural and normal – people are prey animals, it’s just the law of the jungle.

In fact, every character, no matter how minor or incidental, believes they are the star of the story. You must write absolutely everyone that way. Scott Allie, the venerable Dark Horse Comics editor, told me that once and I never forgot it. No one should be there just for the convenience of the main characters... at least not in their minds!

A great example of this is the gay hotel clerk in Eyes Wide Shut, who hits on Tom Cruise throughout his entire scene. In the mind of the hotel clerk, the information he’s giving isn’t important – what’s important is hooking up with Tom Cruise. How boring would that scene have been if the clerk had just been an exposition-spewing android?

Sympathetic or...

There are basically two kinds of villains, sympathetic and scary. Most villains, the vast majority, are of the sympathetic genus. Darth Vader and Magneto are perfect examples.

If your villain is sympathetic, there has to be something about him that makes him the way he is, something that makes him legitimately, honest-to-Christ tragic. It can never be as simple as “he wasn’t held enough as a baby”. And it should never be an excuse for why he’s so darn bad. But it should make him understandable, and he should have a chance to redeem himself, even if he doesn't take it.

The bad guy doesn’t need to be sympathetic at first. In fact, he probably shouldn’t be. But, as the story progresses, the reader will learn more about him, and when the story’s over the reader will walk away a wiser and a sadder person.

...Scary?

All villains should be scary, of course, but I mean something more specific – a bad guy who’s bad just because. He wasn’t dropped on his head as a kid, he had loving parents, but he turned into a douchebag anyway. Examples are Michael Corleone or Hannibal Lecter. There’s no reason why they are the way they are, and there’s nothing scarier than that.

Scary villains are the easiest and the hardest to write, in my opinion. On the one hand, you have Claw from Inspector Gadget or Sauron from Lord of the Rings. They’re cardboard cut-outs. No explanation needed. Michael Corelone, on the other hand...

There are always more exceptions than rules, of course, but there are worse places to start than with The Three Ss or Scott's Five Points.