Writing Villainy

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where you liked the villain more than the hero, or at least sympathized with him? I have. I also watched an anime where the hero became the villain, and wasn't that interesting? It's called Code: Geass if you're interested. But the point I'm trying to make here is that it takes just as much work to create a good villain as it does to create a good hero or heroine.

I don't have a lot of practice writing villains, because a lot of my stories are based around internal conflict, rather than external (or, in the case of my Harry Potter FanFiction, the villain is already established). But I decided to take a shot at it. Because villains are people, too, with goals and reasons for the means to achieve said goals. In fact, you could even say that villains are even more complex than the hero, because something had to happen to make them that way, and then they had to delude themselves into thinking they were in the right.

For my first attempt at writing a villain, I didn't start a new story. Instead, I created a D&D character! (Yeah, I'm a nerd through and through. I was ecstatic to use my new dice on Friday.)

As a writer, I take building a new D&D character pretty seriously. I actually write out the backstory, instead of just trying to summarize it. Doing this helps me get to know my character so I can role-play effectively in the future. In the case of this character, I built a rogue drow elf─in every sense of the word. For anyone out there not familiar with the high fantasy of Dungeons and Dragons, drow elves are basically the opposite of elves─they live underground, they have legitimately black skin, and they're mostly evil and depraved and hate everyone that isn't also a drow (and even that's negligible). A rogue in D&D is basically a thief or a criminal of some fashion.

Now, my character is a little more mellow than most drow elves (he doesn't murder just because he thinks it's fun), but he's still more of a villain than a hero. He's a hardened criminal, for heaven's sake! And in writing out his backstory I had to get in touch with my evil side─that is, I had to set aside my values and attempt to embrace his. The hard part was defining said values in a way that makes sense to the character and then figuring out how to write it. For me, being an decent person, it was very difficult to justify things that I normally wouldn't even consider, like murder just because someone was no longer useful to "me"─my character. (And the rough draft of that backstory still needs a lot of work, because I didn't do so great with that.)

But, that's part of being an author─you have to step out of your comfort zone, your little box of "me", and to an extent actually become someone else.

With writing heroes, that's the fun part. You get to go on adventures the majority of humanity can only dream about, become a much more interesting person than the one who sits around all day waiting for her dream to come true just because she wills it, etc. You get the drift. But when writing villains, it's the opposite. You don't want to be the bad guy (well, maybe some of you do), but you have to be the bad guy if you hope to write a story, novel, script, play, etc. that someone else will actually want to read.

Good luck writing villainy!

PS: Don't forget to check out my Inkshares project, and my FanFiction. I want reviewers, feedback, sponsors. Pretty please?