Last week I wrote about giving your heroes flaws. It is absolutely necessary for a hero to have a flaw or two. Villains tend to be more interesting because they are flawed, but you can go too far down the opposite road. One must beware of the villain who is so bad, so competent, so omnipotent the reader starts rooting for him to win instead of your hero.

Frequently, the story calls for a Very Bad Villain (VBV) in order to give a Very Good Hero (VGH) something to overcome. To Victorian readers, Dracula was the apotheosis of evil in the form both of cannibalism and sexual non-control and deviancy. Stoker took great care in drawing him as a force of evil so malign that several VGHs had to rescue Mina and the world from him. Unfortunately, Dracula’s so bad, he’s too good to die. (I cannot have been the only one rooting for him, can I?) Stoker might have thought his book was popular because of its moral heroes, but in reality, we read for the Count and his breathtaking schemes, utter amorality, and highly sexual charge. The VBV has beaten the pants off the VGHs, as far as the reader’s concerned.

One of the books where the villain is done right is Robin McKinley’s wrenching Deerskin, a retelling of a Perrault tale with peculiarly grim undertones. The father/king is brutal and insane, driven to madness by the death of his wife and searching for his lost youth. (I have always thought this particular fairy tale speaks about trophy wives and midlife crises, but that’s just me.) The king commits a horrible act, and is a selfish, self-centred beast. Still, the reader understands him, and is not allowed the luxury of liking him.

Another way to approach the villain is to make him or her driven by a flawed society, as in Sean Stewart’s Passion Play. If a villain is driven by the natural logic of the society you’ve built, it’s hard to go wrong. Finding those natural consequences, though, can be a real headache. The curse of creating societies in your fiction is that they always end up saying more about your world than the characters’.

Contrast those two approaches with a run-of-the-mill suspense novel, let’s say a Tom Clancy novel. The few times I have read such behemoths I have been rooting for the villains despite their hatred and desecration of Mom, the flag, and apple pie. In a Clancy novel, a villain not only has to be bad, but he has to be smart, and plan for all sorts of contingencies. Like a James Bond villain, he’s so bloody smart and has so many plans in place, the reader never believes he’d be so stupid to tie the hero up and dispose of him in such a convoluted way. (One of the Austin Powers movies had a great sendup of this. Can I just register that Seth Green is a total hottie?) Summer blockbuster movies commit this same error, making the villains far more memorable and interesting than the cookie-cutter heroes–and so, we feel betrayed when the villain does something TSTL. (That’s too-stupid-to-live. Sorry. I have acronym fever, apparently.)

Many writers make the mistake of thinking it is the hero(ine) that makes a story tick. It is the tension between protagonist and obstacle that makes a story tick. The term “obstacle” covers both situation (plot) and villain. When the hero is well-drawn but the villain is not, the plot loses half its impetus and a great deal of interest, and vice versa. Your hero needs flaws, and your villain needs flaws and reasons to be bad, in order to make the plot balance easily on its legs.

While making a villain too sympathetic happens all the time, it’s still a bit awkward for a writer to realize the fans are rooting for the Bad Guy instead of the hero s/he sweated and labored over creating.

I must admit that I’ve had a soft spot for VBVs ever since seeing a rerun of that wonderful 1956 special Our Unsung Villains, where the Magic Mirror from Snow White shows clips of great Disney villains and points out that if it wasn’t for those hardworking bad guys and gals, we would have no stories. That simple dictum has stayed with me for years.

Villains work hard at making our stories work. The least we can do is pay attention to their creation, and make them worthy of our heroes. Of course, we can also stand the story on its head and make the villain the hero, like Gregory Maguire did in Wicked.

But, as I always say, that’s another blog post.