 For Authors: October 15, 2008 Issue [#2662] |
  For Authors
This week: Edited by: CHRISTMAS cub-BELLS R RINGING!  
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Hello, everyone! Welcome to this edition of the For Authors newsletter.  This week's topic is focused on villains, but first off, I'd like to share a few quotes with you that are related to writing. Enjoy!
Quotes:
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In the old days villains had mustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.
~ Alfred Hitchcock
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"A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development."
~ Agnes Repplier
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I try to give both my heroes and villains an emotional dimensionality which provides the motivation for their actions.
~ Sidney Sheldon
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~@~@ ~ Villains Have Feelings, Too! ~@~@~
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Definitions [cited from Dictionary.com]
 villain - [noun]
1. a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.
2. a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot.
antagonist - [noun]
1. a person who is opposed to, struggles against, or competes with another; opponent; adversary.
2. the adversary of the hero or protagonist of a drama or other literary work: Iago is the antagonist of Othello.
Not all villains are people, of course, but the point I'd like to pass along is, try to give your antagonist human traits. The bad guy, or whoever the opposing character is, needs to be real to the reader... someone (or thing) that brings out the best in your main character. A flat antagonist will do nothing to excite the reader, and therefore your story may seem boring. Creating a complex adversary will certainly keep your readers turning the pages.
If you allow your villain to breathe, often times he will come alive and make decisions on his own. Your main character will already have a personality established with the reader, but to give full credit to the protagonist, his adversary will also need personality traits to make things interesting.
Villains can be fun to write about. While the good guy needs to be likable and have good values, the bad guy does not. You can give the villain all sorts of traits that give him complexities and even more reasons to dislike him. The antagonist should clearly help the main character stand out as the one to cheer for.
A few villains that come to mind, are listed below. These antagonists are portrayed as complex, and definitely not boring characters in the least:
- Darth Vader (Star Wars)
- Gollum (Lord of the Rings)
- Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs)
- The Joker (Batman)
- Captain Hook (Peter Pan)
- Freddy Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street)
If your villain is not complex, your story won't be nearly as exciting to read. Give him a background. Allow the reader to glimpse into his past, bringing at least some light as to why he turned out the way he did. If you research serial killers, there is usually a connection to their family life that affected them strongly enough to commit murder. Whether your adversary is a murderer or not, your antagonist is dysfunctional beyond the norm.
Don't create a villain without emotional dimensions. Perhaps he holds feelings of resentment towards society, had overbearing or abusive parents, was abandoned at a young age; the reasoning behind your villain's motivations gives this character depth in which a character without a background or motivational reasoning, would just be a flat, bad guy.
There are many ways to be bad, but if your villain appears realistic, beautiful/handsome, polite, etc., it's possible he would come across more fearful in the long run than if he stood out as the evil antagonist right away.
Be careful that your bad guy doesn't steal the show from the good guy. Someone told me once that we all have a dark side. Once you open that dark side on a character, you might find it so engaging that your main character is left in the shadows. Your protagonist needs to come out on top, claim victory in the end. But that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with your villain, right? 
A few interesting books to consider checking out:
 Disney Villains: The Essential Guide by Dk Publishing
How to Be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans, and More!!! by Neil Zawacki
The Power of the Dark Side: Creating Great Villains, Dangerous Situations, & Dramatic Conflict by Pamela Jaye Smith
Evil Super-Villains Need Love, Too ... and other important wisdom by Steve Sommers
Villain Design Handbook by D. Andrew Ferguson, Brian Jelke, Don Morgan, and Mark Plemmons
For additional online information, browse the following links:
Villains are People, Too, But...
http://www.stellacameron.com/contrib/villains.html
Writing the Effective Villain
http://www.theromanceclub.com/writers/articles/article0042.htm
Creating Villains People Love to Hate
http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/villains.shtml
Creating Villains
http://www.sabrinajeffries.com/creating-villians.php
Now... Who is your favorite villain... and why???
Happy October and...
Keep on Writing!
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