I enjoy writing villains. I don’t suppose I’m alone in this amongst writers. There’s something fun and freeing about exploring the rotten side of a character—or delving into the psyche of someone who is all-consumingly, unrepentantly rotten. I won’t lie. I get a kick out of it.
There are all sorts of villainy to explore. The stuffy, venal, sexually repressed weirdo. The underhanded, undermining, backstabbing little worm. The boarding school son-of-a-bitch. The dyed in the wool psycho. In my time, I’ve written evildoers of those ilks, plus a few more. And I always find myself going back for more.
Why? Well, some of it is simply that a villain is the equivalent of a chainsaw tossed into a kiddie pool: who knows what will happen, right? But surely nothing good.
Even if a villain has his or her objective—and most of them must, as a matter of plot mechanics—it’s the way they chose to fulfill that objective (which is often insane by human standards) that acts as the livewire element. Where the other characters usually have to abide by some level of morality or decorum, the villain is free to operate as a law unto themselves, dashing willy-nilly through the narrative, zigging where other characters are perforce expected to zag.
For most characters to stay believable, they have to operate within narrower boundaries than villains, who are given a wider racetrack to slew about on … and why not? They’re often crazy, immoral, or single-mindedly obsessive, making them radical elements who are allowed to go merrily ping-ponging about, sowing chaos, while still remaining believable to most readers.
I do like to give my villains a backstory. It’s not that they necessarily need one. Lots of villains exist free of personal history, and some even benefit from that lack. I think of Hannibal Lecter or Patrick Bateman here: in Silence of the Lambs, we as readers were given slim reason for how he became what he is. No childhood incident (for example) to explain the man he’d grown to be … Lecter simply is. Elemental, no different than fire or air, a creature who’d simply appeared: a conjuration of the four ill winds brought down to earth to work his destructive magic.
Ditto Bateman in American Psycho. Apart from two brief sections involving a strained dinner with his brother and a visit to his aging mother, we never know much about him. No backstory. He simply is. He exists, almost as if summoned full-fledged in adulthood. And in both cases, that works excellently toward their characterizations.
Even the typical James Bond villain in’t much more than a parcel of villainous tics and trappings. The single-breasted suitcoat, the white lap-cat, the henchman, the guarded compound, the scar descending under one eye, the wealth to fuel a dark intention. And it works wonderfully because the Blofelds and Scaramangas and Le Chiffres can fulfill their roles free of (or with minimal) backstory.
Anyway, it’s not as if I haven’t dispensed with an elaborate backstory myself sometimes. If your villain is a psychopath, for example, it’s perhaps less about how they got that way then the specific mindset they walk around with—the thrill for a writer is digging down into the cesspit of their brains into all the tangled bits of psychology, and presenting that worldview to a reader. How they got to be a sociopath may not matter so much.
But for villains who have, let’s say, an earned objective or pattern of desire, yeah, you may want to delve into that a bit. Give them a reason for pursuing it with such fervor.
A few weeks ago, my son and I sat down to watch Jaws. For him, it would be the first time. I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve watched that classic. I only paused it once—it’s not something my son’s overly fond of, his father stopping the movie in order to explain some upcoming plot point or character grace note, kind of an in medias res spoiler—but I did so before Quint’s famous U.S.S. Indianapolis speech. If you’ve seen the film, you know the scene I’m talking about. If you haven’t … I mean, good God, you haven’t seen Jaws?
Anyway, I’m not sure my son internalized the point of that speech. A bit too much talking for him, and Robert Shaw’s New England brogue was hard for him to muddle out. But I listened to it for the umpteenth time, spellbound as always. And while Quint isn’t a villain, he certainly has the trappings of one: the obsessiveness, the compulsion to act—or act out—based on some quill that dug deep into his brain long ago. Like mad Ahab, there’s nothing he won’t do to catch and kill that shark. If that means putting his life and the life of those on his boat in danger, even when saner or smarter alternatives exist, is to me the quintessential (hah) portrait of backstory as a negative influence, one shading a character towards villainy.
Will I continue to write villains? I can’t see why I’d stop. I truly enjoy it. It’s great to devote a chapter or cutaway scene to the villain’s perspective, walking around in his creepy skin for a few pages. I don’t know what is says about me, but I always look forward to it.
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