How to have a great villain for your novel
What makes them work. how you can sell your villain. what the reader looks for in a villain.
The main rule to follow when writing a novel is to make your villain bigger and stronger than your hero. The reader will fear for your hero.
If your villain is small and weak the reader will not be intimidated by them and not care to finish reading your book. There is no draw, no desire to see how it will end.
In this blog, we will be looking at How to have a great villain for your novel..
HOW TO HAVE A GREAT VILLAIN FOR YOUR NOVEL
Table of Contents
HAVE the reader care for the hero and fear the villain and you’ll have a successful novel. but in the end, the villain sells the novel.
THE villain can be anything. it can be another human, alien, weather, inner struggles of the mind, family, ghosts. Just make sure to make your villain menacing. A weak villain is a weak novel. The reader has to fear the villain to read on. The alien in the movie “Alien” is not cute or lovable. It’s manacling and stronger than the humans. No matter what the humans do the villain is one step ahead. Throughout the movie, the viewer is feeling stress. Wondering what the alien will do next. If the alien was wimpy the movie would lose all appeal.
MAKE THEM PHYSICALLY BIGGER THAN THE HERO
In fact, you can make the villain physically bigger than your hero. The idea of your villain looking stronger will make your reader fear for the hero in case a fight were to occur. If your villain is small and weak and the hero bigger and stronger you will not feel any need to read on. We read the fastest when feeling stress for the hero.
In the movie “Jaws” the shark is 25 foot long with 3 tonnes on him. making us fear the shark physically. In reality, a great white grows to about 12 to 14 feet. But having a 25-foot one makes it scarier. There are countless sharks, in fact, there are 400 species, only a handful are dangerous to man. But do we really want to see a bull or tiger shark in “Jaws?” by having it a Great White and massive it makes us fear for the humans on the boat.
THE AUDIENCE FEARED JASON
Jason from “Friday the 13th” is massive in height and body size making the viewer fear him. when he swings a machete the audience feels fear. If Jason was only 5 foot the audience would not care about him.
In “Star Wars” Darth Vader was big and strong with a sword, he looked intimidating with his helmet on. If he were a tiny little guy with a Mickey Mouse voice the audience would laugh. In fact, the actual voice of the actor playing Darth Vader had to be replaced with another simply because the actual voice was not strong enough. It was something to be laughed at.
EVERYONE WONDERED WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
In “The Avengers” Thanos was big, strong, and smart. We wondered how the good guys were going to stop him. Everyone believed the Hulk would stop him in the climax of the movie, but the writers had Thanos stop the Hulk right at the very start of the movie, leaving the viewer to wonder what would happen next. If Thanos was weak and dumb the movie would not have done as well.
Make your villain smart. In fact, make them smarter than the hero. Sherlock Holmes’s main villain is Professor James Moriarty. Notice how he’s a professor. Nicked named the “Napoleon of crime”. We know how smart Sherlock Holmes is, so having a weak villain is pointless. But someone who’s his equal makes the reader turn the page to see how on earth Sherlock will stop someone who’s a genius.
DO NOT HAVE THEM “LOOK” EVIL
Another important thing to remember is do not have your villain look “evil”. With evil-looking narrow eyes, a cold smile, wearing all black, and a narrow thin mustache, this is so cliche. The best villains blend in. Think of Norman Bates in “Psycho.” The fact he looks like he could be your neighbor is creepy. The best villains smile, laugh, are charismatic, smart, can outsmart you with their charm.
Another important fact is to make sure your villain believes themselves to be good. They have reasons for what they’re doing. They have goals. They’re not bad for the sake of being bad, that will only lead to the reader not understanding your villains’ actions. They will only come across as fake and two-dimensional. leaving the reader to close the book. When the villain has reasons it makes them more human, more complex. In a scary way the viewer might even agree with the villain.
HAVING THE GOOD GUY AND BAD GUY INTERACT
If possible try to have the hero and the villain interact with each other throughout the novel. look at movies like “Die Hard.” Hans Gruber and John McCaine for forever talking to each other throughout the movie. In “Harry Potter” Harry and Voldemort talk to each other in every movie. Making the relationship between the good and bad mean something. They’re not just strangers battling at the end.
The villain is the opposite to the hero, the mirror opposite. They mean something to each other. The hero of your story is on a journey. In search of something that is missing from their life, but they don’t know it. The hero must face obstacles along the way to reach the final confrontation with the head villain. But the villain is not just “anyone.” The villain represents the darker side of the hero. Something within the subconscious the hero is not dealing with. Something that has to be overcome within the hero for the hero to return to their real-life a better person.
GIVE YOUR VILLAIN A GOAL
You don’t want the villain to be made up on the spot, lacking any meaning. Or the novel will lack something. To create a great villain you need to know your hero. Know who they are and what they lack. What they’re afraid of. That becomes your villain. Turn that unknown fear into a face. Give your villain a goal. Now the hero has to stop the villain but do so by overcoming the dark side within their own conscious.
If your hero believes in peace your villain should believe in war. If your hero believes in equality your villain should be driven by greed. This will make the hero have to confront the villain to see if they truly believe in what they say in order to defeat the villain.
CARL JUNG’S SHADOW
Carl Jung spoke of the shadow within all man. the dark side of ourselves. The side we are afraid of looking at. This is where your villain comes from. Novel writing is all about psychology. The study of the mind.
Readers read in order to learn. They want to learn about themselves. By reading how a villain and hero battle we see insights into ourselves. We relate to the hero and see ourselves in the villain. By reading how the villain was defeated we learn how to defeat the villain within ourselves.
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