Villains, Part 2
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Mar•
15•16
Raymond Burr playing the villain in Hitchcock’s Rear Window
Nothing creates suspense and fear like a potent, evil, will-take- prisoners villain. A good villain is the stuff of nightmares and will haunt the reader long after the story concludes. The best villains create genuine feelings of vulnerability in characters and readers. As in make your blood run cold.
Here’s a round-up of tips for creating your own bad-to-the-bone character.
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Create important, believable motivations. Your villain
This severed head was Bill’s practice run.
shouldn’t just exist to wreck havoc. In Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs the villain/madman Buffalo Bill was denied a sex-change operation so is killing young women and harvesting their skin to create a female body suit (of sorts). As Hannibal Lector said, he covets.
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Villains will never play by the rules.
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Must somehow be despicable.
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Must toss in surprises and twists that we don’t see coming.
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Shape a compelling backstory for him–nothing is more plastic than villains who seem to spring to life for the sake of the story.
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Imbue with an interesting mindset and rationale for his/her behaviors.
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No smirking. Ever.
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Beware of writing ‘truth serum’ scenes. These hokey scenes typically take place toward the end of the story when the villain has captured the hero. Instead of offing his victim, he starts confessing his crimes and embittered tale of woe. Gloating is also sometimes part of this scene. Been done, my friends. To death.
Make it personal. The link between the hero and villain needs to become increasingly personal and intimate as the story goes along.This is Robert DeNiro playing Max Cady in the remake of Cape Fear. The hero in the story put him in prison so now that he’s out he’s stalking the hero’s family and he’s going to make them pay. In fact, he wears a tattoo that says, ‘Vengeance is mine.’
Note: Robert Mitchum was no slouch in the earlier film version. Both men possess a simmering sexuality and smoldering rage in the role. 
Be wary of using mental illness as motive and reason for being evil. It requires a lot of research and believeablity. For example, not all children who underwent trauma or were abused grow up to become abusers.
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Consider giving the villain and hero shared traits and characteristics. Harry Potter and Voldemort are an excellent example. Even their magic wands share some of the same origins.
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Good villains often have minions and followers. These types must be creepy also. The Deatheaters in the Harry Potter series are excellent examples. What would the series be without Snape and Molfoy?
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Don’t write about villains who make obvious mistakes or can be easily outwitted. A common trope is when a villain captures a hero, taunts him or her for a bit, then dashes away to take care of other important business. Meanwhile, he’s made some crucial error so that the hero can escape with little or not much effort. To live another day and take down the villain.
Lord Voldemort
Villains: Color them Dark and Dastardly, part 1
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
23•16
Yesterday I used dastardly twice in the same day. I’m calling it a good day, but then the topic of villains brings about our darkest imaginings and lurid vocabulary terms. On Sunday, I was part of a panel at Wizard World ComicCon talking about villains. The talk was lively, the audience engaged and the minutes flew past.
Here are some ideas to follow up on that discussion. If you’ve been reading or watching dramas for the past 10 or 20 years you likely realize that villains are becoming increasingly complex, nuanced, and fascinating. It’s why old-time Westerns can seem hokey and most John Wayne movies flat. It’s not just Wayne’s one-note delivery–it’s sometimes the cardboard bad guys he’s up against.
Begin with a potent and memorable name. Names are powerful tools. Used correctly, they’ll invisibly support your story, enhancing and underlining your plot and themes. The best villain names have firepower. An unsympathetic villain’s name should reflect menace, coldness, and/or strength. Think Gollum, Darth Vader, the Borg. Not exactly the names you’d find in a baby names book.
Look into the meanings and the history of those who’ve shared the
name, so you can subtly enrich your story by choosing names that are a commentary or secret clue to the action. You just know they’re on the wrong team. S sounds as in Snape suggest something slithery and shivery. The Borg sounds like a collective nightmare. James Moriarty sounds like both a worthy nemesis and a professor. Morgoth sounds evil. You might want to choose hard consonant sounds like K or unusual names like Xykon from The Order of the Stick.
Create a potent and deliberate physical presence. Think of the uber creepy Hannibal Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs films. By the time Agent Clarice Starling creeps to his cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane we’re scared along with her. And there stands Lecter: unnaturally pale, erect, sniffing the air at her scent. An eerie stillness about him. That awful jumpsuit. A liver-eating, Chianti-drinking cannibal.Let the games begin!
Your villain’s first impression on the reader is do or die. 
Understand if your aim is to terrify the reader or foreshadow villainy to come. How does he slide onto the page the first time? In disguise? Raring for a fight? Without warning?
What are your villain’s main personality traits? These traits will create the foundation for your character and will be put to work in the story. They should be evident in every scene and the first time we meet him, her, or it. These traits will be put to work in the story. A criminal mastermind needs to be intelligent, cunning and ruthless. Jadis the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis is beautiful, proud, cruel, and possesses a smoldering rage.
More to come…..because villains create and demonstrate story conflict. Chaos follows in their wake.
Fiction is about the most interesting events in your protagonist’s life
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
20•16
Fiction is about the most difficult and interesting events in a protagonist’s life. Fiction is also designed to push a protagonist into new physical and emotional territory. People read fiction to escape dull meetings, mindless chitchat, and infuriating bureaucracies. Give them a story. A fictional story needs to make the reader feel more alive even it takes place down the block.
Think Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit: he was leading a fairly humdrum life when he’s whisked out to journey through the Shire. On his quest he encounters dangers and faces a dragon guarding a treasure. And he discovers the bolder, brasher parts of himself that he’s quashed. Much more interesting than napping by the fire.
Think Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. She’s working at graduating from Quantico when Jack
The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Blu-ray Screenshot
Crawford, the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, pulls her into a serial killer case. She’s young, untested, and in over her head. The reader worries about her youth and inexperience and the ghoulish killer’s hunger and deviousness. And then and there’s crazy, scary Hannibal Lecter and his riddles and head games.
Think Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: she’s mostly just trying ts help her family survive in dismal District 12 when she’s yanked into a crisis of enormous importance, life-or-death stakes, and national scrutiny. She’ll make deadly enemies, find allies, and also find love under the most vicious, treacherous and inhuman conditions imaginable.
Think the Finch family in To Kill a Mockingbird: Atticus is raising his children without their mother when a kind-hearted black man is wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Life or death stakes, small town racism and ugliness revealed, his children put in real danger.
The circumstances of your story should test your protagonist’s courage, strength and wisdom. It should reveal his or her morality. It should also test his or her limits of endurance. If your story is not the most dramatic, intense, and difficult circumstances in your protagonist’s life, why then are you writing it? If your characters don’t learn something important about themselves often the story isn’t worth telling. Fiction isn’t life; it’s artifice.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Quick Take: Plan for Turbulence
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
20•16
Beginning fiction writers I’ll make this quick: In fiction characters do not get along most of the time. Tension comes from fractious relationships, power struggles, disagreements, love or hate or longing that cannot be expressed. Plan your stories for turbulence, not sweetness. Fiction is a world of unease. I told you I’d be quick.
Advice from the brilliant Margaret Atwood
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
16•16
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a 
story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood.It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood
And her 10 Rules for Writing:
- Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
- If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
- Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
- If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
- Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
- Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
- You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
- You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
- Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
- Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart
Write first drafts on paper…
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
11•16
“Write first drafts on paper. This cancels self-criticism immediately; unless you have truly ugly, banged-up handwriting, everything you write will be visually and stylistically unified by ink. Better still, in an age of Internet-rehab apps like Freedom and SelfControl, nothing approaches the uncluttered nondigital quiet of a page. Take confidence in the fact that much of our canon was composed on paper. But mostly, when you achieve a flow, you’re much less likely to break it on the page than on a screen—you’ll be less tempted to double backwards into revision, checking e-mail, opening a tab. I found this to be true when I wrote the first complete draft of my second novel, The Association of Small Bombs. For years I’d been struggling to make progress, only to lapse back into revision. The minute I committed to paper, the story ribboned forward, inventing itself. I had never felt anything like it.”
—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs (Viking, 2016)
Quick take: Skip the “took a”
Written By: Jessica Morrell
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Feb•
10•16
Like many editors I’ve collected my own gaggle of words and phrases that I find annoying. I can become curmudgeonly if I spot certain words in a manuscript, especially when they’re abused and appear over and over. Now, I realize that taste and preference are highly subjective and chances are I might stand alone on this peeve, but writers you do not need to append “took a” and “take a” to verbs. As in:
Took a step
Took a bite/drink/sip/gulp/swallow
Took a breath
Took a swipe
People and characters can simply step, drink,sip, gulp, swallow, and breathe.
And by the way “took a deep breath” is probably the most abused cliche in writerdom.
Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart and write in the active voice.
