Without wanting to get into current affairs and politics, let’s just say there are a lot of evil people out there; people who are willing (or who actively enjoy) to hurt others in pursuit of their own goals. With the real world so full of bad people, how does a writer craft a villain?

You might think it would be easy since there’s a lot of raw material to act as inspiration out there. But the thing about a fictional villain is that they serve functions in a story that aren’t always obvious in real life. (Real life is so muddled).

To identify, or to craft, a villain you have to begin a step earlier. You have to identify the moral code of the novel’s protagonist. The villain of the story is the character who violates that code. The hero’s response to the violation is part of the impetus of the novel. This is easy to see in a mystery novel. The villain murders someone and the hero won’t rest until the villain is caught.

However, the tense relationship between the hero and the villain doesn’t play out in a vacuum. The society the hero and villain belong to also has a moral code. This is one of the things that makes an antihero interesting. They are often society’s outcasts. Sometimes the villain is celebrated by society. Ooh, so successful and rich. In challenging the villain, the hero attacks society’s perception of itself and its moral character. The backlash (against the hero) is often fast and fierce in such cases.

[As a side note, the Drifter trope intrigues me. Don’t be surprised if it inspires a new series next year.]

The villain reveals the shadow side of a novel’s society.

The villain can also represent the life the hero rejects. In this narrative, the villain is who the hero refuses to be. The sympathetic bond of possibilities rejected that plays between hero and villain is dramatically expressed in the games which Moriarty teases Sherlock with.

A villain is a powerful tool for an author.

The dangerous allure of evil can unbalance a novel by having the villain appeal too strongly to the reader. This happens when the villain sees the costs of their actions more clearly than the hero does, and accepts them. The hero’s discernment of good and evil, and willingness to self-sacrifice, must be more compelling than the villain’s story of how the world works. Because in the end, the villain and the hero exist to tell two different stories of how to live.

Shangri-La Spell has a villain ready to sacrifice thousands of people to gain eternal youth in his private paradise. What price do we pay for hiding from our fears?