Food for Thought
As you think about your protagonist, ask yourself some basic questions:
What type of protagonist are you writing and why (hero, antihero, villain)?
Why do they do what they do? For example, why is she a cop? Why is he a psychiatrist? Don’t limit this question to career choice, but ask it every time the character makes a decision, especially if the decision has consequences (good or bad or both). Why does your protagonist make that decision? This will help you understand them better. (Remember: action conveys character!)
Consider how the protagonist interacts with people (friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, strangers). Does she treat one group differently than another? Why?
What is your protagonist’s primary flaw? How is that flaw a weakness? How is that flaw also a strength? Does your character see this as a flaw, and if so, do they want to fix it?
What is your protagonist’s primary strength? How is that strength also a weakness? How does that strength impact the story, both good and bad?
Great writing and storytelling draw in your readers, but a compelling protagonist keeps them turning the page.
STEPHANIE KAY BENDEL
Whenever I run into a nagging problem of plotting or motivation that won’t go away, I find that sleeping on it helps, particularly when I follow a certain path. First, I try to define the problem in a sentence, such as “Why doesn’t Amanda call the police right away?” or “Why does Ben resent his son so much?” I find that when I’m awake, such questions often inspire answers that are unsatisfying and predictable. Letting my subconscious solve the problem often works for me.
The Villain of the Piece
Your hero in reverse: the forces that create a vivid villain.
T. JEFFERSON PARKER
Villains, whether real or fictional, don’t just pop up into our imaginations. They are products of specific times and places, as are the stories and headlines in which they appear. They are shaped by history and the hard facts of time and geography.
So, it’s the author’s job to understand the time and place in which the story unfolds, which, dauntingly, can be any time and any place. You as a writer have—just for starters—all of planet Earth from which to choose your beat and commence your assignment. Such freedom can be intimidating. Should I tell a story about pre-Columbian Mesoamerica or 1930s Berlin? Stone Age Australia or twenty-first-century San Diego? These are weighty questions for anyone beginning a journey that may easily take years to complete. But once you’ve decided on the where and when, the what can begin to grow, and with that, your villain can be born. Time and place inform character.
Which means that a villain reacts to the pressures that are forming them, as does an oak tree or a car tire or a volcano. In my first published book I wrote about a young artist—a painter—framed for and convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Of course, he gets out of prison and proceeds to set things right. His notion of setting things right is extreme and vivid, always good qualities in a villain.
This Newton-like law of fictional action and reaction keeps you, the author, true to your villain. Because you understand the forces that have shaped them, you can accurately create their reactions. Which leads to another action—often by a protagonist—thus continuing the physics-like chain of events that is the story.
* * *
Probing a little deeper, I see two types of villain: the private and the public. The private ones seek no acknowledgment for their deeds (Raskolnikov, Hannibal Lecter, Edgar Allan Poe’s guilt-riddled murderers). In fact, they shun the spotlight and avoid detection. The public villains, on the other hand (Richard III, the Joker, terrorists) proclaim themselves, trumpet their wickedness, and revel in the calamity.
Both kinds of villain can work in fiction, sometimes beautifully, as the examples cited above show. But whether private or public, your antagonist must absolutely have two things: a clearly motivated program, and specific, detailed results. All the better if their programs are diabolically clever and utterly within their skills. And better yet if their results are specific and horrendous.
I’ve written plenty of both kinds of villains. Back in the eighties, when I began to be published, the serial killer was in vogue. Thomas Harris had given us a “new” kind of private villain—maybe the apex of the type. The serial killer entered us like a virus. And is still very much inside us today.
For a few years I resisted, but finally, inspired by this fresh villainy, I built three novels around three very private psychosexual killers. They were good enough crime novels—credible, atmospheric, and very, very dark. I wrote hard. I wrote those three books with the same intention with which I write all my novels—for each to be better than the last. I do remember feeling somehow infected by those villains by the end of my workday. After so much time inside the heads of these characters I needed a brisk physical workout or bike ride, a hot shower, and a strong drink. Sometimes, enough really is enough. I asked myself: Do we need more villains like these? Is there more I should be doing? Well—no and yes. And that was the end of my serial killer days.
Some rich years followed. California Girl, Silent Joe, the Merci Rayborn series—all featured private villains of a less psychopathic variety, including a deceitful U.S. congressman; a young, conscience-less Little Saigon gangster; a Russian strongman out strictly for profit in the United States; a brutal husband covering up the deeds of his even more brutal wife.
Then came a series of private villains in my Charlie Hood books: an MS-13 henchman; a corrupt young sheriff’s deputy; a violent young man with a nearly uncontrollable temper. Again, these were men who were operating on a strictly personal, private level. They were not political or religious extremists. Each one had a different birthplace, upbringing, and history.
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You can begin writing a novel with only a partially worked-up villain, so long as you are able to convincingly create the character as you go. Deadline pressure has its upside. As long as you have solid basics on this character, you can trust your imagination and skill to put the right words in her mouth and give her appropriate actions and reactions—back to that Newtonian push-pull that, when applied to fiction, gives a novel tensile strength and logic. When you come to a scene in which your villain appears, picture her walking into it as an actor would, entering the stage. She strides in. She sizes up the competition. Now she only has to say and do what would spring naturally and convincingly from her character as you understand it so far. Listen for her voice. Try to capture it. If you fail, lean into that delete key, then try again. And again. You are creating on the spot. When you understand your villain wholly, her authentic words will come. You’ll know them when you hear them.
Lately I’ve been hatching public villains again, likely in response to our publicity-mad, social media–driven times. Not many secrets out there, and not many people who even want secrets. Not even the bad guys. So I’ve chosen villains such as a celebrity torturer who writes a book about his black-site “enhanced interrogation techniques”; a native-born terrorist who publicly pledges himself to Islamic State; a white supremacist sect that is planning to infect thousands of U.S. Muslims with a deadly poison; and American anarchists who perform their violence live on television and post it on Facebook. I haven’t had to dig very deep to find these players and to understand what makes them tick: they do most of my work for me. Just read your papers and watch your news and follow your feeds and they’ll tell you exactly who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish.
These public villains aren’t as devious and aberrant as the old-fashioned thrill killers but what they lack in sullen creepiness they make up for in scope and volume: mass murders, explosives, hijackings. And don’t forget motive, which is why they’ve gone public in the first place: religion, race, cultural grievance, national advancement, political bias. They represent the time and place in which we live.
* * *
Private or public, villains are inverted heroes. Start wi
th an upright character, then replace generosity, selflessness, honesty, and bravery with greed, narcissism, amorality, and cowardice. As noted throughout, most villains are reflections of their time and place. And reflections are reversals. You look at yourself in that mirror, or in the blacked-out window of a passing limo, or in that still, clear pool of a trout stream, and you see your perfect opposite. Touch your right ear, and the person in the mirror touches their left ear. That’s why villains—optically faithful inversions of the good—can be, in real life, very hard to spot. Until it’s too late.
A good fictional villain should be not only clearly drawn, motivated, and capable, but fun. And by “fun,” I mean steeped in the flamboyant colors of ego and self-delusion into which a villain—like a hummingbird seen in the right light at the right time—can burst with such sudden luminosity. Let your villain surprise, terrify, disgust, and infuriate your audience. Let the character be pitied, defeated, obliterated. That’s part of why people are reading your story in the first place. Don’t be squeamish. Leave some blood on the keyboard. Just enough.
If the villain of your piece is revealed late in the book, then keeping them compelling but obscured until the end can be very tricky. Which is why writing a good villain requires more legerdemain and is often harder than writing a good protagonist. The answer to this is to give your bad actor a reason to be in the story other than merely as a suspect. Easier said than done, but when it’s done well, you’ll get gasps of surprise and recognition when your villain steps into the light.
For those of you who don’t outline your stories, there’s plenty to be said for allowing your villain—and the other dramatis personae—to develop over the course of the writing. This not only allows you the time and freedom to create the best villain, it also allows the story itself to change, evolve, and improve as you create it. In this sense, your novel is a living and breathing thing, and you must not only give it life but tend to its needs and raise it up to be the best story it can be. I often don’t outline, or do so only minimally and with many disclaimers. Way back in my third book, Pacific Beat (1991), I became fascinated by a character who jumped into my mind about a third of the way through the outline-less manuscript. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why he was there or what he was doing. More important, I was aware at the end of the first draft that this novel was really not working. So I wrote it again. And halfway through, I saw that this character—one Horton Goins, a weird but apparently harmless young man—wasn’t just essential to the book, he was the key to why the story had fallen flat. I’d failed to see him clearly until then. Yes, I’d subconsciously understood that Horton was valuable all along, it just took me a few months and another draft to see how.
Another reason why the villains are hard to write is because to understand them, you as a writer need to enter their dark interiors and help them execute their often bloody plans. I mentioned earlier the desire for exercise, a hot shower, and a strong drink after writing those serial killer novels. Fine and good, but if you really want to get to the core of the wickedness/evil/darkness of your bad guy, you might have to get your psyche dirtier than sweat, water, and alcohol can cleanse.
For my 2017 thriller, The Room of White Fire, I dug about as deep as a civilian could get into the subject of U.S. torture chambers (black-site prisons) during our “war on terror.” I started with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on torture, courtesy of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office (a 549-page synopsis of the full 6,700-page report, which is still classified). I read accounts of torturers and the tortured, of guards and other observers, watched video simulations of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and followed at some distance the trials of suspected terrorists (still ongoing). I was sickened by the torture, ashamed of my government for using it, angered that its hideous existence had been so arrogantly obscured for so long, disgusted that two American privateers had profited handsomely for running the prisons (making $80 million by most estimates, plus bonuses for “useful intelligence”). That fury is why I wrote the novel. When I finally crossed the finish line on it, I took a deep breath and looked forward to more chipper subjects. Of course, a book tour came along and I found myself trying my best to interest my audiences in the horrors I’d found, and also trying my best to sell torture as entertainment. Where does that leave me in the cast of players in this very dark American drama? I’m not sure.
My literary amigos and I go back and forth on this. We know we traffic in violence and heartless behavior. We ride and write on the backs of victims. We suspect that our fictional appropriations of the world’s pain do little to assuage it. Worse, we wonder if we might just be feeding the worst in human nature by putting it center stage. Do we inspire heartless violence by portraying it?
So choose your villains carefully. They’re as much a part of you as your heroes, and like your heroes, they will never go away once that book of yours hits the shelves.
A final thought on the villains, both fictional and real: They are to be respected and thanked, because they willingly do what the rest of us will not do. They shoulder the burden of wickedness so that the upright can pursue better things. They bring the dark into which we carry the fire.
KRIS NERI
Before you start writing a mystery, work out the villain’s behind-the-scenes actions: how they commit the crime, how they set up an alibi or direct suspicion to someone else, as well as how they counter the protagonist’s actions as the novel progresses. Though the villain’s identity is typically kept secret until near the end of the mystery, the writer should be able to switch from on-the-page mode to behind-the-scenes mode to avoid plot holes. You also need to know where the villain is at all times. You can’t put them off somewhere committing a second murder when they’re also in full view of the protagonist (and the reader) in on-the-page mode.
Supporting Characters
The chorus of voices that backs up your protagonist.
CRAIG JOHNSON
An analogy I use when talking about one of the more important aspects of writing a novel is that its construction is akin to a choral group, in that all those voices should be there for a specific purpose. If you make the mistake of using the wrong voice or eliminating it altogether, the whole thing can get out of tune pretty quick.
We all love the idea of sitting at the keyboard and composing witty dialogue and breathtaking descriptions, but first comes the hard work of outfitting a novel for success, an outline that affords you the ability to find a balance and the voices that will allow you to explore the meaning and message of your book.
I’ve told students before, and I don’t think it can be emphasized enough, that you only get to describe a character once in a book, but they speak throughout it, so the individuality of voice becomes imperative, perhaps even more so for supporting characters, owing to their limited appearances.
Support characters aren’t there simply to provide a background but rather are there to advance the plot and to accentuate the passions, desires, tragedies, and triumphs of your writing. No man is an island, and no character can be, either. One character can’t carry the weight of the world, nor should they, so the supporting characters are important in showing a diversity not only of character but of thought. As an example, take your antagonists—there is an old Cheyenne proverb that says you can judge a man by his enemies, and I think there’s a lot to be said for using that formula while writing. The bad guy has to be as fully developed as the hero, or we haven’t provided enough of a challenge to bother writing a novel in the first place. After all, Richard III doesn’t think he’s one of those bad guys, just maligned and deeply misunderstood.
One has to remember, support characters (villains included) may be walk-ons in your protagonist’s story, but in their own story, they’re the star.
When I wrote my first novel, The Cold Dish, I was fortunate enough to stumble onto not only a protagonist but an ensemble of characters who allowed me the opportunity to go beyond one novel into a co
ntinuing series. I think part of the success of the books came from that ensemble, a collection of characters varied enough to carry some of the weight that my protagonist, Sheriff Walt Longmire, couldn’t carry alone.
It was a risky proposition writing a clinically depressed protagonist, simply because the book could become, well, depressing. I thought about how the voice of the books would be that of the sheriff and that there would likely be a propensity of masculinity, and decided I needed to find some way to balance that out with some strong female characters. One of the things that saved the novel was surrounding the sheriff with what I’ve referred to as a pride of lionesses, a ring of characters who would support the main narrator in spite of himself.
The first was Ruby, Walt’s dispatcher and the person responsible for the structure as he navigates his day-to-day life. She became a sounding board for Walt and provides a physical road map for him by way of the Post-its she leaves on his office doorjamb. Next was Dorothy, the owner of the Busy Bee Café, because if left to his own devices Walt was likely to starve to death. Dorothy also provides a conduit to the community. Ask any small-town cop or deputy where to get information and they’ll tell you the cafés and bars, because that’s where people talk.
The next was Walt’s daughter, who was introduced in the first novel only through the medium of phone messages, reaffirming the isolation that Walt had felt since the death of his wife. She was also the last lifeline to the humanity he still possessed.
Then there’s Victoria Moretti, Walt’s undersheriff, a transplant from Philadelphia who provides a more specific counterpoint to the sheriff. I figured that Walt’s strengths in law enforcement would be more socially oriented, with a knowledge of the people in his county and their histories. Vic, having graduated from the fifth-largest police academy in the country, would be infinitely more knowledgeable in the fields of forensic science, DNA, ballistics, and so forth. She would be with him on a daily basis, providing information about the things he wasn’t acquainted with. She would also give the story what I refer to as the introduction of the innocent, the person not acquainted with the highly contextualized environment. I knew that for the book to be a success, it was going to have to appeal to more than just the people in Wyoming (although sales of half a million doesn’t sound bad, if every resident bought a copy…). Most of the readers would be from somewhere else, so I was going to have to afford them a character as an access point to a possibly alien culture, which Vic provided.
How to Write a Mystery Page 19