IT’S GOOD TO BE BAD

“I like gray characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.”
—George R. R. Martin

Heroes andvillains–these terms have less currency today than in years past, since most fiction authors tend to think of characters as a mix of good and bad, not just plain good or bad. In other words, if you’re writing modern fiction and creating a protagonist or antagonist, don’t make your protagonist too good, or your antagonist too bad.

Two questions:

1. If so, does this rule out the 100-proof villain of yore, who seems to made of pure, unadulterated evil?
2. What is the role/function of the villain – at whatever proof?

According to Susan Neville, short story writer and scholar at Butler University, without the villain, there is no story. “Every system has a hairline crack (every marriage, every institution, every friendship), and the villain takes advantage by inserting himself into that crack and breaking the world apart,” she says. “The Garden of Eden would go on and on and on in the same old way without the snake.”

But what if you want to write a story from the snake’s point of view? How “anti” can an anti-hero really be in modern literature? Or, if you do intend to write a proper villain to go toe to toe with your protagonist, how much must we dilute our “bad guy” to make him realistic instead of the moustache-twirling villain of centuries past? We turned to several experts to probe these questions and more.

Creating a villain

First off, how much does genre affect the antagonist you’re developing? As DeWitt Henry, founder of and a prize-winning fiction writer, states, “In melodrama, there’s no issue. The hero/protagonist defeats the villain/antagonist,