So bad they’re good.
In my drop box, cooling for a particular period of time – IE for as long as I can keep my fingers off it – sits a book with a bad guy that took me a while to come to grips with. I’m excited to get back to him and see if he’s as nasty as I think he is. He starts off very nice, drawing you into a false sense of friendship and by the end he has a knife to your neck. What a charming man – how can you not like him.
Wiki commons
While I was wrapping this book up I thought a lot about his role in the novel and his progression. At first he was an all out evil character, there was no doubt. Then he started to take up more room on the page. He would barge in on scenes and his personality came to the fore. I know many of you have experienced this from reading your blogs. I was rather annoyed at first. He was supposed to be translucent but he wouldn’t stop putting on the chameleons outfit. I’m grateful to my evil man for his pushy nature. It would have been run of the mill with out his transformation.
I did some digging into antagonists when he began to take up more space. Funny how the bad guy can be more memorable than the good.
Hannibal Lector – What an amazing character, but not the lead and in many ways oddly likeable.
Vito Corleone- He’s a family man with a thing for horses. He’s utterly compelling.
Annie Wilkes- Every writers nightmare fan. She’s frightening as hell but dedicated.
Travis Bickle- A man with a taxi. He’s a good bad guy, on the side of good but doing wrong. He’s complex.
Alex Forrest- A name that strikes fear into the heart of all bunnies. She was the wrong one night stand for Michael Douglas but she was a fantastic villain.
Regan MacNeil- She coined the spinning head and green vomit so well. She was an innocent girl possessed by evil in one of the greatest horror movies made. Her character is loveable and horrible at once.
I found many more complex antagonists, often more so than the protagonist. They have depth and are show stealers. Mine has walked away with the whole novel.
Have you had a character such as this… one that wouldn’t fit into the box you created and forced themselves onto the pages as something different?
Posted on September 15, 2012, in Writing and tagged antagonists, evil., villans. Bookmark the permalink. 20 Comments.
I'm a single mum to a beautiful little boy and we live in Sydney, Australia, where the water laps at our feet. I'm a physician, a would be writer, and I'm in love with my best friend.
I adore baddies like this. I have one in a book of mine. I thought he was a good guy. He began as the good guy and gradually irritated me (and my heroine) so much that I began to think of him as the baddie (as did she). Before too long, he was truly dreadful and I allowed him full rein to alter the scope of the book radically.
I think baddies who have a gorgeous side are more normal.
I know – rephrase to knew, thank goodness – a con man once. He seemed OK, not my cup of splosh, but OK – until I realised gradually that he was a terrible liar and had another agenda. I met his mother – a very nice, elderly lady – which made me think well, he must be all right. But the little voice in the back of my head said ‘Even con men have mothers’. The voice was right. He was a con man, as we all discovered in the end.
I have to say I did not adore him.
I have a ‘bad’ guy who I thought perhaps shouldn’t always be so mean. But try as I may it’s difficult to have him ever come off nicely. Maybe it’s just the way the story is constructed or maybe he’s just a butt head.
Sometimes the villains seem much more complex to the reader. As a writer it is a struggle to get the fine balance for our hero/heroines to be likeable and real at the same time. Often the really interesting writing comes from bad people doing good things. Or good people doing bad things. I think as a writer you often explore the character of a villain more thoroughly than we do with our heroes, especially when we are fist putting those tentative words onto the paper. Great post Kate.
You’ve got me thinking. My big story has an antagonist who’s too one dimensionally evil. But you’re right. The best bad guys are the ones that you like just a little bit.
I keep changing my mind about how ‘bad’ my bad guy(s) should be. I keep trying to make them a little more likeable–or at least more sympathetic, but they are resisting it. They keep wanting to do terrible deeds for no reason. After a while, I realized it is in my sequel that their history, and thus, the reasons for their badness, will come to light. So, in book one I am keeping them bad-to-the-bone.
I think it probably depends on the genre that you’re writing in, but I like it when the “bad” guys aren’t really “bad”… the ones where you think, “Well, if someone killed both my parents, then took all my money and tried to kill me, I might do the same thing he did.” I like it when you can see where they’re coming from, even though they’re doing the most dastardly things. Awesome!
I’ve learned they have to have either some redeeming qualities or at least trigger some empathy from the reader or they can ruin the overall story. I had a similar problem to legionwriter above. Some helpful beta comments (including from 4amWriter!) set me on a better path.
The character’s more well-rounded now, but still not one of my favorites.
Sometimes you need to be bad to be good.
I haven’t such a character yet but I have locked horns with one in my short stories. Indeed, it’s always a surprise when you believe your character will do this or that, and something sideways happens changing everything…
Great post, Kate.
I just love the ‘bad guy’! Sometimes they are so rich and fuller in character than all the others. I’ve been surprised a few times when people have read my novels and commented on how much the ‘bad guy’ characters got to them. None of my bad guys are inherently evil (because I don’t think this would make them believable) but they have their idiosyncrasies and put you very much on edge.
I love your list – fantastic!
In real life bad guys can often be charming, or have other redeeming qualities, nobody is all bad right? But eventually if they are very bad, the badness can cast a big shadow that falls wide all around them and they become the biggest presence around, it’s unavoidable.
Interesting discussion. Yes–too often ‘bad guys’ become complex and multi-layered thanks to their motivations. As with real people. It’s not so easy to stereotype them. I just finished Matthew Dunn’s debut thriller, Spycatcher. Great ‘bad guy’ that took on likeable traits at the end (though the ‘good guy’ still destroyed him).
The world is leaning away from the Classical version of good and bad. Characters such as Darth Vader draw much attention, because they are villains with good aspects. A good recent example is Gerard Butler’s character in Law Abiding Citizen (which is a very good character study). Also, recall Hitchcock’s Notorius.
My first book has a bad guy that may actually have aspects of goodness, but those aspects are not visible without a sequel. In what I had been writing up until not long ago, the bad guy is pretty starkly bad, and the being he represents is very bad while looking good.
So bad they’re good.
Isn’t that the truth? Or, in the words of Run DMC (I believe): “Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.”
So frequently it’s the villain or semi-villain who steals the story, and I always think of Raskalnikov and Javert, Stavrogin and Mr. Frost. Yes, Mr. Frost, who is one of my favorite villains of all-time.
I think the reason the antagonist is so often more memorable, the rogue more colorful, is that this person is permitted qualities and actual virtues that run contrary to societal mores, which virtues when combined with outright villainy create a far deeper complexity and fascination than that possessed by all these two-dimensional stereotypical protagonists with their garden-variety goodness, so-called.
Hannibal’s hyper-perception and erudition, for instance, his artistic skill and authentic sophistication and refinement, mixed with his utterly repugnant proclivities makes for a far more fascinating character, in my opinion, than even Clarice, whom I love.
Just as there cannot be an up without a down, a hot without a cold, a light without a dark, so there cannot be an evil without a good, and evil, when you get right down to it, can exist only as a parasite of the good. That’s why in my opinion the most effective antagonists are those who paradoxically possesses true virtues alongside their vices.
Where the light is brightest the shadows are deepest.
Said Goethe.
I think everyone loves the bad guy at some point. The best ones at least. The traits of the bad guy are great to come up with and keep everything more interesting.
Actually, most actors prefer to play the villain. They find them more interesting and challenging to play.
I have definitely had characters grow out of what I thought they were. Thinking of all my stories, especially novels, I haven’t had any really evil antagonists. They’re usually either selfish, insane or conflicted. I really should write some truly evil character sometime.
Love the blog! Can’t wait to see what you keep writing. Feel free to check out my blog; just got it going this morning. From one writer to another! Cheers!
Shall do. Thanks.
That’s exactly the character I pictured for the word “villainous” (the theme for the next issue of Halfway Down the Stairs in case you want to turn an excerpt into a short story). Love that image of the chuckling villain rubbing his hands and twisting his mustache. The best characters do surprising things and I think they become more real if they’re somehow a mixture of good and evil, like everyone is.
Well, without our villains, we have not conflict. My favorite bad guy is multi-layered….as you say. We love and hate him or her or it all at the same time. It’s kind of like real life, huh?