Falling In Love with Your Villain

Every piece of writing advice I’ve ever read says to create a well-rounded villain. Give him goals and motivations. Give him a life, and a believable reason to be ‘the villain.’ So I’m doing that – or at least, trying to the best of my ability.

I’ve worked on my villain with as much depth as my hero and heroine. I know his life story, I know his timeline, I know just about everything about his heart and soul and inner workings. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is, I think I’m falling in love with him (as a character, of course). I realized that if I changed the end of my novel and switched POV, he could very well be the hero of his own story.

Before I got quite to the end of my ‘redemption fantasy,’ I realized that I have a disturbing trend of rooting for the villain. And if not the actual villain, the anti-hero. In Lost, I would have taken Sawyer (arguably the anti-hero) or Ben Linus (arguably the villain for at least a season) over Jack, any day. In Justified, even though I love Raylan (and Timothy Olyphant), I’m always more interested in Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins).

I struggled through Law Abiding Citizen. I was completely uncomfortable through most of the movie, because the darkest, primal part of me couldn’t firmly place Clyde (Gerard Butler’s character) into the role of villain even as he was acting out one of the most gruesome torture scenes I’ve watched. I understood – it made me sick, but I understood.  I’m even getting confused as I type this, because I’m checking out the movie’s IMDB page, and some of the reviews refer to Clyde as the hero (I think that might have more to do with the fact that the movie’s actual hero, Jamie Foxx’s character, wasn’t someone I wanted to root for). It was the last half of the film that, for me, through him into a full-on villain role. Up to a certain point, Clyde could have been redeemable.

Source: IMBD | © The Film Department, Warp Films, and Evil Twin

I started to think about my own story, and the stories that I hope will come after it. Can my villain be redeemed? Maybe I’m just naïve, or overly idealistic, but… Can I write Carved in Stone in a way that will open a door to another novel in which my villain can evolve into the role of the hero (or, at least the anti-hero) of his own story?

Who is your favorite villian (TV, book, movie)? What makes you love him/her?