Guest Post...Welcome Joann Buchanan
Fellow World Castle writer, Joann Buchanan, is launching her second book, THE KISS, in her Children of Nox series. She's a fun, sassy lady I can gratefully call a friend. And she's here today to talk bad guys...and how to handle them...at least in the literary sense!*And be sure to follow Joann on Facebook by clicking here or her blog by clicking here!
Now...take it away Joann!
What
makes a villain real? What makes you love to hate him and want to hug him at
the same time? A two dimensional villain has no depth. We get they are the bad
guy and they have no redeeming qualities. The fun villains to read are those
who have a certain vulnerability in them. It’s what makes us love Magneto,
cheer for the bank robbers in Ocean’s Eleven and even why we all love to read
about vampires, werewolves and things that go bump in the night. So what makes
a villain fun to read?
For me, it’s all about those simple redeeming qualities all
good bad guys have. In I Am Wolf, the bad guy was Ralph. He was a schizophrenic
poacher who was bit and from there exploded with evil. What made him fun to
write was that his hallucination was a bimbo named Gracie. He is a tragic
villain who was abused as a child and never really had any real love in his
life. In turn he didn’t know how to love or how to give it. Is that redeeming?
No, but it provides an understanding into his psyche. It allows the reader to
understand why he is who he is.
What about that so called redeeming quality? In I Am Wolf he
wanted to save the world from “aliens” he was sure invaded the planet. Yes,
it’s funny but at the same time, he had a heart and every desire to call out
what he thought were aliens. He went about it the wrong way, but he did try.
True villains are just as read as you and I. They may not
all have the capacity to love, but they do have that one thing they care about
the most and that’s what makes them real.
In The
Kiss, the villain is Ash, a demon who has been caged under a mountain for
centuries. His whole motivation is to escape his cage and get revenge on those
who trapped him and those who killed his newborn son. Some would say, “Demons
can’t love” and they would be right. However, obsession, something that is
often mistaken for love in the twisted minds of our villains—is something they
can feel. So there in rests his redeeming quality. The actions of a villain are
what make him a villain. They are the ones who don’t care who they hurt. They
are also the fun ones to write because we get to do things we have never been
able to do out of our own morality.
Villains live on a different moral compass. They are the
ones who do things we would all love to do. They are the ones who say what we,
the morally in control, wish we could say. Think about this, how many of you
have longed to tell your boss they are stupid idiots who don’t know their heads
from a hole in the wall? How many have wanted to tell your friends the clothes
they wear suck and most people view them as a joke? How many of you have wanted
to walk up to a parent on the playground and say control your child or I will?
All of us have thought things we have never said.
A villain will say and do those things without giving it
much thought. That’s what makes them fun to write and fun to read. We love to
cheer when the “asshole” is trampled by life. We love to hate that guy. We love
to hate the one who cheats on the character we love the most. We also love to
see that villain get what they deserve.
In The Kiss, the other bad guy is a girl. How many of us
have had our boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, cheat on us? How many of
us hated the person they cheated with more than we hated the one we loved? So
in something like this, who is the villain? Is it the cheating lover or the one
he’s cheating with? What if the villain thinks what they are doing is right?
Now how does that make you feel?
The truth is, any villain worth reading is going to make us
think. He or she is going to make us want to hate them even when we understand
them. We all want to see him or her get what’s coming to them because we can
relate to the wrongs they are doing.
There was a Mel Gibson film called Payback in which he plays
a bad guy. What made us cheer for him was his simple directness. All he wanted
was his money back. The people he was going after were worse than he was, so we
cheered for his character. The depth of the character was cool because we knew
we were cheering for a bad guy and that didn’t matter. A good villain will make
you feel something for him. In The Kiss, Cleo is such a person I hope you will
love to hate but feel for at the same time. She is the bad guy, or girl I
should say. She is also being manipulated by an evil. So does that make her bad
or do you feel for her? In the end, I felt sorry for her. That doesn’t mean I
make it easy on her. She will ultimately get what’s coming to her. Just not the
way you think.
The cool thing about writing a villain is it allows us to
all touch the dark side. I mean really when you think about it, we all love to
be scared, that’s why we go to horror movies. We all like to see Karma take
action on the person we love to hate. And we all want without a doubt, for that
person to make us feel something for them, no matter the outcome.
What about emotions and villains? Can they love, laugh or
even feel joy? For me the answer is yes and that’s what makes them real.
Emotions play an even more intricate roll in creating a good bad guy. They are
the heart of what makes them tick. They have a twisted moral compass and that’s
what makes them more real than some of the good guys in books. No one person is
perfect. The more flawed a villain has, combined with a redeeming quality, the
more likely he or she will be real to the reader.
That’s my take on villains. They are complex beings who are
fun to write. I can’t wait to hear what people think of Cleo. She, the
vulnerable twisted soul who makes life a living hell for the Youngling Pack,
was fun to manipulate into doing another’s bidding. Will you feel sorry for her
or will you just hate her? That is something I’m dying to find out.
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