Good villains: go bold or go home (Soaps Blog Hop)

My good friend Danielle Ngontang joins the hop today to talk about the importance of good villains and a yummy, convoluted plot. I don't get to watch a lot of foreign soaps (other than those awesome Korean telenovelas), so I appreciate her insights into British soap Hollyoaks. Well, when those British villains go, they go hard.

The DiMeras of Days Of Our Lives, where sociopaths are devilishly handsome

Please stop over to Danielle's blog and share your thoughts about your favorite soap villain.

Building a Better Villain

Thea Atkinson, author of character-driven fiction, features my thoughts on what makes a good villain. For starters, in many cases it's all about how you define a villain:

What is a villain? Various dictionaries give different answers: a deliberate criminal or scoundrel; one blamed for a particular evil or difficulty; a character in a story who opposes a hero. My favorite comes from, of all places, Google: a person guilty or capable of a crime or wickedness. Because, when pushed far enough, I think most of the characters I write for are. Depending on how we define “wicked”, Emily, the main character of my book The Smartest Girl in the Room might be accused of being a villain; certainly, stealing someone’s drugs and punching another in the jaw right before you blackmail them are criminal. But, I submit, Emily isn’t a villain at all: she’s a young woman trying to protect her friends. If her actions are questionable, her motives aren’t.

Which leads me to my first observation:

1. Villainy is about perspective. You, the reader, know immediately that Emily isn’t a villain because you know what led her to her actions. Someone else (say, law enforcement) might not be so forgiving. Emily is trying to protect her best friend Zainab from someone she hasn’t trusted since the first chapter. What she does is ill-advised (breaking the law should be avoided at all costs), but you know why she did it. If someone else did the same things but for a different reason- they really wanted to get their hands on a stash of drugs, for example- your conclusion might be different.

Please check out GonzoInk to read on.