Things Your English Teacher Won't Tell You

Bad Guys Need Motivation, Too

I will admit it, villains are more fun to create than heroes. Ask almost any writer and they will tell you the same thing. It’s more fun to create antagonists than it is coming up with interesting protagonists. Why? For one thing, your villains can do things most of us might think about, but would never act on.

“See that car that just cut me off in traffic? If I had a laser beam on my car I would vaporize them in a heartbeat!” Of course, I wouldn’t vaporize them, and you probably wouldn’t vaporize them, but your villain? Yeah, that car is toast!

Another thing is that villains, especially in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, tend to have power, whether supernatural or political, beyond the realm of most people. And power like that is attractive, especially in terms of what it means to your story. Small wonder villains are more fun to write.

But, that doesn’t mean that they don’t need motivation. All antagonists, with one glaring exception, need a reason to act the way they do.

That one exception, by the way, is Nature. A sailor lost at sea is fighting against time and the weather and the sea itself, but natural causes don’t need any motivation beyond the simple fact that they exist. The crew of a spaceship racing to divert a planet killing asteroid or the physician in a medieval village working frantically to save his neighbors from a plague are fighting an enemy that is as uncaring as it is deadly. Nature simply is nature.

But, what about the rest? What possible motivation can someone have to be evil? Well, here’s a little secret: no one, not in real life or in fiction, ever thinks of themselves as the villain. We are all convinced that we are the protagonist in our personal stories, even if that makes us the bad guy in someone else’s tale. The reasons are many, but generally fall into two broad categories. Villains who are convinced that they are doing bad things for a good cause, and villains who think of themselves as victims. For these people, the end always justifies the means. A king who has people tortured and killed to protect his own power justifies it by telling themselves they are doing what’s best for their kingdom, or at least for their throne. A thief that robs and kills is convinced that they have no other choice, that the odds are so stacked against them they deserve to take what they can. After all, in their minds, everyone else has more than they do, why shouldn’t they get their share? They are the real victims in life and, just like the King, the end justifies the means in their conscience.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t feel bad about what they are doing. Very often the antagonist shows massive amounts of remorse for their actions, but they keep doing it anyway. Or, often because of what your protagonist does, they see the error of their ways and change. But, even if they evolve from demons into angels, they will go to their graves believing they were justified.

There is one other category: the antagonist who is mentally ill or emotionally incapable of differentiating wrong from right. They are out there, from serial killers to hit men to corrupt world leaders, the men and women who either revel in other’s pain or simply don’t care that they destroy lives. However, if a character is insane, or goes insane through the course of the story (Yeah, King Lear, we’re looking at you!) it needs to be established early in the story that something is wrong. You can’t simply spring it on the audience in the last ten pages that they were coo-coo for Cocopuffs. And if your antagonist is a true sociopath who has zero empathy for the people they harm, that also needs to be shown, the earlier in the plot the better. In both their cases their motivation is their insanity.

Can an antagonist be a good person? Of course, just as a bad person can be a hero. Good people fight each other every moment of every day, both sides convinced they are doing the right thing. Your job, as a writer, is to show why they are fighting, and more importantly, why it should matter to your readers.