Is Your Villain Evil Enough? #Writing Advice from Chris Eboch

(From the "Most Viewed" files...)

In previous posts, I've touched on using villains to add drama to your story. Let’s look at this more closely.

Use Your Villain

On the surface, this may sound obvious. The whole point of a villain is to make your hero’s life difficult, right? But I’ve found that it’s sometimes easy to forget about the villain when you’re focused on the hero’s actions. The villain sets something in motion and then disappears.

If you get stuck in your writing and can’t figure out what happens next, try checking in with your villain. Is he just sitting around, waiting for your hero to act? No! He should be actively trying to thwart your hero, plotting new complications and distractions. Realizing this can be the push you need to get past a slow spot.

I found this helpful for my middle grade historical mystery, The Eyes of Pharaoh. The heroine, Seshta, had done everything she could to track down her missing friend. While hunting for him, she had tipped off the bad guy. When I realized that would mean the villain was actively plotting against her, I had the inspiration for several big action scenes leading to the dramatic climax.

Not every book has an actual villain, of course. But if you don’t have one, consider adding one. Even if it’s not necessary for the main plot, a villain could add drama as a subplot.

Example: In the Haunted series, each book’s main plot involves Jon and Tania trying to help the ghosts. In book one, I created a minor secondary character, a fake psychic who calls herself Madam Natasha. In The Riverboat Phantom, Madam Natasha figures out that Tania can see ghosts – something Tania desperately wants to keep secret. Madam Natasha uses the secret as a threat, as she demands that the kids share information about the ghosts and give her credit for helping them. In The Knight in the Shadows, the kids go to war with Madam Natasha, determined to expose her as a fraud. This is still secondary to trying to help the ghost, but it adds challenges and emotional drama.

Whether your villain is involved in the main plot or a subplot, he or she doesn’t have to be a diabolical evil genius. He can be a bully at school, a competitor on a sports team, a nasty boss, or even a manipulative sibling or friend. Whatever the “villain” is, his job is to make your hero’s life miserable.

Exercise: look over your work in progress. Do you have a major villain? If so, is the villain as active as possible, aggressively trying to stop, hurt, or kill your hero?

Do you have secondary characters with villainous tendencies? Can you enhance these, so they cause even more trouble?

If you have no villain at all, brainstorm ways to add one.

Chris Eboch is the author of You Can Write for Children: A Guide to Writing Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers. Order for Kindle, in paperback, or in Large Print paperback. She is also the author of Advanced Plotting.

Chris has published over 50 books for children, including nonfiction and fiction, early reader through teen. Her novels for ages nine and up include The Eyes of Pharaoh, a mystery in ancient Egypt; The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan adventure; The Genie’s Gift, a middle eastern fantasy; and the Haunted series, about kids who travel with a ghost hunter TV show, which starts with The Ghost on the Stairs. Her writing craft books include You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers, and Advanced Plotting.

Learn more at https://chriseboch.com/ or her Amazon page.

More Notes on Building Characters

Here are more notes on building realistic characters, adapted from my “Be Cruel to Your Characters” workshop.

•    Heroes should be realistic, complex and individual. Make sure your heroes have flaws.

•    Heroes should have universal traits (emotions and motives). Readers should identify/sympathize to some extent, so they’ll forgive the main character for their mistakes.

•    Your hero should have the qualities needed to realistically overcome the challenge. Thus, the challenges should be hard enough to be dramatic (we must believe the hero could fail), yet not so great that no real person could solve them.

•    In general, the protagonist should grow and change in the course of the story. She should make errors, and learn something. Heroes need both inner and outer challenges.

•    Protagonists should be active, not passive. They should take risks and responsibility. They may be at least partly responsible for their own problems. They should have to sacrifice something in order to succeed (pride, safety, financial security).

•    Heroes may be willing or unwilling. They may be outcasts, cynics, loners, wounded or reluctant. But at some point they should commit to the challenge. (Harrison Ford often plays this kind of character.) In the The Ghost on the Stairs (Haunted (Aladdin)) Jon just wants to be an ordinary kid, but his sister keeps dragging him into trouble as she tries to help the ghosts. In each book, he has to find his reasons for supporting her.

•    Your hero’s rewards should be proportionate to the challenges.

•    Villains should also be well-rounded. A villain with good qualities and understandable motives creates a more subtle and complex story. Why is the villain nasty? Are they actually evil, or ignorant, or do their goals just conflict with your hero’s?

•    Other major characters also need strengths and weaknesses. Think about their motives, their good qualities and their flaws. All characters should have a mix of traits, good and bad, sometimes working against each other. (In The Well of Sacrifice the main character's brother is so dedicated and heroic that he doesn't question authority, leading to his betrayal by the high priest.). Even the people you love have flaws and irritating quirks. So should your characters.

•    Think of unusual/contradictory qualities. Maybe your tough bully loves animals. Twist the stereotypes. Instead of a sweet, white-haired grandmother who comforts her grandkids with home-baked cookies, how about a grandmother who plays racquetball, is running for mayor, and comforts her grandkids with giant ice cream sundaes at the local diner?

People your story with realistic characters, and you'll bring that world to life. So have fun getting to know the characters you create!

Plotting Advice from Sid Fleishman

To honor the passing of an amazing writer, teacher and man, Sid Fleishman, I thought I'd share some of his wisdom from a workshop he gave at a Los Angeles SCBWI conference some years ago.

“Plotting is the most baffling of the bafflements.”

You need three things for a strong story: (1) a sympathetic character who (2) faces a problem (conflict) and (3) then the main character solves the problem. The reversal, with the villain as the main character who suffers a payback at the end, can be done but is a hard sell. Mr. Fleishman practiced plotting with those three elements, without intending to write the stories.

Once you have an idea, weigh your story – is it big enough for a novel, or simple enough for a picture book? What if you don't seem to have enough for a complete, complex story? “It takes two ideas to make one story idea,” Mr. Fleishman said. “With one stick, you can only throw it to a dog. With two, you can rub them together and make something new—fire.” For example, he took a folklore idea, that if you’re born at midnight, you can see ghosts, and added dumb pirates who killed their captain at the treasure site and then lost the map. The combined ideas became “The Ghost in the Noonday Sun,” where pirates capture a boy born at midnight, hoping he can see their captain's ghost and lead them to the treasure. He combined witchcraft trials and the fear of number 13 to get “The Thirteenth Floor.”

You can then make your story idea more dramatic by upping the ante. “The stronger the story problem, the stronger the story,” Mr. Fleishman said, “(and) the stronger the villain, the stronger the story.” Treasure Island would be forgotten without Long John Silver, so aim for villains who are as interesting and well-rounded as your heroes. You can also use a time lock to add pressure – like in James Bond, the world will end in three hours, unless…. Don't give your main character endless time to solve the problem. Put the pressure on now.

Write your story in scenes to give elements the right emphasis. “Don’t make the mistake of dramatizing scenes that aren’t important,” Mr. Fleishman said. He never used flashbacks – “they’re poisonous” – but dropped in backstory in small nuggets. “Flashbacks stop the story dead in its tracks.”

Finally, Mr. Fleishman shared one piece of advice I've never heard from anyone else. If there’s a hole in the story – some flaw in the logic of the characters’ behavior, for example – point it out and it disappears. He gave an example from one of his McBroom stories, a tall tale where the family is dealing with a mischievous “Hidebehind” that always stays directly behind you. Why wouldn't the family just use a mirror to see the Hidebehind? Mr. Fleishman had them try it, and then state simply, “It’s too clever for tricks like that.” No other explanation needed.

Exercise: Try Sid Fleishman's three-part story development exercise. See if you can come up with (1) a sympathetic character who (2) faces a problem (conflict) and (3) then the main character solves the problem. You might even make lists of characters and problems, and then try mixing and matching them. Perhaps you'll come up with a new idea you want to develop. At the very least, this can help you get a better grasp of how character and plot interact. (See the From Idea to Story posts, Be Cruel to Your Characters and Plot/Character Exercises – links to the lower right.)