Are you tired of not knowing exactly how to make your villain believable and despicable?
It’s a common problem, but one that has a solution.
Write a villain that is so despicable, so loathed, that your readers will be looking for them to lose or mad at you if you don’t write their downfall before the story is ended.
# 2 Tips How to Write a Villain Readers Truly Hate: Make them love power over all else
Make them addicted to power and willing to do anything to get it.
Make their motivation power, greed, and wealth.
They can love money or weapons. They can be trying to gather armies. Whatever it may be, write them attacking the innocent, the weak, and the vulnerable to acquire their power and wealth.
They are willing to do whatever it takes to get what they want and they don’t feel bad at all.
# 3 Tips How to Write a Villain Readers Truly Hate: Make them think that they are in the right about their evil choices
A villain that is going to be hated is going to feel no remorse for their evil acts.
And not only should they be completely remorseless about what they have done they should feel completely right and justified about doing it.
Example: If they attack a helpless village with their troops, they should feel like the worthless village deserved it for betraying them for wanting to be “disloyal” and wanting to be free of their tyrannical reign.
They are going to need to be cold and any interaction they have with any other person needs to have them show that they are relentless. They need to do several acts of violent behavior that makes them hateable. One act of violence is probably not enough to be believable.
To be believable our reader needs to see them carry out cruel acts a couple of times over.
# 4 Tips How to Write a Villain Readers Truly Hate: They should be completely irrational.
Your villain should be irrational. People around them should try to tell them how wrong they are.
It could be a spouse or a parent or sibling of the villain that tries to tell them how wrong they are and how irrational they are being.
After an encounter like this, the villain should throw them into prison or have them killed or beaten because of disloyalty and give them a line like “I loved you. I never thought you would betray me too.”
Look for inspiration to create your most hated villain.
Not all stories need a BIG BAD Villain. Some Antagonists can be non-human or a time ticking time bomb, but if you are creating a villain for your story then you are going to choose between a few different arc types.
Your villain can be the type that believes with all their heart that what they are doing is for the “greater good.”
They could also be the type of villain that is a “victim” of their own circumstances. They may have had a tragic upbringing that made them feel as though their evil choices are completely justified or they are acts of revenge or acting out in reaction to their terrible situation.
Another alternative would be making a villain that people love to hate, the PURE EVIL Villain.
# 1 Tips How to Write Villains You Love to Hate: The pure evil villain has terrible motives.
The villain that people love to hate is pure evil and their motives are strictly to do harm to others for mostly selfish motives.
Readers can’t stand a villain that wants evil to happen on the grounds of selfish personal greed.
Write them as a villain that has selfish motives and is willing to do anything to get what they want and that they don’t care about anyone but themselves. They don’t even care about those that are “close” to them or people that truly care about them.
How to write the ultimate climactic moment of your story
As storytellers, we know that every great story has a great climax.
Stories have many problems that help keep our readers interested throughout our story, but there is a moment that our readers are being lead to and if that moment, that one big moment is a big let down then that is what they will remember and think about and talk about as they walk away from your story.
So how do we capture this moment for them?
How do we make sure that this moment captures their attention and meets their expectations?
Let’s think about some ideas that will help make the climactic moment of your story all it can be for your readers.
It is the tipping point of our stories so let’s try to make it everything it can be.
# 5 How to Write the Ultimate Climax of Your Story:Use lies your character believes.
A great way to have your character end up in a really bad problem is by having them believe lies.
These can be lies they tell themselves.
These can be lies they believe from others.
Have your character believe these lies and live by them for enough time that when they find out that they are lies that it is utterly devastating to them.
The deeper the lies go, the better.
The more consequences that come about because they believed the lies the better.
Make sure that the lies affect a long term part of their life.
Play off of the character’s emotions by allowing other characters to know the truth while your main character does not.
And make sure the lies and the consequences are believable.
Hope this helps! Now get out there and write something!
We need our characters to be in such a dark place that our reader believes it.
Our reader needs to be concerned enough about their bleak predicament that they are curious enough to keep reading to find out how their situation revolves.
Whether our character has tried everything and failed miserably, or they have been pushed so far into a corner that impending doom lurks imminent.
If we as writers are going to pull this off and do it well we are going to need to have a strategic game plan in mind.
# 1 How to Write your Character Hitting Rock Bottom: the stakes gotta be high
Don’t try to paint your character into a dark corner nobody cares about.
“If I don’t pick up my dry cleaning by 5 they are going to fine me an extra 25 cents.”
Nobody cares.
“If I don’t find a way to give them the ransom of 10 million they are going to kill my wife and child.”
Okay, that sounds concerning.
# 2 How to Write your Character Hitting Rock Bottom: Consider making the character self-destructive
Nothing smacks you in the face more than the moment you realize, “it’s completely and only my fault that I’m in this mess.”
Make your character choose several to a dozen terrible choices and spiral into the metaphorical toilet, all while your audiences watch and wince with every poor decision.
And then, when everything smashes your character in the face and there is absolutely no going back, give your character a flashback moment where they realize that everything they are going through is completely and utterly their own fault.
Nothing says rock-bottom more than “I did this to myself.”
Enjoying your stay? Share the love: share this social friendly “How to Write your Character Hitting Rock Bottom” image above!
For your character to hit absolute rock bottom, all hope must be lost.
But it MUST be believable.
Imagine you’re sitting with your reader and telling them the story of your character and you tell them, “all hope was lost.”
Can your reader say, “wait a minute! What about this?”
You can’t have any question in your reader’s mind whether the character has a possible viable way out.
Your reader needs to be thinking, “oh crap. How are they going to get out of this?”
Then you know you’ve written it right.
Don’t leave them any reasonable doubt.
# 4 How to Write your Character Hitting Rock Bottom: Consider Making Your Protagonist Give Up.
A part of hitting rock bottom is the ultimate temptation to call it quits and say “that’s it! I’m done!”
How many stories have you seen where the main character hits a brick wall and then decides enough is enough, I’m not trying anymore, I can’t win and I’m tired of trying, I can’t go on?
How many times have you personally hit that place where you just can’t take it anymore at a sport or at work or at home and you just quit?
This is a beautiful moment you can create for your reader to jump into the life of your character, where they can watch that character say “no more! That’s it! I’m done!” and the reader can say “I feel you.” or they can be saying “no! You can’t quit now! You are soooo close!”
Either of these feelings and you can know that you are giving your reader the emotions you want them to have to enjoy your writing and want to read further.
And you can use simple dialogue to give your reader these feelings.
Have you ever been reading a story and the character says, “That’s it! I can’t take it anymore! I’m done with this whole thing! I’m done with you and you and you and you. I am out…”
Okay…so maybe they didn’t say exactly that. That was a bit over the top. But think of a story where your character gave up and left the scene with the other characters saying things like, “No! Wait! You can’t quit now! After all we’ve gone through, you can’t just give up now!”
Maybe you used a secondary character that was skeptical of the main character’s ability to finish the task and accomplish the goal. And only after the main character voices their immediate resignation to the quest that the secondary character finally believes in them and brings them back from hitting rock bottom.
Some writers think that in order for their villain to be dynamic, interesting and leave a big mark, they have to experience a big change in their story.
This is not completely true.
Your villain does not have to have a giant story arc to make waves.
And we no longer have to fall under the assumption that our main protagonist is the main reason our readers like our story. That idea bubble has been popped.
Think the Joker, Loki, The Shining, venom, these are just a few villainess characters that have drawn large audiences over and over again over their favorable hero counterparts.
Another story idea we have put to pasture is the idea that in order for villains to be interesting they have to have big story arcs.
Take the Joker for example. When the Joker shows up in the Dark Knight Movie we see him only in particular moments.
He does very specific tasks and then vanishes: robs a bank, kills people, escapes in a clever way, meets with mobsters, hands them their lunch and burns their money.
The story doesn’t have a long story arc in these films, just very strategic, specific moments and audiences everywhere loved it.
So keep this fact in mind: Your character doesn’t have to have a large story arc to be loved by readers. They just have to have very planned out moments; moments done well.
It’s an age-old question for all creatives that love and want to write.
Sometimes we are inspired by our lives and the lives of those around us and sometimes we just aren’t.
Nothing that interesting is going on and we really desire to write something but just don’t know where to start.
So here are some quick thoughts to help inspire any writer.
Do you like to write fiction or non-fiction?
Personally, I love writing fiction with a bit of non-fiction spattered in there.
For instance, if I am writing about a dermatologist diagnosing a patient with skin cancer I want to know all about the true to life skin cancer melanoma and I want to be able to write factual things about what it would be like to be diagnosed with it and what the real to life treatment procedure would be.
If I am writing about medieval times I feel I have more fancy and license to make stuff up as I go but to include fun facts like the spears the Romans used to capture enemy shields. They have a type of hook on the end so the soldiers could pierce the shield and hook it and rip it off their enemies and strike them down.
I also enjoy creating completely fictional worlds in which I make up all the rules, the weapons, the magic and I have total control over the universe, the history of the universe, and anything that may come up or come along.
That is my favorite and most enjoyable way to write because the possibilities are endless and creativity can flow without too much research or inspiration.
Do you want to write non-fiction?
If you have an idea and you love researching and the idea of interviewing people than you will most certainly love to write non-fiction.
If we are writing non-fiction, we can write a biography, we can write down a historical event, we can research our favorite science project and write down the science of it.
Personally, if I choose to go the route of non-fiction I think the most interesting topics are true stories about people.
The people could be alive or dead, but there are many fascinating stories about peoples’ lives and experiences they went through that no one really knows about.
I think it would be very enjoyable and interesting to interview 20 people with a fair amount of life experience and get a few of their most fascinating experiences in life written down and then write a book about all of their experiences.
Or another idea would be to take their real-life experiences and create one to three characters that live through them all in one lifetime combining them in a way that entertaining to write and read about.
Writing prompts
Writing prompts are a great way to start writing short stories that can later turn into full-fledged novels.
You can google or go to Pinterest and find a plethora of assorted writing prompts and choose one or more and just start writing based on that writing prompt and just see where it leads you.
Another great way to use writing prompts, I highly recommend keeping a writing journal.
In your writing journal anytime a writing prompt pops into your head you can quickly write it down and come back to it later.
So the next time you are wondering “What should I write about?” you can grab your handy writer’s notebook and have an entire large list of ideas ready at your fingertips.
I hope these tips help prompt great writing for you!
If we want our readers to enjoy what we write and the stories we tell than we need to carefully consider how we get them to see what we want them to see while they are reading.
We especially want to do this with our villains because who doesn’t enjoy seeing a good interesting dynamic villain?
Good example: “he threw her to the kitchen floor muttering how worthless she was. He immediately reached down and took a twenty out of her purse that had spilled onto the floor. As he stared at the twenty tilting slightly from being drunk he spit on her, walked out the door and slammed it behind him.”
It takes more time to write that way and we have to find more creative ways to “show” our readers who our characters are, but the end result is much more interesting and will hold onto your reader’s interest longer.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write to help our reader see our villain more than just hearing about them.
A sure-fire way to get through this is to be more specific about details.
Bad example: “he wore a coat and glasses.”
Good example: “when he walked through the door the first thing anyone noticed about him was his dirty unshaved face hiding behind small circular thin glasses. There was a tiny chip on one side. Even his facial hair couldn’t hide his striking cheekbones and jawline, but he never looked up. His long brown leather jacket that looked to be as old as twenty years. It looked as if it had never seen any type of wash and it dragged just sightly with each step. If the smell wasn’t his own body it was most certainly the jacket.”
Again, longer to write and takes more creative juices, but we really want to get into the practice of imaging what our villain looks like and then using specific details to tell our readers what we see.
Don’t worry about being a dynamic writer.
Be concerned about passing what you see, hear, and smell the best you can as if you were in the room yourself.
It is the Amazon you love, for work. Make workplace procurement easier with convenient delivery options, simplified purchasing workflows, multiple payment options, and a competitive marketplace with business-only pricing and quantity discounts. Anyone who makes purchases for work (eg. procurement specialists, office administration, IT departments, etc.) can create a FREE account for their business. Customer must be from a verified business in order to successfully create their Amazon Business account.
11 + Things You Should Know About Your Main Character Before You Start Writing Chapter 1
We spend so much time thinking about the story and the plot and what we want to happen and why and then… we start writing chapter 1.
We start writing only to find that we don’t really know our main characters very well.
Have we ever taken the time to see what it would be like to sit down with them and have a cup of coffee to see what they would be like as a person in the real world?
Imagine you are sitting with your main character on a nice sunny breezy day outside a coffee shop and their name is Thor.
“Hi Thor, how are you today?”
“I’m marvelous and this brown liquid you have served me, what did you call it again?!”
“Hah, Thor, that’s coffee.”
“Ah! Coffee! I love this stuff! It makes me feel so alive and ready to conquer all my foes! I’ll take 3 more pitchers!”
“But Thor that much might make your heart race very fast.”
“Good! Indeed, I hope it does! I’ll take 5 more in that case! Bring them at once bar maiden!”
Silly though as it may be, it can be quite fun to think about what it would be like to sit and talk with your main character in various scenarios and even in their realm.
What would it be like to be their sidekick on an adventure?
What would it be like to walk with them through a quiet field?
What would it be like to go with them into a bar or tavern?
What would it be like to go on a 10-hour road trip with them?
What would it be like to go on a high-speed car chase with them?
By knowing upfront how they would act in a certain situation we can put them into almost any scenario and not betray their character. This is one simple way to make sure we write a good main character compared to a lousy one.
How would they act if they were sad?
Characters show sadness in different ways. Some bottle it up and try to manage it on their own.
Others immediately wail out and tears are flowing.
What pokes the heartstrings of your character? What would make them a little sad and what would be devastatingly sad to them?
When we are able to make our characters realistically sad it will have an effect on our readers too.
How would they act in anger?
Are they the type of character that can’t handle their anger and they act vengefully? Or do they act cool and calm no matter what comes at them?
What would make them angrier; their best friend getting punched in the face or their own face being punched?
Does injustice make them angry? Or could they care less? Does their own suffering make them angry or does seeing the suffering of others make them angrier?
What would devastate your character emotionally?
What things could your antagonist target in your character’s life that would devastate your main character?
How would they feel emotionally and react to someone messing with:
Their brother or sister
Their mother or father
Uncle
Best friend
Acquaintance
Stranger they see
Shop owner
Their teacher
Their relationship or crush
Their waiter or waitress
Their car
Their grades
Scholarship
The sports team (cheating)
How does your character react to change?
Change comes in many forms and it is a brilliant idea to introduce change to your character while you are writing about them to see how they would react and what the consequences would be.
Are they forced to move away from home?
Did the school just kick them out of one class with their favorite teacher to a class with a terrible teacher?
Did they lose their job? Did their boss quit? Did they get a new assignment with a different team?
Did they not make varsity this year compared to last year?
Does your character make friends easily?
Whether or not a character has friends and makes friends easily says a lot about them. Are they the life of the party or a good personal listener?
Or are they a loner and have a hard time relating to others in any form?
How do they normally react to the idea of spending an evening around strangers? Do they thrive on meeting new people or do they hate the idea?
Do they have many friends? Do they have just a few friends? Or do they not really have any friends?
There is a simple method over 30,000 people use to get paid for freelance writing online.
Opportunities can get started in just minutes a day, all from your home couch.
It’s easy to get started! No previous experience or degree required to start.
Exclusive job listings for writers, updated daily.
Check out Writing Paychecks to see if you can start getting paid to write today.
What are the character’s major fears?
Know what your character fears and how this affects the plot. Some characters fear getting into certain situations.
They may fear being on stage or swimming with sharks. They might be afraid to talk to a popular person they like.
Other’s experience fears of certain things.
They may fear certain animals or bugs like snakes and spiders. Those are a bit cliche, but you could make them afraid of other things like certain flowers or butterflies. These types of fears give our fictional characters more depth.
What are your character’s minor fears?
Writers often think of major fears without thinking of minor fears. You can give your character more humanity by giving them a slight fear of rats, bats, or spiders. Things people are commonly slightly afraid of.
Everyone has minor fears, things that might make them jump or scream. They might run out of the room because of these fears, but they won’t become debilitated or break into a sweat or start crying.
What are your characters not afraid of at all?
We can make entertaining and interesting characters by writing that they have no fear of more commonly feared things. Make them not afraid of sharks, speaking, cliff jumping, sky diving, or bank robbing. Think of common major fears.
Is your character a planner?
Does your character plan out what they do? Do they know what they are going to do tomorrow or not?
Are they extremely spontaneous or do they plot every move they make at the grocery store?
If plans don’t go their way do they get impatient and lose their cool? For planners, the plans they make are EXTREMELY important to them, so if anything goes outside the bounds of the plan that can make the entire event a COMPLETE and utter failure.
For someone that is more spontaneous, they actually enjoy just going and seeing what happens. They’d rather not have a plan at all and just enjoy the adventure.
Is your character spontaneous?
Does your character jump first and think second? A spontaneous character can be easier to write sometimes because you can easily make something up as you for their actions.
Planners have to be planned out and stick to the plan.
On the flip side, your character could be a hardcore planner where their plans almost NEVER work out. This could be entertaining and interesting to watch how it plays out for a character that experiences a lot of stress and turmoil just by plans going out of whack.
Does your character have a habit of lying? What do they lie about?
Do they lie because they are afraid of getting caught? If they do lie but not easily, what first prompts them to lie? Why would they give in to the temptation and who are they willing to lie to and about what?
A character’s personality and traits are a complicated web of thoughts, habits, and emotions, but know how they would think about and react to things is a great place to start figuring out just who this new character you have in your mind REALLY is.
Check out these FREE trial resources from Amazon for when you work from home (or are stuck at home 🙂 ) As an Amazon associate, if you do sign up or buy anything using Amazon links from our site we make a commission at no extra cost to you.
In order to beat writer’s block, you’re going to need to figure out where you’re at in the writing process.
In order to know where you’re at in the writing process, you are going to need to know what the writing process is.
What is the writing process?
The writing process goes as follows:
You get an idea.
You start to write that idea out
You finish writing that idea out
This sounds really simple and it is. The hard part is figuring out why you specifically are suffering with writer’s block.
Do I have writer’s block because I don’t have an idea?
In order to start writing you MUST have an idea.
An idea is not complicated in itself.
An idea is like, I want to write about a bank robber, but the bank robber isn’t nasty or mean she’s actually extremely polite and kind. She just gets a job at banks and figures out a nonconfrontational way to rob it and then disappears.
How do I start writing about my idea if I have writer’s block?
Writer’s block happens for different reasons at different times.
If you don’t have any idea of what to write about than it is time to do some reading and researching and thinking and sitting down and just making a giant list of ideas until you find one that you just love the idea of writing about.
If you already have an idea but you are having a hard time actually sitting down and writing that is a completely different beast altogether.
IF I have an idea what about writer’s block is stopping me from writing?
This is where you have to dig deep down and be really honest with yourself.
Are you having a hard time getting the idea in the right words or are you having a hard time actually sitting down and physically doing the work of writing.
Some of us fantasize about the idea of being a writer and being famous for a story and making lots of money and being called an author, but if we are honest with ourselves we don’t actually love the work of writing.
Let me make something very clear: The real work of being a writer is finding a place where we can sit or stand and write manually or type words on a page that cause others to want to read those words.
If you don’t like the idea of getting alone in your mind and creating words that lead to interesting words and paragraphs then you don’t actually like the work of a writer or author.
This very fact is to be considered when you have an idea, but you find it much easier to turn on Netflix, play a video game, go on social, go out with friends, and the thought of actually sitting down and writing seems bleh.
What do I do if my writer’s block is actually me not liking the physical work of writing?
This may sound blunt and it is. If you want to get past this type of writer’s block, you will have to stop what you’re doing and just go sit somewhere and start typing words.
It doesn’t have to be a million words the first time and every time you sit down to write, but I would recommend treating it like physical exercise.
Start small. Start by writing 10 words at a time and in time if you find that you can sit down to write 10 words then most likely you will feel like writing more.
The biggest problem for this type of writer’s block is not knowing what to write. Its the daunting feeling of feeling like writing takes a lot of work.
And writing can be a lot of work, but if you don’t just sit down and start writing something as small as ten words in a session you will never write anything you want to. You’ll just keep putting it off and procrastinating.
What if I have an idea and I’m trying to sit down and write, but I just stare at a blank page with a blinking line?
This is the real writer’s block and I’m going to give you the BIG but not so crazy secret to crush writer’s block and never have it be a problem for you again.
RESEARCH.
AND
READING.
Instead of staring at a blank page, start to read and think about and research the idea that you want to write about.
Let me give you some practical ways to research say BYE BYE to writer’s block.
EXAMPLE: Let’s say I just got a story idea and I want to write about an orphan girl in Vietnam during the Vietnamese war and her journey to find life family and love amidst war and being orphaned by that place and war.
Even though I have this idea that I like if I go immediately to the blank word document I still have ABSOLUTELY no idea how to write about an orphaned Vietnamese girl during the Vietnamese war.
So what should I do instead?
I should start reading about the Vietnamese war. I should read about orphans. I should read about young girls during that time and in that place and what their life and culture were like to deal with.
If you start to think this way and you start to read anything about what you want to write you will instantly start to have the knowledge to work with for the next time you pull up the blank page.
And I recommend that you write as you are reading and researching.
If you think of something while you are reading DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE WATI TO WRITE IT DOWN.
I can’t stress that enough. You will almost always forget your ideas if you do not write them down right away.
I recommend keeping a writer’s notebook near you while you are researching.
What if my idea is about fictional stuff and I can’t research it historically?
If you want to write about dragons, vampires, werewolves, unicorns, and leprechauns read about dragons, vampires, werewolves, unicorns, and leprechauns.
Exact same principle, different reading subject matter.
I hope this helps! Now gt out there and write something!
IF you have a specific idea and you are having a hard time figuring out how to research it, PLEASE feel free to reach out and I’d love to help you think of ideas for how to research any specific subject.
Leave a comment and I’ll try to get back to you soon!
I think we can all agree that the reason most readers love stories is because we want to feel something.
We want the good guy to win and the bad guy to lose or if the bad guy wins we want to feel for the good people and hurt with them or experience their emotional hurt.
We want to be able to experience those good and bad emotional feelings without real-life fallout or consequences.
In other words, we want to make sure as good writers that we are tugging heartstrings.
How are we tugging heartstrings?
We create emotional connection and attachment for readers by setting it up from the start.
# 1 How to write a Story that is tugging Heartstrings: We make a character that we want the audience to love or hate.
The last thing we want to do is create a character that is likable, but forgettable.
No, in order to be tugging heartstrings there must be emotional consequences at risk.
We want our readers to feel mad, upset, or unfair about the character we have made them hate getting away with injustice.
We want them to feel sad at the loss of our character that they love is experiencing.
Disney does this SOOO well at this skill in many of their stories. They create a character that we love and then they KILL them or kill someone they love! (Bambi, Lion King, Good Dinosaur, Frozen, Guardians 2, just to name a few…) You can look at tons of their stories and you will find beloved characters’ dead bodies strewn all over the battlefield of story and cinema.
Even if we create a character that they hate this is also good because they will still be emotionally invested to find out if that hated character gets away with “it” or not.
This is called tugging heartstrings.
We make people feel something by getting them attached to characters in our stories by the feelings of love and hate.
We naturally love ourselves and our own stories so we psychologically as humans hate when bad things happen to us (lose money, get cut off on the road, are late, get punished, loss of a loved one), but love when good things happen to us (get promoted, catch every green light, make a new friend, receive a gift, win the lottery.)
Taking it a step further, we hate when bad things happen to others that we love and we love when good things happen to them.
In this same way if we are going to be tugging heartstrings we MUST create characters that are either loved or hated, nothing in between.
Indifference about your character is the enemy of good storytelling.
If your reader feels indifference about your Character that is BAD.
# 2 How to write a Story that is tugging Heartstrings: If we are going to be tugging heartstrings, our readers must care about the relationships we build for our characters.
Not nearly as important point #1 but to be taken into account is that our relationships must be interesting to our readers.
# 1 plays into this though.
If we do a good job creating characters that are loved or hated then readers are more than likely going to care more about the relationships they are caught up in, and we don’t just mean romantic relationships.
They are to be emotionally invested in their relationships with their parents, friends, enemies, sidekicks, romances, pets, any relationship you can think up.
A good way to make any relationship interesting is to bring good times into it and bad times into it.
We are always interested to see how a fight between two friends or lovers will turn out.
Will they be together after? Or will they part ways? Will it end peacefully or ugly? Will there be theft or even murder involved?
All of these ideas make for interesting relationships between characters.
