Vanquishing Villains

While walking in the desert today, I saw a dead rattlesnake. I hesitated to take a photo, not wanting to memorialize death, but it was so beautiful lying there, that I went ahead and snapped an image of it. Although it looked vibrant, as if it were sleeping, I could see that it had been run over. This made me think how even such a fearsome creature as that Mojave green rattler had enemies, though its four-wheeled killer was one it could not even imagine.

And so it is with a story’s villain.

For a hero to overcome her nemesis, she has to come at the villain from a different direction, not go at the villain from his position of strength. If the villain is the strongest person in the world, he cannot be vanquished by the second strongest person, but he can be vanquished by intelligence, perhaps even middling intelligence. If the villain is strong and smart, he can be vanquished by a determination to win at all costs. If the villain is smart, strong, and equally determined, he can be vanquished by esoteric knowledge, something the villain cannot even imagine.

My NaNoWriMo project has no villain. My poor character has to deal with her husband’s death, the loss of her home, the loss of her daughter’s respect. Since he had been the focus of her life, his death left her unfocused. Moreover, she finds out he is not who she thought he was, so to find out who she’s been all those years, she has to find out who he was. I’m wondering if her way out of this conundrum is to do or be something she’s never thought of before, something that until now has been unimaginable to her. Like what? I don’t know, but it will give me a direction to follow.

What about your characters? Do you have a hero/villain situation? What special strengths does your villain have? What special strengths does your hero have?

Heroes and Villains, Villains and Heroes

All heroes need a flaw to make them human, but it seems as if heroes today are more flawed than heroic. Perhaps that is why villains need to be so despicably evil -- it makes the unadmirable hero shine in comparison. Well, maybe not shine. Gleam dully, perhaps. If not for the utterly evil villain, we would think that the hero's actions were villainous. I suppose, in the fiction world, the end justifies the means, but the more unrealistic the villain, the more I'm aware that the conflict is an artificial construct. It seems that authors are trying to outdo each other to created the villainiest villain, but I don't think a writer has to resort to such theatrics to write a good story. We've talked before about the villain being the hero of his own story (which means that the hero is the villain of the villain's story). So, if a hero needs a flaw, a villain needs an unflaw -- something good to make him seem heroic, at least in his own mind.

What do you do to keep your protagonist and antagonist in conflict and still keep it real? What is your hero's flaw? What is your villain's unflaw? Why does your villain think he is doing the right thing? If the story were inverted, and you told it from the villain's point of view, what would make your hero seem villainous to him?

If this is too restricted a topic, or if it is too deep for a fine October evening, we can talk about our current projects. What are you working on? If you're not writing now, what are planning or hoping to write?