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A story is only as good as its villain. And while the antagonist of your story does not have to be a “villain,” they do have to live up to certain reader expectations if you want your story to be of any merit. So here are the top 5 qualities that readers want and need to see in your story's villain.

Quality 1: Your villain should be a dynamic, true-to-life character.

Remember, we are talking villains here, not monsters. And unlike a monster, a villain should be a person. This means that no matter what race, gender, or even species, your audience should be able to empathize on a certain level with them. Doing so makes the story feel real, and creates complex emotions for the audience as well as the hero.

Quality 2: Your villain should be more powerful than the hero.

This does not mean that you villain has to be stronger in every way. I means that the villain should have something that gives them a distinct edge over the hero. Doing this gives your heroes something meaningful to accomplish, as no reader will respect a hero for overcoming a weaker villain—this simply makes them a protagonist bully. Unless, of course, you want your audience to start rooting for the villain.

Quality 3: Your villain must think that what he/she is doing is right.

Nobody goes along in their day-to-day lives, saying, “What dastardly deed shall I do today.” Even Adolf Hitler thought that he was doing the world a favor, or at the very least that he was cosmically entitled to commit his acts of evil. So to make your villain more real, they must think that they have a right to do what they are doing.


Quality 3.5 *due to my excellent readers who pointed out a blind-spot in Quality 3* When your villains are cruel for cruelty's sake, they must perceive that they have the "right" to do so. 
When villains just have the unnatural urge and lack of compassion required to do deeds of great cruelty, I would say that this is bordering on mental illness and sociopathy... and then you get into making your character a monster who was once a human. There is nothing wrong with creating a "human" monster as the antagonist of your story. It is simply a different strategy in writing, and requires certain distinctions so that the audience knows that they are dealing with. On the other hand, you could avoid this completely by just taking the entitlement route. In other words, the villain is being cruel because he or she perceives that something (god, nature, status, royalty, power, fame, etc) has given the villain this right. So they are not "right" in the moral or ethical sense, but "right" in the sense that they are doing something they feel they are entitled to do... lawful evil. 

Quality 4: Your villain should win battles, and perhaps the war.

While it is difficult, we must in many circumstances, allow the villain to win throughout the course of the story. Doing so creates actual stakes in the story, and will make your reader actually question whether your hero will rise to the challenge—dramatically heightening your story's tension.

Quality 5: Your audience should feel that they could easily become the villain.

In other words, after learning how the villain became the villain, the readers should have an uncomfortable feeling that they could have easily turned out the same. This quality is almost like a checklist to make sure you've done the others effectively, as it finalizes the effects of reader empathy, making a true and dynamic villain, and adding tension to the plot.

Adding these qualities to your villain will make your story dynamic, but it will also prevent you from committing an artistic evil called “propaganda.” As I've said before, writers embody their villains with the evils they see in the world around them. This is fine if you are creating a monster; but when it comes to villains, you are dealing with real people. And when you embody a person with everything you hate, just to be knocked down by the hero, you are merely creating a one-dimensional straw-man. And straw-men exist only for manipulating the masses into agreeing with your ideals, instead of making the reader question their own motivations and the multifaceted problems that create the good and the evil we see in the world around us.

Feel free to comment with other suggested resources. Any questions about writing? Things you want me to discuss? Comment or send me a message and I will be glad to reply or feature my response in a later article.

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