Quite by accident, I stumbled upon yet another way to make the antagonist of my novel series even more of a bastard. This is important to me; that he is presented as the best type of villain – the cold and calculating, hands-on, go-getter type of alpha male. He’s self-righteous and completely convinced of his own superiority in all things. It’s so important to me that at this point, he’s the only character with a name and a clear to-do list of villainy.
It actually makes my job a lot easier, during the planning phase, to have the antagonist already conceptualised and ready to go. At any point – at every point – in the narrative, I can ask myself “what is the villain doing?“. He’ll either be reacting to the actions of the hero characters with as much evil as I can muster, or he’ll be pro-actively causing them some kind of grief. The third option is that he’ll be further cementing his grip on the kingdom, but we won’t actually see him do this very often; we’ll mostly see the effects of his machinations in the incidental and support characters we meet in each book.
There are two main points I’d like to make regards your own villain, and this goes for any genre so long as your antagonist is more or less human. First; you want to make sure he isn’t like a child character in a 90′s sitcom: only ever popping into the picture when there’s a punchline to blurt out and the rest of the time conveniently absent. Take the Eragon villain Galbatorix. He might as well have been locked in his tower for all the menace he personally directed at Eragon for 90% of the story. Similarly with Harry Potter’s Voldemort. He did pop up much more frequently, which was great, but he was still mostly just scheming from a distance with a presence that was felt and feared but rarely directly seen. Authors use this method of holding the villain behind a veil because they’re too powerful and will smite the hero before he has a chance to put up a fight. It’s not wrong so much as it is just convenient and a little clichéd. Try not to do it – and especially not for an entire series. Make sure your villain is driving the hero into his quests and sacrifices and burdens. Blame him for everything! That’s what they’re there for.
Second, try your hardest to make your Villain’s actions pull double duty. This can work for your heroes, too (if your hero is clever enough to plan it, only very rarely should any action have a positive unforeseen payoff!) but mostly if your villain isn’t a complete dunce, his plans are going to be impenetrable. The little brainwave I had was to do with a previously planned scene where he wipes out a small village to either catch or kill our heroes. He fails, except to make damned sure our heroes will think twice before asking for help from innocent people again. That was it for that scene, until I later had a dungeon with a scary prisoner inside. Who was he and what had he done? Well, now… what if my villain blamed him for the massacre of the village and made a big public hoo-haa over his trial? The accused is presented as a victory by the villain on behalf of the kingdom (winning him Brownie points with the peons) and is a ready-made morale booster – the villain can allow the prisoner to escape at any time another village needs cleansing! That kind of neat, tied-with-a-bow evilness is my villain in a nutshell.
It will be grand when he gets his comeuppance*!
*comeuppance yet to be planned.