Villains can be lots of fun to write. In many cases, they are the only other character who can provide a real challenge to the protagonist/main character. There's also something fun about pitting your hero against this new character and seeing how it turns out. Evil dialogue too is just so much because I can let my melodramatic side run wild.
But successful villains, the ones that scare us, are so much more than that. They aren't melodramatic and more importantly, they aren't evil for the sake of being evil.
I think this is a particularly important distinction to understand because as soon as you try to imagine what evil for evil's sake would actually look like, you start to come with the reasons why they're evil. You might think they're bullshit and to us not-evil folks, they are bullshit. We get to hide behind the knowledge that those people are just evil and somehow that Others them.
For those of you who did not take Tom Drake's lit class (or don't spend your free time knee deep in books and stories): Othering is claiming another person's differences from you makes them less than you.
As a writer, though, I don't have the luxury of simply writing a villain who kills or tortures or plots the overthrow of a good leader and chalking it all up to 'He/she is just evil'. Nope. Not gonna cut it. At all. So I have to do for the villain what I do for every other character: crawl inside their head and see the world from their perspective.
Most of my villains, once I got over my tendency to just shout THEY'RE EVIL and move on, aren't diabolical fiends who feed off the pain of others. They're just people who have goals and fears and hopes. Sometimes the ways they go about getting them (i.e. fighting a war) aren't that different from how the heroes are going about trying to reach their goals (i.e. defending their homeland).
But there was one villain I wrote who absolutely terrified me. I think one of the characters in the story described him in this way: "He's fire and fire loves nothing more than to burn." But he had a story for how he came to be that way. He didn't come into the world wanting to watch it burn. Life before he met my main character made him that way.
What terrified me about him was the fact that he had come from me, like every other character I've ever written. I imagined him, I created him and I justified his actions. He was incredibly human to me because I saw parts of myself in him. I tend to see the parts of myself I like in my heroes: stubbornness, intelligence, determination. But in this villain I saw my anger, the way I find it too easy sometimes to hate.
The nature of evil that terrifies us is not the horrible things it creates but the reasons behind it. If we look just a little harder, we can see the path that led to the thing or person we've named evil. We comfort ourselves by saying we would never do that, we're better than that, we value the lives of others, we're different from the people who made those choices. Sometimes, that is true. Most people wouldn't make the choice.
Whether that's true is a topic of debate in the field of psychology- ever heard of the Milgram experiment?
My point is this: yes, there are people in the world who make choices that lead to terrible, awful, gut-wrenching things. But when we refuse to see them as people, we aren't doing it because it's true. We're doing it to make ourselves feel better because if they aren't people and we are, then we would never be able to do the things they did.
But that just brings us back to the act of othering and suddenly we don't see so different.
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