Seeing how tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, I thought it would
be appropriate do discuss minor villains.
They’re interrelated, you know.
Really they aren’t, but I felt the need to acknowledge the
holiday that provides me with a bunch of cheap chocolate.
Now.
Minor villains.
It’s a broad category, when you think about it. ‘Minor’
villains include your mercenaries, thugs, assassins, bodyguards, IT personnel,
the main villain’s son/daughter who happens to be trained in half a dozen forms
of martial arts, and all the other people who side with the actual antagonist
of your story.
How many books have you read [or movies you’ve watched]
where the minor villains are… incompetent fools? They sleep on the job, lose
that all-important sword duel against the newly trained heroine, let prisoners
escape under their very noses, they never [ever] hit their target, they’re
rude, arrogant, and are dense as a brick wall.
There are people
in the world who are idiots like so many of the henchmen in stories. However,
if the villain is some kind of genius overlord with a secret plan to rule
everything and kill the hero, why is he hiring the least capable minions?
In keeping with your Valentine’s preparations*, I want to
give you six tips to make your minor villain a worthwhile character.
1. Think of the minor
villain as an Ally to your Villain. Think about this for a minute. Unless
your novel(la) has a cast of two, your Hero(ine) will have a friend or two, or
even a random stranger they ask directions from. These people are ‘allies’ of
the hero.
But what about your villain? Doesn’t he have any ‘friends’
or strangers he uses in his scheme? Of course. I’d venture to guess ninety
percent of villains aren’t loners. So your villain has his minions and
ninja-like descendants. If you have a minor villain, treat him like an Ally.
You don’t make your Allies idiots1, incompetent, and
under-developed, do you?
2. Give us a reason to
detest them. Please note I’m not asking you to make sure your minor
villains kill small children and kick puppies around just so the reader hates
them.
However, they are
villains. Why should we be rooting for the hero to take down the evil king’s
bodyguards? Did they look the other way when a merchant butchered a street
urchin who tried to steal from him? What makes the minor villain wrong? Why are
they allied to the ‘dark’ side?
3. Create empathy2.
Even as we detest them we need to understand why they chose the villain over
the hero, or even over a non-committal stance. True, some minor villains want to be villains, but we need to know
why.
Did their puppy get run over by the neighbors, so they want
the chance to carry out some kind of personal vendetta?
Has the villain offered them a chance at something (power,
wealth, freedom, glory, redemption, joy, peace, death)?
Are they working for the villain against their will (through
blackmail, debt, a sense of honor, slavery, mind control, father-child
relationship)?
4. Give them an Ideal.
This can even be the same one as what the villain stands for (Greed, Lies,
Corruption, Death, whatever). But the minor villain needs to mean something to me. In order for the
reader to care about what is going to happen in this character (which we should;
even if we’re rooting for their death, that’s still a form of ‘caring’).
Emotional investment should not be limited to just the good guys.
5. Let them stand on
their own two feet. When and if your minor villain meets an untimely
demise, it needs to be worth my time. Often times the bad guys are just mown
down with a machine gun or a few flights of arrows so the hero can get on with
the final climactic moment of angsty struggle against the villain (who probably
has immaculate hair even if they’re in the middle of a battlefield).
Have you forgotten about the minor villains who just died?
That’s what I thought. We just read that a few dozen people
were just wiped from the face of the earth, but we’re too busy chuckling at the
hairdo of our handsome villain and the melodramatic waffling of our hero.
*warning lights*
The reader should never read about a death and just forget
about it half a sentence later.
Never. Nunca. Ne jamais. Etc.
If your minor villain has to die, make it count. When the
Ally dies, plenty of people are affected, so should it be with the minor
villain. Everyone has friends and family, even your scar-and-tattoo-covered
security guard. With that in mind, their death is suddenly more significant to
you, the writer, than if they’re just a nameless, faceless, friendless guy in a
uniform.
Now that you know
this minor villain’s death will mean something to those around him, make it
matter to us, your readers.
6. Make them
intelligent. Unless it makes them more real to the reader, your minor
villains should only be as dumb as the Allies. In fact, make them four times
smarter. If it’s impossible to sneak into the enemy camp to rescue the hero’s
sister, thanks to your alert minor villains, the conflict, tension, and dread
just skyrocketed.
‘But I need it to
be that easy!’ you say?
No you don’t.
Your tired little brain has run out of ideas, and you are,
consciously or not, taking it out on the poor minor villains.
What did they ever do to you?
Let’s all take a moment and collectively raise the IQ points
of our minor villains by about 300.
Done?
Even if this sets your hero’s goals back by about thirty
chapters, that’s perfectly fine. If your outline is now blown to bits, I’d get
out the broom and start collecting the fragments. There is nothing, nothing wrong with adding a chapter or
two or twenty because the story goal just got that much harder to achieve.
In fact, I’d give yourself a pat on the back. Your reader
will now be sitting on the edge of their seat, waiting for the heavyset genius
you now have for a bodyguard to pummel the hero [again]. When the IT personnel
scramble the Hero’s communications we’ll shake our fists at them and bemoan our
poor protagonist.
And guess what: when the hero finally takes down the
mercenaries, when she figures out how to pull the plug on the IT department,
when the dust settles, we’ll be shouting for an encore.
Bonus: yeah I said
six, and it’s still technically six3. I just wanted to take a moment
to point out how useful minor villains are. Imagine this: your hero [and
thereby, you] are stuck in the middle of a dreadfully boring FoTAT, when the
intellectual giant (as in, a literal giant) minor villain shows up. Suddenly
the FoTAT is now a FoTATV (Forest of
Trees and Terrifying Villains). Food for thought.
*I’m assuming
that a charming person such as yourself has a lot of prep for tomorrow, yes?
1 There are,
of course, those times where the ally is an idiot. That’s all right. Just make
the minor villain smarter than them.
3 If you’ll
note, I put no number before the bonus tip, thereby keeping the official number
at six. Shhhhh.
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