by Stephanie Morrill
Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and the Ellie Sweet books (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website including the free novella, Throwing Stones.
The book I just finished writing is the first (completed) manuscript of mine that has a true villain rather than the “she used to be my best friend but now we don’t get along” type. Because of that, I was bound to make some mistakes along the way.
One big thing that I’ve taken away from the experience of writing this book is the need for a Villain Action Plan, or a VAP. When I first started working on my plot, I knew that theoretically my villain needed to be active and have motives and all that good stuff. But weaving that through the story was much harder than I thought it would be.
When I do it all over again (which I’m getting ready to as I’m in the early stages of a new book) this is how I’ll do it:
I’ll start by considering who my villain is apart from my main character.
This can be as simple as writing a paragraph or two about what my villain’s goal is and how they intend to achieve it. My favorite exercise for deepening my villain is to use
character journaling, but I don’t usually do that until I’m well into the first draft.
It’s very important to explore their plan apart from the main character, especially if they didn’t expect the main character to interfere. Otherwise, they don’t come across as very intelligent, which keeps them from seeming as formidable.
I’ll look for points of intersection.
Now that I’ve taken the time to think through how my villain plans to meet his goal, it’s time to look for where he and my main character will intersect.
When I was working on my last book, basically all I did was figure out where Piper and my villain collided. The problem with that is it left big, unexplained, and unintelligent gaps in my timeline. Why would my villain take a random six weeks off while my main character grieved? Made no sense.
But if you’ve taken the time to figure out everything they’re already doing, you’ve given yourself what you need to craft a thoguhtful villain. And a thoughtful villain is a dangerous one.
I’ll lay their actions out on a timeline.
I shared
this timeline tool back in October. This really is a handy little thing that can be very simple or as color-coded and info heavy as you want.
If you’re not a spreadsheet person, another way to do this is with sticky notes or index cards. You could use a plot line like this one:
Or you can just go crazy storyboard style:
Picking one color of index card/Post-it for your main character and another for your villain and using that to visualize how their story lines coincide can be very helpful.
Not every story needs a mustache twirling type villain (The Fault In Our Stars and Stephen King’s 11/22/63 are proof of that) but I intend to be smarter and more intentional the next time I throw one into a manuscript!
What kind of bad guys do you tend to write?
