The real reason I write every day

When I was a kid I played the violin, and I hated it. Looking back, it was actually a terrible instrumental choice for me. Unlike the rest of my family, I'm not very musical. I have a very bad ear for tune, and the violin gives you enough rope to hang yourself twice over in this since you can literally put your fingers anywhere. I probably would have done much better with piano, where you hit a key and get a note, but by the time I started piano I was 5 years into violin and I'd already learned to hate anything that resembled practice.

My mother made my practice my violin every morning before school. EVERY MORNING. I understand now why she did it, she was trying to show me how practice makes perfect and that by sticking to something through the hard parts, they would stop being hard and I'd be happy with my progress. Unfortunately, none of these lessons took at the time, mostly because 1) I hated the violin, and so 2) I didn't pay attention in practice, just went through the motions so my mom would get off my back, and therefore 3) I never actually got any better.

I quit violin the second I got to High School and never touched another instrument. Way I saw things, I'd toiled in the violin mines for 5 years with nothing to show for it. Therefore, clearly, violins were stupid, unplayable instruments that only freakish naturally talented people could ever hope to master.

I didn't realize it until years later, but I took many of the lessons from my battle with the violin with me to writing. You see, back when I was first getting serious about the idea of actually creating a story for other people to read, people said (as they say now and have always and will always say) that I needed to write every day. I had to stick with it, to push past the hard parts and get my words, and bit by bit, all those 500 word sessions would stack up into a novel.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is a true point and an excellent sentiment. If you write so many words every day, eventually you will have a novel. Many, many novels are written this way. I've written novels this way. But there's a difference between writing every day and forcing yourself to write.

I harp on the idea that writing should be fun a lot. It's one of my core beliefs. If I'm not enjoying what I'm writing, then I stop and figure out why. Sometimes, I don't write it at all (notice how I didn't say "I don't write" just that I don't write the thing I didn't like). I believe that an author's love and passion for their own work can't help but shine through the prose. That energy that consumes you when you're writing something you love gets transferred to your reader and becomes infectious. Also, it is phenomenally easier to find the time to write daily when you're looking forward to the exercise.

This is why, when I hear people talking about daily writing practice, I get a little tic in my jaw, because it makes me think of that damn violin. Not to willfully misunderstand the usage of the word "practice" here (meaning both "the act of" as well as "doing some to get better" in this instance) but the connotation is not a pleasant one for me, because that trial I endured every morning through elementary school and middle school is something that I never, ever, ever want anywhere near the joyful, wonderful event that is writing.

I'd almost rather you not write at all than force yourself to write when you hate it. You see, resentment is like grime. It builds up slowly and poisons everything around it. I know. I did this to myself a few times in the early days, forcing myself to get up every morning and write words I didn't care about. It was just like the violin. I resented the work, resented how it didn't get any easier or better. I resented my writing, and that is a horrible, horrible feeling for someone whose great ambition and driving force in life was to be a writer. I felt I was betraying myself, betraying my dream and all my work. I felt like a failure.

It was fear of this feeling, fear of losing my stories to my resentment, that taught me to stop treating writing like the violin. The only way you become a better writer is through practice and observation, writing stories and figuring out why they work and why they don't. But if you're just writing because you have to, to meet a quota, then you're like me with that violin, and you're not getting any better, which kind of defeats the whole point, doesn't it?

One of my greatest triumphs over nine years of writing seriously was learning to love my writing instead of just practicing it. I still write every weekday (I'd write weekends, too, but I have a toddler who wants my attention for some reason. Something about being a mother? I also have a house that doesn't clean itself. Jerk.) only now I refuse to write things I don't like. These days, though, I take daily writing even more seriously than I did when I was writing to a quota, but for a new and much better reason.

One of my absolute favorite sayings is that "writing begets writing." The more you write on a story you enjoy, the easier, better, and more exciting the next day's writing becomes. When I write every day, I build up momentum, like running down hill with a hang glider. Get going fast enough, and the story will lift you up all on its own and take you flying, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds. This is my goal in every book, to reach that lift off point, and the only way I get there is by writing regularly on projects I love. And let me tell you, my word counts on the flying days? Breathtaking.

Today's going to be a flying day for me. I hope you have the same.

Happy writing!
- R

The Art of Story Velcro

I apologize for the extended blackout. Our house has been beset by a green plague (also known as pollen), and fallout has not been pretty. I'm not sure what cruel and whimsical force gave humans sinuses, but I think I hate it right now.

But while all of this sneezing and general miserableness didn't leave much space for writing/tweeting/blogging/cleaning/being a functional human being, it did allow for a great deal of thinking. Specifically, I've been thinking about what makes a story un-put-downable, and how I can get more of it.

You know how sometimes you'll have a book that you're enjoying, but it takes you forever to finish? Like, it's good and you want to know how the story ends, but life conspires and you just keep putting it down. Now, you know those books that take you over? The books that keep you up until all hours of the night when you desperately need to sleep but you simply can not put the sucker down? Yeah, those books.

The difference between these two types of books can be difficult to pin down. After all, they're both good, it's just that one was addictive and one wasn't. Why? What creates that special MUST READ brand of story crack?

I'm sad to say I haven't figured out the entire recipe for book crack yet (but man, once I do, watch out world! None of you are ever getting anything done again ever!), but I do believe I've figured out a major ingredient: reader engagement.

Reader engagement is just a fancy term for how into your book a reader is. When you can't put down a book, you are highly engaged, and engagement is a facet of reader interest. Specifically, if I want a reader to keep reading, I have to keep them interested on as many levels as possible. Interested in the plot, in the romance, in the world, in the outcomes of my character's lives, etc. And the more interest I can build, the more engaged (and addicted) my reader will be. As a story teller, I am competing against the reader's busy life for attention and time. To win this battle, my story needs to be almost impossible to rip yourself away and incredibly easy to get locked back in to if you do manage to pull free. In short, I need to story Velcro.

If you look at Velcro up close, you can see that one side is covered in thousands of tiny hooks which snag on the soft strap and hold the two together. Once stuck, the two sides require force, sometimes massive force, to pull them apart again. This is exactly what I want in my stories, to snag my reader so tightly they'll need to exert massive force to pull away, and every time the force stops, they fall right back and get hooked again. This sort of broad, inescapable engagement is essential to creating an un-put-downable book, and to achieve it, I take my cue from Velcro. I make hooks.

Putting hooks in your story is hardly a new concept, but I'm not talking about the big hooks that convince someone to pick up your story in the first place. If the reader's already reading, those hooks have done their job. We're in subtler territory now, which means smaller hooks, sometimes tiny ones, spread all throughout the story for the purpose of keeping your reader locked at that same level of interest that made them pick up the book in the first place.

To see this in action, let's take my favorite go-to example: Harry Potter. Most people picked up the series initially because a boy magician going to a secret wizard school is pretty great hook, but they stayed because J. K. Rowling is a freaking master of story velcro. Practically every paragraph of Harry Potter is filled with interesting tidbits, things you want to know more about. First there's the mystery of a baby left on the doorstep, and then empathy with Harry's terrible home life. This is followed by the wonder of obviously magical happenings and overall giddy excitement that is the world of Harry Potter itself and then finished by intense character drama and an exciting climax.

Rowling doesn't hit you with all of this at once. Instead, she picks at you, revealing one tidbit after another, hook hook hook hook, snagging you and pulling you into her story until you can no longer (and have no desire to) get free. Even when her hooks never really panned out (like all that stuff about the dragons in Norway), they kept me reading. I take several issues with the plots of the Harry Potter series, but I read each new HP book at midnight on release day just like everyone else. And that, my friends, is the power of amazing story velcro.

On a practical writing level, I believe that creating this sort of deep engagement is more of an exercise in attention than talent. You need to remember to think like a reader. When you look at your story, you have to put aside what you want it to be and see the text for what it is. You might know your main character is going to transform from a spineless wimp into an amazing person over the course of eight chapters, but your reader has no idea, and it's the writer's job to keep that reader hooked long enough to allow the transformation to occur. To do this, in every scene, in every paragraph, you have to ask yourself, "how can this be more interesting?" and then be ready to find that answer in all sorts of different places.

The best story velcro happens on multiple levels through out the story. It's not enough to just cram your paragraphs full of amazing ideas and prose (though that can take you pretty far if your ideas are cool enough, just look at China Mieville). But this sort of shot gun approach can overwhelm readers unless done amazingly well. A far safer (and easier) approach is to try to think vertically through all the threads of the book and apply your hooks on multiple levels. For example, if you've just done a lot of talking about world building, throw in some snappy character dialogue that reveals interesting facets about your cast. If it's a low point in the plot tension, create character tension to fill the gap. Have an argument, hint that someone might be lying. My personal favorite is to have something vaguely sinister happen just on the edge of the scene to make a reader gasp and go "WHAT'S THAT?!"

Wherever you see an empty spot or a place where reader attention might be flagging, work in a hook, even if you're not sure what to do with it yet. Not only will this keep your reader engaged at every turn, it also deepens the book and gives you something cool to pull up later in the plot, sometimes entire books later, and come out looking like you planned it all along.

I realize this probably sounds overwhelming. I mean, working in hooks when you're also supposed to be thinking about tension and character development and, oh yeah, just getting the freaking story down and making sense? That's a lot to think about. But as I said two paragraphs up, this isn't a matter of talent or genius or inspiration, it's an exercise in attention. The most important thing a writer can be is attentive to their own work. Having care, paying attention, adding detail, these are how you create depth, and the more you deepen, the easier it becomes to add nuance and flourishes to every part of your work.

Fortunately, writing is neither a spectator sport nor a timed event. Creating the dense network of hooks required to make excellent story velcro is a multi-pass project that goes on for as long as you're working on a story. For my part, I keep shoving in hooks all the way up to the final copy edit. But so long as you are actively thinking about reader engagement, even if it's nothing more than rejecting boring sentences in favor of more interesting ones, you are actively making your story better, and that's always a step in the right direction.

Update on the ACTUAL real novels I have coming out soon!

So I might not have actually written a venerable tome of letters and pages that got reviewed by the New York Times, but I did write a 3 book SciFi series for Orbit that comes out at the end of this year!

While I don't have a formal cover or blurb to show ya'll yet (we're working on it, I swear. This project is a little cursed, please bear with us!), I can tell you the general details.

Fortune's Pawn (November 5th, 2013) introduces Devi Morris, a powered armor mercenary in way over her head. There's a lot of awesome powered armor combat, snappy dialogue, and of course Things Are Not What They Seem (TM). There's also a pretty strong romance and some language, so if the Eli books were PG, this is definitely an R rated book. 

Again, I'll have the official cover and blurb up as soon as I get the OK from Orbit, but I wanted to reassure people that yes, there are more books. They're even all done! All 3! Complete series! Also, remember when I talked about having a series with no villain? That was this one. I'm very proud of the work I've done here and I think you folks are really really going to like it. 

Fortune's Pawn is followed by Honor's Knight (Spring 2014) and Heaven's Queen (Fall 2014) to complete the set (collectively called the Paradox Novels). I'll be doing give aways and putting up big chunks of sample chapters closer to the release date. Again, I wish like hell I had something more to show you, and THE MOMENT I get final approval I will bury you in Devi info.

"Hey! Wait a minute! If you've already written all 3 books, why do we have to wait until Fall 2014 to get the last one?"

This is actually a very fair question. All I can say to this is that publishing in a big machine with a lot of small pieces that all have to work together. I am only the beginning of a very long chain that takes about a year to work through. As someone who ABSOLUTELY HATES waiting for books, I really do wish things could move faster, but it is what it is, ya know? 

Meanwhile, I'll try to make the waiting less terrible by posting free short stories and tidbits as the books come out. Thank you all for your patience and even if Space Opera isn't usually your thing, I hope you'll give Fortune's Pawn a try.

Thank you!

- R

Rachel Aaron presents: A NOVEL

So, at long last, I'm able to announce my newest book! It's a bit of a depature from my Eli series, but I think we'll all agree I'm headed in the right direction!

And so, without further ado, may I present: A NOVEL!

Presenting Rachel Aaron's newest work of fiction: A NOVEL.

Jane is a woman with a motivation. To get what she wants, she'll have to take action... but can she? When complications arise, she'll have to team up with other named characters to finish the plot and maintain the narrative tension, or it's happily never after for everyone!

"If you enjoy the physical act of reading, get ready to work out your eyeballs over five hundred pages absolutely filled with letters, number, and the occasionally ASCI symbol for that extra treat!" - Civilian Reader

"There were parts of this book that came as a total surprise and parts that didn't. There were female character and male characters interacting. It was like looking at life in another world, only through words on paper, and without the ability to turn your head to look at other stuff." - The Book Smugglers

"You have to use your imagination because there are no pictures, but that's what reading is all about!" - Far Beyond Reality

I know it's been a long time, folks, but I swear A NOVEL is worth the wait! Look for it in bookstores everywhere at some date in the future which may or may not occur!

Thank you for reading!

- Rachel

The Art of Asking... people to buy my books

Sorry for the extended blogging absence. I fell down a writing hole... of the very best kind! Most of my conversations over the last 2 weeks have gone like this:

Husband/child/dog: *expresses need for food and/or attention*

Rachel: CAN NOT LEAVE THE PRECIOUSSSSssssssss...... (clutches laptop)

I did manage to poke my head up to watch a very good TED talk, though. It doesn't specifically deal with writing per se, but I still found it very relevant.

I've been on the fringe of the Amanda Palmer storm for years now, but this talk convinced me to drink the Kool Aid. The whole video is totally worth watching, but the gist is about how difficult it is to ask for help and compensation vs. how much others want to give it. "Asking [as an artist] makes you vulnerable," Palmer says. "There's always that voice in the back of your head: get a job."

This talk REALLY hit the nail on the head for me, because the single hardest thing I've had to learn as a writer is how to ask people to buy my books without feeling like a huckster or a fraud. It's not that I'm shy. I'm the opposite of shy. I am the biggest extrovert you will ever meet. But asking someone to pay money and read my work is harrowing in a way I have trouble putting words to.

I constantly joke to my friends that someday this writer thing is going to dry up and I'll have to go get a "real job." But the kicker here is that writing is a real job, and not just in the "you should treat your writing as a job if you want to be a professional" kind of way. I mean that writers are entertainers who provide a service, a book, and that is worthy of compensation.

When I ask people "buy my book?" I feel this overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. Who am I, after all, to ask these people to put forth their hard earned cash to take a trip through my imaginary world? But it's all in my head, a product, ironically, of my own pride. In asking someone to buy my book, to like my story, to invest in me, I have to open myself up to the fact that might say no. I have to make myself vulnerable. But as Palmer says, when you trust in people, most of the time, they trust back. If you give them an honest experience, a good story, then don't begrudge you the asking, or the money.

The point here is that writing, singing, entertainment, these are real jobs that provide real benefits. We've all read books that we would have paid twice as much for. There's no shame in asking people to buy my book, it doesn't make me a fraud or a huckster. It doesn't make me a sell out. It makes me a working writer, and that, I gotta say, is the best job ever.

It's my birthday, so have some free stuff!

My 31st birthday is coming up this week! Hooray for surviving to my 3rd decade!

To celebrate my transition from the 21-30 demographic to the 31-40 demographic, I've decided to make my writing e-book, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love free until Friday!

IT'S FREE!

If you've already bought the book, thank you a million times. If you haven't, I hope you'll give it a try now. Whatever you decide, though, thank you all so much for reading this blog and my work! I could not do what I do without you.

Thank you for everything!
- Rachel

Guest Post for Magical Words

I'm a blogging machine! Today I have a special Valentines Day guest post about loving your novel up at the Magical Words writing blog! Go check it out!

Happy Day-Before-Super-Discounted-Chocolate Day!

- R

83 Problems

There's an old Buddhist story I think about a lot. It goes (more or less) like this.

A farmer was having a hard time of things: his crops were failing, there was a drought, etc. Desperate, he went to ask Buddha what he should do. When he got there, though, Buddha told him he could not help.

"What do you mean?" asked the farmer. "You're supposed to be a great teacher!"

"All humans have 83 problems," Buddha replied. "Even when you resolve one, something new rises to take its place. In the end, no matter what you do, you'll always have 83 problems."

"But what's the good of all your teaching if it can't solve my problems?" the farmer cried.

"My teachings can not help with your 83 problems," Buddha said. "But maybe I can help you with the 84th."

"Which is?" asked the farmer, crossing his arms over his mud stained chest.

Buddha gave him a kind smile. "That you don't want to have 83 problems."

***

I read a lot of books. I did this before I was an author, but now that I can write them off on my taxes, I read a LOT of books. In fact, I'd say the only thing I read more than books are the book blurbs I go through trying to figure out what to read next.

I mention this now, because if there is one sentence I've read in blurbs more than any other (especially in YA) is "Character X had a perfect life."

I see this all the freaking time, but I have never understood why. What is up with all these characters having perfect lives that proceed to fall apart? First, perfect lives are booooooring, good only for wrecking so the real action can begin. Second (and the reason for this post), is that perfect lives don't exist.

One of the things about trying to write characters who are also people is that they suffer from universal human complaints. One of these, as the story above illustrates, is that everyone has problems. Even people who appear to live perfect lives--the famous, beautiful, fabulous people eternally adrift on a sea of family money so vast they can never spend it all--have problems. In fact, the problems of the rich and famous are the most well documented of all.

It's easy to write these complaints off as First World Problems, which indeed they are, but the fact still remains that even these ostensibly "perfect" lives are riddled with annoyances and frustrations. Everyone has things that annoy them, things they consider problems to be fixed or eliminated or ignored. The reason you only hear about perfect lives in fiction is because the very idea of a "perfect life" is the greatest fiction of all.

This isn't to say a character in hardships can't remember the life he/she lost as perfect. Romanticising the past is a character trait. But when an author declares, "this person's life was perfect until X happened!" I declare, "Bullshit."

The point I'm trying to make here is this: if you are an author, and you want to start your main character off in a sweet spot so that they can have a precipitous fall into the main plot, that is totally cool. That opener is a classic for a reason: watching a fall is almost as enthralling as watching a rise. But please, please don't ruin it by describing things, or worse, having your character describe their own life while they're in it, as perfect.

If a character is a person, they will find something in their life that annoys them. It's human nature. No one describes their own life as truly perfect unless they're talking about a foggy romantic memory or they're trying to impress you. To that end, even a character who starts a novel in a "perfect" life should be entirely consumed by their 83 perfect life problems. Maybe their private chef never cooks their eggs the way they like, maybe their insanely rich parents don't love them like they think they should be loved, or maybe their unicorn ate all the clover and now there's a bare patch on the crystal palace green.

To whit, the character who resides in arguable perfect should still be annoyed about SOMETHING, and this annoyance can actually be a huge source of character development once the real plot kicks in. You thought the unicorn thing was bad? HA. You would kill to have unicorn problems now, wouldn't you, kiddo? That sort of thing.

I mean really, which sounds better? "Caroline had a perfect life, lead role in the high school musical two years running! But it all came crashing down when zombies invaded her small town." VS. "Caroline thought her biggest problem was keeping the lead role in her high school musical for an unprecedented third year in a row, but when the zombies show up to auditions, she has to choose between making the final cut and making it out alive."

Okay, so those are really dumb examples, but you get the idea! Everyone, even characters leading ostensibly perfect lives, has 83 problems. It is our nature, our super power. We can literally bitch about anything, no matter how petty or mundane. And when that basic humanity is not reflected in a character's situation, those scenes can't help but come off as flat and unrealistic.

So please, fellow authors, if you must have perfect lives, fill them up with First World Problems before you smash them down with Real Plot Problems. The fall from grace will still be horrible and engrossing, only now the person tumbling down the mountain will be far more believable.

Please Don't Steal My Books

Like most authors, I have a Google alert set to inform me when someone mentions my name online. I use it to keep track of reviews and generally assuage my vanity. Recently, however, I had to shut it down. Not because my books or blog had become so wildly popular that the tsunami of praise was washing me under or anything so awesome, but because I got sick of deleting all the notifications that came from my books being added to torrent sites.

I don't normally jump on internet bandwagons (I dislike crowds), but when Chuck Wendig, a hoopy frood of an author who always knows where his towel is, got on Twitter to declare this #dontpiratemybookday, the timing was simply too perfect for me to ignore. You have to understand, I'm thirty years old. I was in late high school and early college during the heyday of Napster. I get piracy, I really do, especially when DRM or other corporate shenanigans make it easier to torrent something than to buy it legally.

Hell, I don't even have that much of a moral problem with stealing, I'm the lady behind Eli Monpress, remember? I don't think people who download things off the internet for free are evil or immoral or even criminals. I do, however, think they're unintentionally doing great harm to the people whose art they enjoy.

You see, authors are entirely dependent on sales numbers. I'm traditionally published, which means the lion's share of my income comes from advances, money paid to me by the publisher in advance of publication. But here's the kicker: if my sales numbers aren't good, I won't get another advance, because no publisher will buy a book from an author who can't produce good numbers.

I can't blame them. Why should a publisher risk money on me if I don't sell? It makes no business sense, and contrary to the very odd belief that all authorship should be done purely for love of the medium, editors and authors and art directors have to eat just like everyone else. And here in lies my biggest problem with piracy. It's not that you're stealing my book, you're stealing my SALE, and thus, stealing my future.

I've wanted to be an author ever since I can remember. I fought and clawed and wrote my heart out for four years before I made it, but even after I got my book contract, there was no rest. It doesn't matter how good my books are, if I can't pull good sales numbers, I can't keep writing. My great dream of being a full time professional author that has been the driving force of my entire life is completely dependent on how many books I sell, and every time someone steals my book instead of buying it is a chip in my foundation.

For the record, I'm actually a big fan of a free and open internet. I agree with most of what comes out of Cory Doctorow's mouth, I support net neutrality, I chip in my $5 to Wikipedia every time they put up their annoying banner, etc. I love my open internet and I never hesitate to write congress when they try to fence it in. But under the current publishing model, my entire future is dependent on getting people to pay money for my work, and when someone torrents my book, that future I fought so hard for erodes just a little.

Maybe it won't be this way forever. Maybe in the future we'll work out a system where piracy doesn't hurt authors so horribly out of proportion to the minor offense of downloading a book. For foreseeable future now, though, illegally downloading a book is just about the worst thing you can do to an author.  It's not a minor crime for us, it's a shot to everything we've worked our butts off for. Most of us don't even begrudge you the money, but the sale? That extra number in the column that lets publishers justify paying us for our work? That matters. That matters a lot.

So please, don't steal my books. Don't steal anyone's books. If a book is too expensive, wait a bit and prices will come down (and on that note, the omnibus of my first three novels is only $2.99 right now, just sayin'!). Hell, I would rather you buy someone else's $0.99 book than steal mine, or anyone else's.

So if you're ever tempted to torrent that bestseller they're trying to charge $13 an ebook for (ROBBERY!), or if you hear someone bragging that they got all of a series online for free, please remember this post. I'm all about sticking it to the man, but we're not him. We're just folks like you trying to make a living doing what we love. Not stealing is great karma, too, so help a sister out and spread the word.

We might not be able to stop piracy, but if we can change a few people's minds, we'll have done good, and that's enough for me.

- Rachel

Your Other MC: Thoughts on Villainy

First up, I want to announce that Orbit is putting Eli Monpress is on sale this month! Get the omnibus of the first three Eli books for only $2.99 (Amazon | Nook | Everything Else)! You could even say they're a steal (har har thief humor). This is a great and cheap way to get new people hooked on the series, so please, spread the love! Now, on to the blog post!

Here at last, my long promised post about villains. It took me so long to write this because once I'd announced my intention to make a post like this, I realized I didn't actually know what I was going to write about. My original goal was to write a simple how-to guide for creating a good villain, but the more I tried, the more I realized I was attempting the impossible. First, if there was actually a reliable alchemy to creating excellent villains, we'd see a lot more of them. Second, even those bits I have penned down are so incredibly specific to my own method of story percolating that I doubt they'd be of much use to anyone else.

Honestly, I can no more describe to you how to write a truly good villain than I can teach you how have an epiphany. I can, however, write a blog post about villains--what makes them good, why we love them, and what happens to a story when the villain can't carry their end of things--and hope that knowledge spurs inspiration. So, let's talk antagonists.

What Does A Villain Do?
I went over this a bit in my AMA sessions last month, but since this whole post is about villains, I want to go ahead and get the definition out of the way, just to make sure we're all on the same page.

At the very highest level, the purpose of the antagonist is to provide the plot's push back. In a story of any sort, you have the main character(s), who generally want to do something. The antagonist is the thing/person/force that stands in their way. Without them, the MCs would just go over and do whatever they'd set out to do, and there would be no story.

You'll notice I used the term "antagonist" there. This is because this not all antagonists are villains. An antagonist is simply someone or something who is against the protagonists. This conflict doesn't always mean that the antagonists are in the wrong. There are some books where the protagonists are, in fact, horrible people who shouldn't be allowed to have their way, and in those the antagonist is often the force of good who are trying to stop them. But those sort of reverse stories are few and far between. In the vast majority of cases, the protagonist is a hero working toward some kind of good, and the one standing in their way, antaging their protag, so to speak, is the villain.

Villains are antagonists who are not doing the right thing. Who are, in the vast majority of stories, actively trying to do the wrong thing, either by preventing the heroes from doing good or by doing evil in their own right that the heroes must stop. Sometimes this evil is straight forward (kill the princess, take over kingdom, cover world in darkness for all of eternity), other times the waters can be murkier. It is in this murk, however, that the best villains often reside.

The Spectrum of Villainy
I like to think of villains as falling on a spectrum. At one end, you have the pure cackling evil sort, think Sauron or (my all time favorite) Maleficent.

Now that is some stylish evil.

As fun as villains at this end of the spectrum can be, however, their unabashed love of being, well, evil can make their characters shallow. There's a reason villains like this tend to show up in children's fiction. There's no question that this character is bad, and therefore they can be killed by the good guys without remorse. Their evil is so intense they are dehumanized. Their deaths are victories to be celebrated, not murders.

Villains like these often have monstrous forms that match the black evil of their hearts, and they're always shown being cruel without provocation or purpose: kicking puppies, killing children, etc. Sometimes they're mindless evil, like the zerg from Starcraft or the zombie hordes from any of the Romero Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead movies. They don't have to be physically dangerous either. Emotional abuse can be far worse than any physical danger, especially if the hero is the one being abused. Judge Claude Frolo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame was a violent and powerful man, but he was at his most evil when he was calmly emotionally abusing Quasimodo.  However villains at this end of the spectrum present themselves, though, they are always 100% unmistakably evil beings who need to be killed for the good of everyone.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the misunderstood or reluctant villain, the one who could have been a hero had things been different. My absolute favorite example of this is Antonio Salieri from the play/movie Amadeus (one of my absolute favorite movies of all time).

Though named for Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus is actually the story of the composer Salieri and his absolute frustration and jealousy with the young Mozart. Here is a young, vulgar man who, though his genius, effortlessly produces music so beautiful that Salieri believes it is the work of God, while Salieri himself is cursed with only the ability to appreciate that genius but never create such beauty himself no matter how hard he works. The unfairness of this drives the jealous Salieri, who is otherwise a decent, if overly strict man, to set in motion a series of events that bring about Mozart's death and destroys Salieri in the process.

Salieri is the ultimate reluctant villain. So much so, in fact, that he actually ends up being both the hero and the villain of his own story. You could easily argue that the bumbling hero in this piece is Mozart, but Salieri is without a doubt the core of its story. Amadeus is the story of the rise and bitter fall of a talented but ultimately forgettable artist driven to villainy by jealousy of another's true genius. It is a deeply complex character drama where plot takes a far back seat to the relationship between Salieri, God, talent, and music.

And it is here we see the biggest different for authors between the two extremes of villainy. While cackling villains lend themselves to shallowness, misunderstood villains like Salieri demand depth. They struggle with their misdeeds and take over stories with their own internal conflict. This isn't to say that one type is better than the other, just that they are different animals who require different treatment within a story.

In a plot heavy YA fantasy, for example, a reluctant villain with highly complex motives that require a lot of exploration might end up feeling cramped or underdeveloped despite your best writing simply because there's not enough space in a 100k action adventure novel to properly deal with all of his/her issues. Especially if you're already dealing with two or more main characters who also need development time. On the flip side, if you try to put a cackling evil-for-evil's sake villain in an intense character drama where everyone else is multi-layered, you're going to have a real struggle making sure your bad guy doesn't appear flat or one note by comparison (this is actually a huge problem in Hollywood movies, the heroes will be deep and multilayered while the villain is left as almost an afterthought).

This isn't to say you can't make either of these set ups work. You're the writer, you can do whatever you can imagine. I'm just saying that these are issues that bear consideration when you're putting your book together.

I'm also not saying that all villains fall into one of these two extremes. Quite the contrary, there are thousands of highly successful villains who fall everywhere on the spectrum, and most likely your villain will also fall somewhere in the middle. But simply by upstanding that there is a spectrum of villainy can help you as a writer understand where your own villain falls, and that, in turn, can help you figure out how best to use them in your plot.

What This Means and What it Doesn't
In the section above, you'll notice I used a lot of hedging words like "tends to be" and "most of the time." This is because part of our job as writers is to break the molds we're given. Just because evil overlords tend to be overly simplified just because they're wholly committed to their evil ways and misunderstood villains tend to invite more complex narrative because of the innate complexity of a decent person driven to do bad things doesn't mean that's how you have to write them. Hannibal Lecter showed us just how complex and nuanced a wholly evil character can be, while the Grinch from the Dr. Seuss story of the same name is a perfect example of how powerful and simple a misunderstood villain can be.

With so many good counter examples, it might seem silly to bother putting villains on a spectrum at all. But the point here isn't to be right, but to create a way of thinking about the concept of villain in a broader sense. Because the only way to make something better is to understand what makes it good in the first place.

Okay, So What Makes a Good Villain?
The same things that make a good character: hooks, flaws, and motivation.

One of my favorite sayings in writing is that every villain is the hero of their own story. Like your hero, your villain needs to yearn, to crave, and to act. They need the agency to move the plot to their own ends and the motivation to make them do it. They can't just be evil because you need someone to lock your hero up so she can make her daring escape. Or, I guess they can, but this is a post about writing GOOD villains, not plot devices, which is what villains become when you let them wither.

Way back at the beginning of this post, I defined the villain/antagonist as force providing the push back that must be overcome before the heroes can achieve their goal. They are what creates the tension, doom looming on the horizon, the threat in the dark, the mountain that must be overcome. If the three act structure is defined as 1) put your characters in a tree, 2) light the tree on fire, 3) get your characters out of the tree, the villain is the one setting the fire, or the one chopping down the tree, or the one doing both at once while climbing up into the branches after them. Villains are conflict, they are your other main character, just on the opposite side of the plot.

But even more important than their vital roll in the plot is what a good villain brings to a book's emotional weight. What we as authors are really asking from our readers is investment. At the simplest level, we want them to be invested enough to turn the page, but on a larger scale, you want your readers to care about your characters, to stay up all night reading just to make sure everything turns out okay. The greater the level of reader investment, the deeper the book hooks into them, the more they remember it. I've read plenty of books that I've liked, but the ones I loved were the ones where I felt a deep emotional connection to the characters, and those are the books I bug people to read.

Commercial success in a book is directly related to reader investment, to how much people care. To that end, you want to make sure you give your reader every opportunity possible to become invested in your work, and villains are a huge part of this, because people LOVE great bad guys. I mean, I didn't watch The Dark Knight for Batman, I watched for the Joker, and I wasn't alone. But you don't get invested in a plot device, you get invested in a person, and what's what a good villain has to be: an amazing, interesting person capable of captivating your reader's attention.

The easiest way to do this is to create a villain people love to hate. Hate is the simplest emotion to inspire (see the commonality of puppy kicking mentioned above), but being easy, hate is also simple. For my money, the absolute best villains are the ones you hate but also sympathize with. Maybe they have very good reasons for the terrible things they do, and you can't help but feel for them even as you're cheering for the hero to win.

These sort of villains fall toward the "redeemable" end of the spectrum, but you can also court reader investment on the unrepentant end of things by having your villain be tempting. The will to evil is a universal constant, and villains like The Joker or Hannibal Lecter are masters at showing just how much fun life on the dark side can be. With good writing, good dialogue, and good hooks, a wholly evil villain can be hypnotic and addictive and even admirable in their unwavering dedication to being dastardly.

All that said, though, one of the true challenges of writing great villains is that you have a limited amount of space to do it in. In the vast majority of cases, the villain is not the main character. No matter how big a deal they are, in the end, it's not their story. Cutting away from the main character action to check in on the villain is a classic way to build tension, but like any powerful tool, if you use it too much it loses its impact. In fact, often the less you show a villain, the better and more interesting their scenes get, though how much is too much is something only the writer can decide.

But If You REALLY Want to Learn How to Create a Great Villain...
The best way to do it is to go and find your favorite villains and figure out why you like them. And once you've pinned those down, find some more. Read books, watch movies, read comics. Comics are actually really awesome places to find great villains (Magneto 4 EVA!) as well as some truly terrible ones. Honestly, though, that's even better. I've always found you learn way more from figuring out why a sloppy mess didn't work than trying to pick apart a masterful job that did. Pick up the bad guys and dissect them, try to think about why the author/artist/director made the choices they did. And if you don't like my villainy spectrum, make your own. That's what I did! It's just a model, a way of organizing information so you can think about it more clearly. But the important part of this, the most important part of all writing, is thinking. If you can look at Hannibal Lecter and understand why a soft spoken, over educated sociopath who likes to eat people captivated America, then you've got all the foundation you need to create your own amazing villain.

So there's my villains post. I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave your comments if you think I missed something or if you have your own way of defining villains. I'm all about learning something new. Thanks again for reading!

- Rachel

PS: My next post is going to be about my experiment writing a series that had NO villain. It was... interesting. Let's just say I got a very hard lesson in exactly how much work a villain does in a series. Until next time! - R