Minrose Gwin on Creating Complex Villains
“When it comes to creating villains, I must confess to writing with more fury than love.”
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Eudora Welty has said that writers of fiction need to write with love, and out of love we can write “with straight fury.” When it comes to creating villains, though, I must confess to writing with more fury than love. Villains make trouble, and trouble makes for a good story. But creating a central character who’s not only villainous but also complicated and even sympathetic can be a real challenge.
By writing “with love,” Welty says she doesn’t mean “writing forgivingly.” What she does seem to mean is that writing with both love and fury can become a source of understanding—not just the understanding of a particular character, villainous or otherwise, but the understanding that all of us are flawed and infinitely complex human beings.
This is a lesson I’ve had to learn again and again. In my first novel, The Queen of Palmyra, Winburn Forrest, a descendant of Nathan Bedford Forrest and, like his notorious forebear a vicious Klansman, murders a young Black woman as she goes door to door selling encyclopedias. Although I set the novel in my home state of Mississippi, it is based on the 1968 Martinsville, Indiana case of Carol Marie Jenkins’s brutal murder by a Klansman, a crime witnessed by his own daughter. Years ago, the editor who bought The Queen of Palmyra told me I’d made my villain too villainous—a cardboard figure with no back story or real sense of what made him the abhorrent individual he became. That early version of Win Forrest was too simplistic, too predictable.
As a debut author, I might be forgiven such a faux pas (which I hope I rectified). And yet I made the same mistake three novels later. An astute reader of an early draft of my most recent novel, Beautiful Dreamers, offered exactly the same critique about my handsome and charismatic predator Tony Amato who manages to seduce an entire household, with tragic consequences. In her opinion, he was a predictable stereotype: the embodiment of Evil with a capital E, nothing more. Her critique led toward a whole new round of revisions. I had to write Tony’s back story with at least an ounce of the love that Welty advocates, just as she does in her most searing short story, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” written from the first-person point of view of the assassin of Mississippi Civil Rights Movement leader Medgar Evers on the night Evers was shot. A stand-in for the real assassin Byron de la Beckwith, Welty’s narrator is a poor white man who envies the Evers character’s “nice grass” and paved street. He has a nagging wife and just wants to be “on top of the world. For once.”
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Why is it so difficult, even for a seasoned author, to create a multi-dimensional villain? To write with love as well as fury? What I’ve learned over time, through personal experience (who among us hasn’t felt victimized at some time in our lives?) and as a cultural observer is that villains are people too. Even the most hardened criminals have had a personal history and cultural conditioning that shaped them. Schoolteacher in Morrison’s Beloved is part of a rapacious culture in which owning another human being was not only acceptable but also a marker of wealth. Today’s mass shooters come from a culture of AR-15s and violent videos and films, bullying and systemic failures in our mental health systems.
In case I ever feel moved to write another villain, I’ve made myself a set of questions to consider:
Is my villain so seductive and charismatic that even smart people like us, the readers, can be drawn into the villain’s web? My character Tony Amato seduces three members of the same family despite the fact that each one has at least partial knowledge of his flawed character. Even as a girl, the narrator, Memory Feather, can see the strands of lies, charisma, and physical beauty he’s weaving around them all. And yet, as she says, “there is a certain exhilaration in surrendering to something you are afraid of..”
Does my villain have a past that makes it at least somewhat understandable as to why that person turns away from empathy and kindness? The road from victim to victimizer is well paved. Becky Sharp in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is an orphan; Thomas Sutpen in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is shamed as a boy because of his poverty; Cholly Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is abandoned as a child and sexually abused by whites. After all, Dracula turns his victims into villains, and they pass along the favor!
Most crucial, perhaps, does my villain raise the larger question of the human propensity for and vulnerability to evil and malfeasance? As the young narrator in Beautiful Dreamers wonders, wistfully, about my most recent villain, “Was there simply a spoiled part of Tony, like a swath of mold on a piece of cheese? Cut it off, and the cheese is fine again? Or was he like curdled milk, sour through and through?”
In short, fictive villains need to raise the discomfiting possibility of villainy and victimhood in us all—as Faulkner would say, “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
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Beautiful Dreamers by Minrose Gwin is available now via Hub City Press.
