Writing the bad guy

If you’re creating stories, sooner or later you’ll need to write a bad guy.*

Speculative fiction is full of bad guys, and many of them are so bad they are fabulous – dark lords and cyborg maniacs, blood-suckers, brain-suckers and soul-suckers, foul beasts and demented villains. Often they are visibly bad, in either extreme of gut-twisting hideousness or brooding good looks.

But there’s another kind of bad guy: the sort that conceals his malevolence under a rigid veneer of ordinariness. That wears plain clothes, goes to work every day, smiles charmingly at the neighbours, and ensures his front lawn is meticulously mown. The sort of bad guy that stalks in the real world.

The sort of evil that strikes up a conversation with you when you least expect it.

This everyday malevolence is harder to spot, and infinitely more intriguing in a story. But how can we write this type of not-about-to-actually-eat-you evil? How do we achieve that chilling balance of ambiguity, and, well… badness? 

One technique that I like to use is writing about something by not writing about it directly (#omission). It’s telling a part of the story by writing about something else. It’s like drawing a picture using the negative space. You write the story that surrounds the kernel of truth, and allow it to resonate with everything that hasn’t been said (#subtext).  

In this way, you can write the bad guy without saying much about him at all. Instead, show the impact of his actions on the people around him. Because no matter how overt or subtle his particular flavour of nastiness is, it will leave an imprint on everyone it has touched.

For example, there will be people around the bad guy who thrill to his power: the fawners, the hangers-on, the loyal deniers of wrong-doing. Those who would be bad themselves but don’t have the mettle. Those who benefit, directly or indirectly, from the efficiencies created by his utter disregard for other humans. Those who are too willing, too weak or too well-rewarded to challenge what’s happening.

And then there will be the characters who have worn the full brunt of the bad guy’s nastiness. The ones who pay the price for his evil brilliance, regardless of the form it takes: manipulation, treachery, violence, viciousness, scheming, intimidation.

All of those people have a story. If you tell those stories, they will all bear the unmistakable marks of the bad guy’s steel-capped boots.

But to do this, it’s critical to show, not tell. Create a series of details that, singly, provoke questions, but when taken together, lead your reader to formulate answers. In this way, you create a bad-guy shaped space in the story, which your reader’s mind will fill.

What does that look like? It might be a character’s hesitation, a momentary flinch, or a freeze. It’s the obedient response that’s just a little too quick for the request. It’s tightly-coiled wariness, or flat weariness. It’s the tension in a face, the food left on a plate, or the hands that shake at all the wrong times. It’s flatness in a voice that’s talking about what happened. It’s a still-raised scar, or covered-over bruises, or a limp. It’s the studious quietness of someone trying not to be noticed, as if by shrinking themselves they might become invisible and no longer a target. It’s the resignation of someone who doesn’t even try to run.

And in the most insidious cases, the signs of the bad guy’s handiwork may be quite subtle – things that people pause over for a moment, but then dismiss, because… No, surely not…?

That’s how the very worst of the bad guys get away with it.

But there’s always, always a larger, repeating pattern. (That’s how the good guys work it out).

Put that pattern in your story, and you’ll find your bad guy is right there in the middle of it.

*Sometimes girls are the bad guys. Sometimes they’re the badass guys too. ‘Guy’ is used here as a gender non-specific term.