Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

How bad are your bad guys? Are they believable?

It’s important to know as much about our antagonists as our protagonists—to flesh out their roles and use them to captivate the reader’s interest.

Before I go on, I’ll share a real life example of a bad guy.

Halloween night. My kids are dressed up and chomping at the bit to collect massive amounts of candy to keep them on a sugar high for weeks on end. We traipse from house to house as a family. It’s cold. It’s dark. They walk by skeletons sprawled on the ground. They bypass witches and ghouls trick-or-treating in the same neighborhood.

“I’m brave. Nothing scares me,” I hear again and again.

Then we approach the blue house.

A creature flings the door open. A mask with the gruesomeness of an Orc from The Lord of the Rings, greets my three girls at the door. I hustle to catch my girls charging away from the door.

“They’re scared,” I explain to the man.

“Of course.” The man slides the mask off his face and transforms his monster noises into a gentle speech. “It’s just me. I’m a man. See.” His grandpa form emerges and the kids take small steps back up to his door. His wife laughs at his side. They drop candy into my children’s hands.

Then for some freakish reason the big bully decides to slip the mask back over his head while my kids are but a step from his door. They run squealing.

This masked man was a perfect bad guy. He gave a trick and a treat. He dished out a head trick.

“I’m a monster.”

“I’m a man. I’m normal. I’m nice.”

“But really, I’m a monster.”

This is what we need to do with our bad guys. Humanize them. Help the reader to see there’s a man beneath the mask. And we’ll leave them screaming, scratching their heads. Leave them wanting to know more!

In On Writing, Stephen King offers advice while referring to Annie from Misery:

“If I can make you understand her madness—then perhaps I can make her someone you sympathize with or even identify with. The result? She’s more frightening than ever, because she’s close to real. If, on the other hand, I turn her into a cackling old crone, she’s just another pop-up bogeylady. In that case I lose bigtime, and so does the reader.”

And take James Scott Bell’s words from The Art of War for Writers:

“We are drawn to powerful negative Leads, especially if they have a little charm. We have a part inside us that wonders what it would be like to have such power.”

Donald Maass touches upon this in The Fire in Fiction:

“Cardboard villains don’t scare us. Stereotypical antagonists lack teeth. By contrast, an antagonist who is human, understandable, justified, and even right will stir in your readers the maximum unease.”

Maass expounds on this more in Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook:

“We are not accustomed to thinking of villains as being on an inner journey, but what human being is not? Humanize your villain. Motivate his actions with kindness. Let her be heroic, helpful, and principled.”

How intentional are you when you create your bad guys? Do you remember to humanize them?

*photos from flickr