villains

Hey all! I was recently asked to talk about my favorite villain that I have written, so I decided to make a post about it. In all honesty, I have many things that I like about certain villains, they fit each story in their own perfect way. Some of them I outright hate, some of them are a little more tricky. Thus, this post will probably include mentions of more than one villain ha ha ha. However, there is one that I think stands out for me a bit more than the others. Seeing as my book Impact just released, I am free to discuss it.

While writing Defiant, I actually had several villains who were not quite what they seemed (Mikhal and Vane). I knew how it would end and I knew book 2 would involve a lot of Santain. Naturally, the Patriarch of Santain was the next villain. With Vane being our most prominent villain and being arrested, I fully realized the next villain could not be the same. He needed to be someone we could hate, someone we wanted to watch die. He had to be bad for the sake of being bad.

And so we have Saizar.

Patriarch Saizar is quite possibly one of the most unpredictable villains I’ve ever written. He is not a normal man. Unfortunately, Saizar is a product of unchecked mental instability. He seized the throne and has been left to his devices, fully able and allowed to do whatever he wanted for the last twenty something years. This predicament has bred a true monster, yet at the same time, a monster with a human side.

We see Saizar in fits of rage, we see him tending his wife, making plans for his sons future. Yet one wrong move he loses all sanity and control. I believe this unpredictability makes for an unnerving villain, which makes him one of the best, because you don’t know what he might do next. You see that he is fully capable of being decent… and you see he chooses not to be that way. In the third novel, this will be built upon even more before we see who lives and who dies (wait… someone is dying?! Oh yes, my darlings, many will die before this is finished).

At this point in my writing career, I have villains and heroes that blur the lines of good and bad. I can’t fully discuss them because they haven’t been published yet, and I can honestly say I have someone worse than Saizar, a villain I truly despise, a villain who fights on the side of good, a hero who falls and becomes the villain, but for now I leave you with Saizar. My most unpredictable and one of my worst, and best, villains.

Thanks for reading!

Much Love,

P.S. Please feel free to ask me questions that I can answer here in my blog or any other media outlet 🙂

There are few things I love more than a good villain. You know the kind, the one that gets under your skin, the one that makes you worry about what he’s going to do next, even that one villain who makes you giggle and want to follow him instead of the hero (Loki anyone?).

I try to include all types of villains throughout my writing. There’s so much to work with, but one important thing about a villain, they have to have a reason. If your villain has no rhyme or reason for what he’s doing, there’s not much point to the story is there? The hero might be trying to stop him, sure, but why?

When writing a villain, there are plenty of paths to choose. Did the hero somehow wrong him? Perhaps in the past? Perhaps it was the beginning of the book when he accidentally broke the to-be villain’s favorite magic wand.

There has to be goals, end games, plot lines to look forward to.

Is your villain unpredictable, is s/he psychotic? Does he simply want power? Was s/he dropped on his or her pretty little head one time too many?

Many villains are brought into light by their craving for power. They want to rule, they want to be the best, they want what they’ve never had before. Other villains exist because they always had power. They’ve never been told they couldn’t have something so they take whatever they want, they fear no consequences.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard when it came to writing villains, however, was that almost every villain sees himself as the hero. He’s the one in the right. The hero is standing in his way, stopping him, preventing his ultimate dreams and goals. The hero is in the wrong from his point of view. For this reason, it is very hard to change his mind or make him see otherwise, though many hero’s try to reason their way through it before they ultimately have to fight.

The freedom with writing is that you can create whatever you want. These are all just some pointers to keep in mind when writing your own villains. Why does he want the hero out of the picture or dead? Why is he fighting against the hero?

Happy writing!

Author C.M.Herndon

Defy the Universe

My Favorite Villain

Villains