A Villain is a Hero in His Own Story: Why Villains Need Backstories
I’ve just been answering an e-mail from a college student who is writing a paper on Malificent (or, as I told her, “the old fairy”) in Sleeping Beauty and wanted to know why I gave her the backstory I did in my novel, A Kiss in Time. As I sometimes do, I got a little long-winded and started to reflect on villains and backstories in general, so I thought I’d share it in a blog post.
I chose to give Malvolia (my own, made-up name for the old fairy) a backstory because characters have backstories. No one is just evil for the sake of being evil. There must be a reason. The fairy tale’s ostensible reason,being offended at not being invited to a party is a stupid reason to get so angry that you put a death curse on a baby. There has to be another reason, a reason why she feels wronged, terribly wronged. Also, there should be a reason why she wouldn't be invited to the party. What were the king and queen’s motivations? Obviously, this was a very big party, not a little tea or something, and the king and queen (who have a lot of money) would likely invite all the people (and fairies) who reasonably should be invited. Also, logically, they wouldn't want to offend such a powerful fairy unless they had a very good reason. So I started to think of what a good reason would be and, also, what would make Malvolia feel so wronged that she would try to take revenge in such a horrible manner.
In a word, the reason why the villain’s backstory needs to be considered is motivation. There is a saying that "a villain is a hero in his own story."
I've seen it attributed to Chekov but I've also seen people say that it is unknown who said it, so I'm not sure (though Chekov did come up with that cool saying about the revolver on the mantlepiece, so I like Chekov’s writing advice in general). What that means is, no one thinks he or she is the villain. Like, a criminal would say he had to commit a crime to feed his family, or to get rid of someone who was mean to him or because the system did him wrong and he had no choice. He wouldn't say, "I committed that convenience store robbery, then shot the clerk because I am a terrible person." So I enjoy getting to the bottom of why that person did what they did, whether or not I agree with that person. That person may end up being Jean Valjean (who was justified) or Fagin (who was less so) but every character must have a reason behind his actions. Les Miserables and Oliver Twist are actually both very good illustrations of this principle. In Les Mis, Javert thinks of himself as the hero of the story because he is following the law, which he is bound to do. He thinks of Valjean, an escaped criminal, as the villain. But we, the reader (and the audience for the musical version for decades now) think of Javert as the villain and Viljean as the hero. Maybe not the ONLY villain, and maybe not as bad a villain as, say Thenadier, but a villain. But if there was a musical called Javert! (with an exclamation point after it, like Oliver! or Oklahoma!), we would think of Javert as the hero.
Similarly, Oliver Twist has several villains and antiheroes. Dickens, was, after all, the king of writing antiheroes. He gave us one of the first and best-known books written in the viewpoint of the villain: A Christmas Carol. I realize “antihero” sounds cooler than Ebeneezer Scrooge, but he was really one of the best, and that’s why so many sit-coms have a Christmas Carol parody episode each year. Charles Dickens saw all sides, and his book delved deeply into why Scrooge became the man he became.
In Oliver Twist, the first villain we meet is Mr. Bumble, who won't give Oliver more food and then sells him to a funeral home. But he would likely say he was a hero. He didn't give Oliver more food because, after all, he didn't have more food. The Parish can’t spend all their money overfeeding workhouse boys. And he sold him to the funeral home because he was making it hard to keep order in the workhouse and, also, selling Oliver provided money for food for all the other orphans. The next main villain we meet is Fagin, who runs a band of boys and teaches them to pick pockets, so he's a villain. But, on the other hand, he also feeds the boys presumably better than they were fed in the workhouse, so he's a hero. The truest villain in Oliver Twist is Bill Sykes, a violent criminal who eventually beats his girlfriend to death. But I wrote a whole book on the psychology of that backstory, and it is called Breathing Underwater, so you can read it if you like. Nonetheless, I do believe Bill Sykes is a true villain. However, I would guess he would still disagree with me on that. He likely had a father who beat him and beat his mother and definitely lived in a time and place where the odds were stacked against the poor, much as they were stacked against Oliver. He would say he's done what he's done to get by (and, I would guess that, had he lived long enough to be sorry, he would also be very sorry about what he did to Nancy). He would probably tell me that, had Oliver not been taken in by Mr. Brownlow at the end of the story, Oliver may well have turned out to be Bill Sykes or Fagin. And he might even be right. We’ll never know.
A more recent example of a villain who is a hero in his own story is Snape in Harry Potter. I don’t know about other readers, but I suspected Snape’s backstory, or something like it, all through the series, long before it was revealed in Half Blood Prince or Deathly Hallows. Of course he was a double agent, and of course he was heartbroken. But, weirdly, Rowling provides less motivation for many of the other main villains in HP. Dolores Umbridge, for example. Or Bellatrix. However, in my mind, Bellatrix is just some confused Squeaky Fromme (again, not a hero) taken in by a charismatic, Manson-like Voldemorte.
The first time I started thinking about my villain’s backstory was when I was writing an early draft of the book that eventually became Breathing Underwater. The villain started talking to me, and I wrote pages and pages in his viewpoint, with the idea of writing a sequel about him. Eventually, the sequel became the book. I’m not saying that you have to write a whole book about your villain or even pages and pages about his motivation. But you should definitely at least spend a long time thinking about it.