A broken heart?

Unless a hero's written to be heavily conflicted, most actors will tell you they love to play villains.

Villains are the most fun and the hardest to write. Without them, there would be no conflict — no conflict, no story. They're so multi-dimensional: they can be evil in so many different ways, and each one comes to his wrongdoing from wide-ranging experiences. I read somewhere that inside each villain is a broken heart that's refused to mend (Rose's rich, embittered boyfriend from "Titanic"). 

Aside from wondering what made the villain, you have to design the scale of his evil. Is he a Dr. Crippen? Is she a child abuser? A villain's context showcases the magnitude of the evil: in a story about wartime genocides, can an abusive mother be written as more or less horrific? Put her in a coming-of-age story, set in peace time, and she can be drawn as a relentless monster. Within the Holocaust of "Schindler's List," Ralph Fiennes' Auschwitz commandant still stands out as exceptionally evil.

How does the villain's choice of behaviors compress and torment the life of your lead character? This is where the fun begins. One could say Kathy Bates' oinking loon in "Misery" just wants to be loved, to collaborate in a creative process. The problem is she'll drug and maim you to keep you home. Hannibal Lecter's mere presence signals the possibility of evil on an epic scale in the world, yet he befriends and mentors FBI agent Clarice Starling.

How will your villain be vanquished? Can your villain be defeated? Is your villain even human? (Maybe it's an incurable disease). Is it a complete obliteration, a vindication of good in the world, or a gray area of moral ambiguity? In the movie "Gone Baby Gone," Morgan Freeman's character insists, "Everyone looks out his own window," and audiences left the theater debating both sides of the moral coin. Maybe it just matters that the hero lived, because it's too exhausting to find every reason, to attribute wrongdoing to personality disorders, Agent Orange, addiction to drugs or pornography, and sociopathy. After a while, they all sound like "Twinkie defenses," such as the one used by Dan White after he snuck back into San Francisco's city hall and gunned down Mayor Muscone and Harvey White. Real human beings are complex, so what they feel as they look out their own windows can be tangled and murky, even if their actions are not. Sometimes the more we learn, the fewer answers we have. 

Perhaps that's why we pay big bucks to see movies about the walking undead — zombies, vampires, robots run amok — because post-9/11, it's more comforting to believe in absolute evil incapable of human thought, thus easier to demonize our political adversaries as somehow less human, and to dehumanize strangers with code ("illegal alien").

My days as a writer — as a human being — became more textured when I tried to understand the stupid, disagreeable, wrongheaded, unpleasant people of my life without just demonizing them. The reader doesn't have to like your villain's reasons, but the better those reasons are understood, the more compelling your villain will be.