How to Write a Villain, From the Craft Books Themselves

To write a villain, give them a goal of their own that they believe in, make them stronger than the hero, and let them act against the hero in moves that get worse until no compromise is left. A villain who waits for the hero to arrive is scenery. A villain who wants something, and goes after it, is a plot.

The advice below comes from the people writers usually cite on this: Alfred Hitchcock in his interviews with François Truffaut, Robert McKee's Story (1997), Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey and Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing. Every quote was read in the original, not in a summary of it.

What Is the Difference Between a Villain and an Antagonist?

An antagonist is whoever or whatever stands against the hero. A villain is an antagonist who means harm. Every villain is an antagonist; not every antagonist is a villain. Both roles are defined by the main character they oppose, the pairing set out in protagonist vs antagonist.

Christopher Vogler draws the line in his chapter on the Shadow archetype. "Villains and enemies are usually dedicated to the death, destruction, or defeat of the hero. Antagonists may not be quite so hostile." They may be, in his words, "Allies who are after the same goal but who disagree with the hero's tactics." A rival detective is an antagonist. The killer is the villain.

Robert McKee widens it further. "'Forces of antagonism' doesn't necessarily refer to a specific antagonist or villain," he writes. "In appropriate genres arch-villains, like the Terminator, are a delight, but by 'forces of antagonism' we mean the sum total of all forces that oppose the character's will and desire." A storm, a family or the hero's own fear can all oppose the hero. A villain is the opposition with a face.

Why Does a Story Need a Strong Villain?

Because the hero is only as interesting as what they are up against. McKee calls this the principle of antagonism, and states it as a rule: "A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them." In his experience, it is "the most important and least understood precept in story design."

Hitchcock made the same point about his own failure. Talking to Truffaut about Stage Fright (1950), he said: "The great weakness of the picture is that it breaks an unwritten law: The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. That's a cardinal rule, and in this picture the villain was a flop!"

That line is usually quoted on its own, as a general rule. It began as a confession about one film, and the famous wording is not the one Hitchcock first used. "The better the villain, the better the picture" is Truffaut's reply in the same exchange, and the heading of that part of the book. Hitchcock's own word was "successful". Later in the interviews he took up Truffaut's version as "a slogan" and added a turn of his own: "The stronger the evil, the stronger the film."

How Do You Give a Villain a Motive?

Ask what the villain wants, and answer it as they would. Chris Baty, who founded NaNoWriMo, puts "What does your main character want more than anything else?" first in his planning steps, and says to answer it "for all of your characters, including your villain."

The answer should sound reasonable to the villain. Vogler: "From his point of view, a villain is the hero of his own myth, and the audience's hero is his villain." A mill owner who floods a valley believes he is saving two hundred jobs. That belief is what makes him dangerous, because he will not stop out of shame.

Quote sites pin a similar line, "every villain is a hero in his own mind", on the actor Tom Hiddleston, and give no source for it. If you want a citable version of the idea, Vogler's is in print.

How Do You Make a Villain a Real Threat?

Make the conflict one that can't be settled by talking. Egri: "The real unity of opposites is one in which compromise is impossible." If the hero and the villain could each take half, they would, and the book would end. Their goals have to exclude each other.

Then escalate. McKee describes the opposition deepening in three steps, "the Contrary, the Contradictory, and the Negation of the Negation". The last step is the worst: a situation that turns "not just quantitatively but qualitatively worse." In practice, the villain's moves follow a ladder:

1. A reasonable offer. The villain asks for what they want, politely, and the hero says no.
2. Pressure. The villain uses money, law or position to take it anyway.
3. No way back. The villain does the thing that can't be undone, and the hero has to stop them in person.

A villain who is beaten early by a clever trick has not been a threat. Each move the hero makes should be answered by a stronger move from the villain, until the climax, where the hero's best effort only just wins. That alternation of move and counter-move is the same engine as scene and sequel: the villain's move is the disaster that ends the hero's scene.

Where Does the Shadow Archetype Fit?

The Shadow is Vogler's name for the villain's role in the hero's journey. "The archetype known as the Shadow represents the energy of the dark side, the unexpressed, unrealized, or rejected aspects of something."

The useful point for a writer is the last part. The strongest villains reflect something the hero has pushed away: ambition, anger, a willingness to cut corners. A hero who refuses to compromise meets a villain who compromises everything. The villain then tests the hero's character arc, and not only their plan.

A Worked Example

Tess keeps the lock at Hallow Weir. Aldous Marr, who owns the mill upstream, wants to dam the river to keep his mill running. Tess's village sits below the dam.

Marr's motive, as he would put it: "Two hundred families eat because my mill turns. A village of forty cottages is the price." He is the hero of his own story, and he isn't lying about the jobs.

1. Marr's offer. He offers Tess a fair price for the lock cottage, and a job at the mill. She refuses.
2. Tess moves. She takes the dam plans to the county council.
3. Marr's pressure. He has the vote brought forward a week, and wins it.
4. Tess moves. She gathers the village to stand on the dam site.
5. No way back. Marr closes the sluice at night, with the village asleep below.
6. The climax. Tess opens the sluice by hand, in the flood.

There is no compromise to be had: the mill needs the dam, and the village can't survive it. Each of Marr's moves is worse than the last, and each one answers a move of Tess's.

How Do You Plan a Villain in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app. Its Codex keeps an entry for each character, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. Together they hold the villain's motive and every move they make.

1. Open the Codex and click the + beside the Characters section, then Character, to start an entry from the built-in Character template. Name the villain.
2. Set the entry's Role to Antagonist. The Codex marks the entry with its own colour, so the villain stands out in the list of characters.
3. Write their goal in Motivation & Goals, in the villain's own voice. Use The Lie They Believe for the belief that justifies them.
4. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each move with Add › Scene. In each synopsis, write the move and what it costs the hero.
5. Make a label called "Villain" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), and set it on every card where the villain makes a move.
6. Switch the Outliner to its list and read the label column. The villain's label should keep coming back, and each of their moves should be worse than the one before.

A long run of cards without the label is a stretch where the villain has stopped acting. That is also where plot holes on the villain's side tend to hide. The Codex entry is the place to keep the rest of the villain consistent across the book.

Common Mistakes

• A villain with no goal. Wanting to be evil is not a goal. Give them something they want that the hero can't allow.
• A villain who waits. If the villain only reacts to the hero, the hero drives the whole book alone. Let the villain move first.
• A weak villain. Hitchcock's point: if the villain is beaten easily, the hero's win means nothing.
• A villain the hero could reason with. If a conversation could settle it, it isn't conflict. Egri's rule: compromise must be impossible.
• The same threat, louder. Escalation means each move is worse in kind, not the same move repeated.
• Misquoting Hitchcock. His first words were "the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture", and he said them about Stage Fright. The "better" version is Truffaut's, which Hitchcock later repeated.

Sources

Retrieved 25 October 2026.

• François Truffaut, Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 1967), the chapter on Stage Fright, and Hitchcock's later "slogan" remark. Read through Open Library's search inside the Internet Archive's copy (archive.org).
• Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (ReganBooks, 1997), chapter 14, "The Principle of Antagonism", from p. 317 (archive.org).
• Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Michael Wiese Productions, 2nd edition, 1998), the chapter on the Shadow (archive.org).
• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (Simon and Schuster, 1960; first published 1946) (archive.org).
• Chris Baty, "No Plot? No Problem!: Five Secret Steps to Story Building", excerpt on the NaNoWriMo blog, 16 September 2013 (archived copy).