A Character Only an Author Could Love

It strikes me that as readers, we have a luxury. We can love or hate any character in a book at will. Lord Voldemort, Richard III, and Agent Smith are deliciously villainous, which makes them interesting and their motivations fascinating. They have backstories, ie, my mother didn’t love me and daddy beat me, everyone made fun of me because I’m a hunchback, I have extra-sensitive olfactories and humans smell bad, wah wah. Whatever. We hate them. We really really hate them and can’t wait to see them defeated. (Unless you’re one of those that takes pleasure in being perverse, but really, if you would just TRY to wear a nice pastel instead of all that black, I really think you’d feel better about life in general.)

Ah hem. Sorry, tangent.

The thing is, as an author, you aren’t allowed that luxury. You have to love all of your characters, even the villains, at least a little bit, in order to give them any sort of depth. You have to actually care WHY Dr. McNastyPants acts like a creep in order to figure out what new jerkoff thing he’s going to pull on your lovely three dimensional (and good looking) hero next. Otherwise, said doctor will simply annoy your reader as he goes about shooting people up for no good reason.

The irony is that if you as an author don’t love your villains, you won’t be able to inspire that rabid hatred in your readers that is the mark of a really great villain.