Azarias from my Discord asked me about writing

believable baddies, who often aren’t sympathetic but who do read as real people

and that chimed with some other stuff I’ve been thinking about recently, so here we go.

I recently read the absolutely incredible Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, from which the following quotes come. It’s a terrific book about the psychology of self-justification and how we very often double down on mistakes or bad behaviour rather than confront the psychological blow of realising we’re not as clever or good as we thought. This includes, horribly, the psychology of victim-blaming.

the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

“He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”

Take any complex human situation and you’ll find people on both sides trying to recast it to a simple narrative whereby they’re the unoffending victim and someone else the cruel or callous perpetrator. Obviously there are plenty of situations where a victim is a victim, end of. But we all also can think of situations where we cast ourselves as sole victim—in the divorce, the falling out, the job loss—and it was honestly a bit more complicated than that. It is, basically, pleasanter to feel wronged than to accept we did wrong.

Of all the stories that people construct to justify their lives, loves, and losses, the ones they weave to account for being the instigator or recipient of injustice or harm are the most compelling, and have the most far-reaching consequences.

It’s a brilliant book which will cause you to take a long hard look at yourself, and especially the number of times you start thinking, “Okay, yes I did that, but I had a good reason…” It’s also a terrific place to start with a villain.

Because, let us recall, people don’t tend to think they’re villains. The world is full of torturers and abusers who believe that their behaviour is justified by their victim, and the proof of that justification is ultimately the lengths to which the perpetrator was simply forced to go. There’s a reason You made me do it! is an abuser cliché.

The money was just resting in my account. I’ve got to feed my family. I felt he was threatening me. You can’t con an honest man. They didn’t deserve that job, that partner, that nice car. Come on, would I have done that if I didn’t have to? Those people are all criminals. He started it. She asked for it. They had it coming. The end justifies the means. Make America great again!

If you want to make your villain believable, think about how they justify their behaviour to themselves. It probably won’t be much fun, because we really, really do not like confronting profound cognitive dissonance, and it’s a lot more comfortable to say “He’s an evil misogynist!” rather than trying to dig into whatever sense of entitlement and wounded pride and resentment and fragility that makes his behaviour reasonable, justified, even necessary in his own head. Mistakes were Made has some really extreme examples of the contortions people perpetrate. Or you could just look at the news.

You don’t necessarily have to put this stuff on the page. It often looks pretty thin when it’s written down because, you know, it is pretty thin. But you do need to think about it, because it’s not always satisfactory to simply decide your villain is an Iago, doing bad things out of motiveless malignancy just because he’s a baddie. (I am totally here for purely malevolent villains where useful–Dark Lords, serial killers, etc–but that’s not what we’re talking about now.)

If you want a deeply plausible baddie, ask yourself not “How is this villain trying to hurt my characters?” but “How is this person trying to protect themself?” Are they defending their self-image as a good parent/person, their identity as a rich, powerful, good, successful person? What unacknowledged truths are they trying to keep unacknowledged because the cognitive dissonance is too painful? In a word, what’s their inner justification?

A side note but useful: If you’re doing a book where the villain has machinations, especially off page, it is a super good idea to write down the events of each chapter and then track what’s going on with the villain that the reader isn’t seeing—literally what the plot would be showing if the villain was the protagonist. That way you can make sure the villain’s actions make a coherent sequence from their perspective, and avoid having a villain whose life revolves around the MCs, like Joker around Batman or the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Outside superhero narratives, it’s a lot more plausible if the villain is a person trying to get on with their own shit.

Your hero/ines are likely to be just as prone to squirmy self justification as the rest of us. On the plus side, you can really use this for conflict! I did a post on arguments that touches on this. If you go into an argument aware that your characters are (probably unconsciously) looking to justify themselves and place the wrongdoing firmly on the other’s shoulders, that can create an absolutely massive row. And if you then show them coming to realise that wasn’t fair, making themselves confront a more objective truth, and apologising sincerely—well, that’s the grovel nailed, with some proper personal growth along the way. Happy ending assured.

I can’t overstate how unpleasant self-justification can be to confront. It makes us uncomfortable to accept we did bad things, and it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge we justify them. It’s not a likeable quality. Interestingly, people with low self-esteem are far less prone to pathetic attempts to avoid cognitive dissonance: they already have a poor self-image so they aren’t surprised by their own failings in the same way as someone who considers themself superior.

It doesn’t make your hero/ine a bad person if they indulge in self-justification, and it doesn’t make your villain a good person if you give them plausible motives. It just makes them more like actual people, such as you or me.

New book next month! Copper Script publishes 29th May and the advance reviews are coming in strong. Goodreads here. Buy links go up shortly, watch this space.