Villains and Plots: Do you have to in the bad guy’s smelly shoes?
Remember Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, saying
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
https://tokillamockingbirdquotes.org/#atticus
I’m sure that’s a challenge if Heliogabalus or Hitler or Pol Pot are characters in your novel. I’m spared such difficult decisions because Water-stone is set in the Middle Stone-Age, and there are no recorded horrors perpetrated by specific people.
All the same, when I was a bit stuck recently, I found it an enormous help to step into my villains’ moccasins. I have three arrogant bad guys. I already knew quite a lot about their physical appearance, their skills and even some of their characteristics: one is brave; one is Macchiavellian; and one is a psychopathic bully.
But then I realised that they were still cardboard cut-outs. It was only when I started to ask myself why each of them wanted the stone so badly that they started to come alive for me. The brave one wants it because he thinks it might heal his injured lung; the manipulative one wants it because, it turns out, he has a strong love of beauty; and the bully wants it because he wants power and status.
Suddenly I was writing new scenes for each of these renewed characters. I still haven’t fully understood the psychopath, but I have a much stronger sense of the brave one and the Macchiavellian, and the plot has a lot more reason and depth to it.