Writing From the Real World Bring on the Bad Guys -Victor D. Infante             There is no one in Hollywood cooler than Christopher Lee. No one. It’s not that he’s the best actor out there, although he’s fabulous, but rather, it’s that he gets to play all the good villains. Think about it. The man’s done more than 200 films, and which ones do you remember off the top of your head? Darth Tyranus—a predecessor of Darth Vader—in the new Star Wars.  Saruman in Lord of the Rings. Dracula. If you’re good at this game, you came up with Fu Manchu.             These aren’t just great villains, these are some of the characters that define what a great villain is. It’s not just that the characters were evil, but that he made evil seductive, as seductive as the Devil in Milton’s Paradise Lost. As seductive as cheesecake. (Mmmm. Cheesecake.) Lee plays the kind of bad guys whom you kind of want root for, the kind of baddies that make evil look not so bad.             Christopher Lee makes evil cool., and that’s how we like it. All of the best villains are cool, whether it’s the classy Dracula waiting until the conductor lowers his arms to begin speaking to Van Helsing, or the punkish Spike smirking in disbelief as he tells Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I want to save the world.” The best villains are witty, elegant, sexy and terrifying. Terrifying in how much of ourselves we often see in them. If you watch Smallville, who would you rather hang with, Clark Kent or Lex Luthor? Hell, if you’re inclined that way, who would you rather sleep with?                The problem is, very few Real Life villains are that cool. Even the flashiest of serial killers, once the lights are on them, are just sick little men. The charisma of a Charles Manson seems just plain creepy beneath the harsh light of day. Osama bin Laden? Friends who speak Arabic tell me he speaks persuasively, but “cool” isn’t really the word for it. From what I gather, most real life hitmen and assassins are grubby, unlikable people with few social skills, very much as depicted in Soldier of Fortune.   How then, as a writer, are you to construct a villain worth watching?             In a lot of ways, it comes down to looking at the world subjectively, rather than objectively. To quote the great Hunter S. Thompson, “It was the built in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen...You had to get subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”             Perhaps, then, the best tact towards constructing a villain is to search your feelings for what makes you uncomfortable, and conversely, for what you find seductive. You don’t need to snort cocaine to know what it’s like to say, crave cigarettes, or chocolate. Likewise, you don’t have to know for a fact whether or not the Bush Administration had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks to imagine reasons why they might have. Truth is important in journalism. In fiction, it’s what feels true that matters. If it feels true for your story to have a villainous politician trying to score political points off of tragedy, run with it! And if you don’t want him to sound like Dubbya, why not try having him sound like, oh, I don’t know. Pat Robertson? Or James Carville? Or maybe the villain is a woman who sounds seductively like Paula Zahn? And hey! Maybe the sexy, sleek Armani look of so many GQ photo shoots tops the image off! Now you’re cooking with gas!             In the real world, the biggest villains are in Real Estate and Civil Law. They’re boring as toast, but with a little look at the world’s own gray, it’s people who aren’t presented as such, you’re villains can be much, much more.                  (c) 2002-4 Victor D. Infante

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