Dig Deep for that Creep

I’m a goody two shoes. I’ll admit it. As a kid, I followed the rules, colored inside the lines. I put all 64 Crayola crayons back in the box when I finished drawing my five-legged ponies and rainbows instead of scattering them all over the play rug like a philistine. I knew the difference between right and wrong and navigated between the two without much of a struggle. I am normal, civilized, well-adjusted (relatively), just like you.

But as I pen this piece on how to write creepy villains, I’m reminded of Bobby Christmas (real name), a kid in my fourth-grade math class. Christmas was a smart kid, punctual, attentive, dialed into all that classwork as he sat at his little desk with the pressed-wood top dressed in a button-down shirt and clip-on tie—a CPA-in-training was good old Bobby Christmas.

Christmas was the dastardly fiend who would remind the teacher at the end of class on a Friday that she had forgotten to assign homework. Boldly, too, like times tables were his life. Oh, the glares old Christmas got, even from this goody two shoes. I often wondered what high school locker Christmas eventually ended up stuffed in. Now, he’s probably running some corporation and sitting on a summer home in the Hamptons with a dog named Money and a Ferrari parked in the circular drive. Figures. Now that I think about it, maybe I’m more of a goody one shoes. I say this to say, villainy comes in many forms.

But I digress. I cop to the goody shoes to say that I do not swagger through life on the dark side of the street. I do not know, nor to my knowledge, have I met a serial killer with bodies crammed in his chest freezer. Yet I have no problem AT ALL writing about these folks. Sometimes it’s fun to walk on the dark side. After all, writers have to get inside the head of both hero and foe. We have to humanize both the saint and the scoundrel or else we leave the job half done.

These are the truths I start with (other writers may come at it a different way): Every animal, even the human variety, has the capacity to kill. We are all capable of things unspeakable. There was a case, decades old, that I recall where a priest killed a nun in a hospital chapel. He strangled her, stabbed her, and then draped the body with an altar cloth. Evil exists. Murder is the most despicable of crimes. That’s true in life, and so it has to be true on the page. Nothing is more inhumane than taking a life.

So, how do writers craft those killers, those inhumane villains? I start with the essential triumvirate – good guy, victim, villain. Crime fiction lives or dies by a writer’s successful manipulation of these three character buckets. Without the three, the cat-and-mouse chase, the struggle of good vs. evil, suspense dies. If suspense dies, you cannot raise the stakes and your story doesn’t move. If your story doesn’t move, your reader disengages, and your opportunity to knock their socks off has been lost.

Your characters must be worth their time on the page. Your villain, the creepier the better for my taste, has to hold their own, or else the reader gets bored and, quite frankly, the writer does too.

What makes a villain creepy, though? I think two things contribute – character and stakes. Let’s take stakes first.

High stakes, not low.

A villain who operates so far outside the boundaries of human decency that they barely seem human are frightening characters. You never know what they’re going to do, how far down that evil hole they’re willing to slide, how deep their perversion might be. How do you deal with a character like that? A character for which nothing is wrong, nothing is a bridge too far, nothing is beyond the pale? For me, this level of unchained freneticism is an interesting thing to explore. For the villain what’s right for them is right. They’re not thinking about social mores. They’re not even pretending to be goody one shoes.

Your villain doesn’t know he’s the bad guy. They are just living their life on that page, doing what they feel compelled to do to get through the day. Is it psychopathy? It can be, if you choose to write it that way. Is it evil? What is evil? Who decides what’s evil? Certainly not your villain. Your villain is working on the want, the need, the desire. Lizard brain. Impulse, release, satisfaction. Boom.

And that’s how I write my villains, as though they are the normal ones only doing what nature dictates. It’s my protagonist’s job to bring him to justice. My job is to keep you reading by giving you a creep you can’t turn away from, no matter how loathsome they are. You don’t have to like Mr. Serial Killer, in fact, I’d worry about you if you did, but as a reader you should understand what motivates him, what makes him tick.

So how do I go about it?

This is not a broad sweep kind of thing, in my opinion. You don’t get a creepy villain with only outer physical descriptions. You need that stuff, of course, but the gold, the very heart of creepy, is found close to a blackened soul. The truly scary part of inhumanity is just how human and normal it can often seem. Creepy’s inside. It’s often masked by an inviting smile or a helpful hand. For creepy, go small, not big.

Go trauma, go kink, go drive, go anger, go hate, go lust, go greed, go . . . human. It can be interesting to write characters who are so unlike you. As a writer, it’s like playing in somebody else’s sandbox for 360 pages. I write to play, but I’m also writing to understand. Don’t we all do that?

Creepy villains are wounded book people. They’ve been through some stuff. I write the reasons for their disconnect. Nothing’s off the table. No rules of morality, by which we as real people abide, must apply on the page. A killer kills for personal reasons. A killer kills again and again and again because the train has left the track somewhere. Finding that jump point, exploring the fallout, is how I try to add depth and levels, and layers to villains. The layers are what matter. Readers are smart, they need the layers. Writing to understand how villains come to be the way they are eventually leads me to that spidery basement in chapter 50 when the killer is caught with all those frozen body parts in the freezer.

So, how do you get to the understanding part?

Dig. Remember, inside, not out.

If you craft intricate character sketches before you begin to write, you can add your levels here as you flesh out your villain. Was there childhood trauma or abuse in play? Is your killer suffering from some mental illness? Even more frightening is a killer who is perfectly sane and kills for expedience or sport or, worse yet, pleasure.

If you don’t do character sketches, as I do not, you will have to meet your villain on the page. Same parameters, different process, result needs to be the same.

Writing creepy villains is an inward exploration of motivation, backstory, flaws, idiosyncrasies, and contradictions. What formed your villain? Who hurt them? What lessons didn’t they learn? What good didn’t take? That seed, that nucleus, that foundation is the platform on which you will build all your other character elements. Inside out. Deep, profound, layers.

Then when you think you’ve got it, take a moment to look at your villain and find subtle ways to flip the script. You don’t want cookie-cutter creepy. You want nuanced creepy. You want your creepy. What about your character can you play with and angle this way and that? What habit can you give them? What distinctive trait or characteristic or need? A killer who fosters kittens on the side? A killer who teaches Sunday school surrounded by a group of six-year-olds? A little thing, a juxtaposition, a little turn will do.

In the end, writing creepy villains is the same as writing any character. You’re going for the humanity, the understandability, even though they’re doing inhuman things. Bring out their normal, even if their actions are abnormal. Draw your reader in by going inward, straight to the heart, however evil it is.

And if you want to name your villain Bobby Christmas, I won’t hate you. He’s probably somewhere right now asking for extra work on a Friday afternoon. The madman!

About Echo by Tracy Clark:

From the award-winning author of Hide and Fall comes a taut tale of renegade justice and long-awaited resolution, bringing the thrilling Detective Harriet Foster series to a heart-stopping conclusion.

Hardwicke House, home to Belverton College’s exclusive Minotaur Society, is no stranger to tragedy. And when a body turns up in the field next to the mansion, the scene looks chillingly familiar.

Chicago PD sends hard-nosed Detective Harriet “Harri” Foster to investigate. The victim is Brice Collier, a wealthy Belverton student, whose billionaire father, Sebastian, owns Hardwicke and ranks as a major school benefactor. Sebastian also has ties to the mansion’s notorious past, when thirty years ago, hazing led to a student’s death in the very same field.

Could the deaths be connected? With no suspects or leads, Harri and her partner, Detective Vera Li, will have to dig deep to find answers. No charges were ever filed in the first case, and this time, Harri’s determined the killer must pay. But still grieving her former partner’s death, Harri must also contend with a shadowy figure called the voice—and their dangerous game of cat and mouse could threaten everything.