One of the panels at Life the Universe and Everything was on writing about one man’s villain is another man’s hero. Here are some of my notes.

Any inaccuracies or misinformation in any of these notes is the fault of the note taker.

• Even evil wizards set up in the middle of the night to eat chocolate chip cookies.
• Shallow villains are when they have a single motivation.
• You need more than one motivation for someone to act
• Best villains have small redeeming qualities.
• Good villains need a motivation that people can relate to.
• Villains have skills and qualities where they could have taken a nobler path but didn’t.
• Smart villains will see the dangers and threats to their plan
• The strength of your hero is the strength of your heroes that are worthy of the billing.
• Good heroes do not mean a perfect hero. They need to have flaws.
• We are looking for complex characters.
• We like heroes that make mistakes or errors.
• We like heroes with flaws where even a character can’t sing.
• We like confident but not arrogant.
• Good heroes have ideals and conviction.
• Villains’ desires are more important than ethics.
• Check out the TV show called the blacklist.
• Check out the TV show justified.
• Villains need to have a reason to going over to the other side.
• Heroes that know about bad things and don’t make an effort to correct the bad things and let someone else do it makes them villainous. An example of this is that Churchill permitted a British city to be demolished so that the Germans would not know that the British had broken the German code.
• You may need to delete some scenes when heroes go too far.
• Revenge is a selfish motivation.
• Book Ursula Le Guin: One who walked from omolosk.
• What are your hero secrets they don’t want others to find out about.
• What are some of the villain’s secret? These secrets help create complex characters.

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