Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, or of writers. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of this, evil, in Dr. Jekle and Mr. Hyde. Writing the evil in the bad guy is deciding how much and how to frame it in your story. We are a morbid and voyeuristic society. Ratings in TV news and newspaper spike when a particularly creepy, spooky, or gruesome event makes the top story. You can't go wrong if you make your bad guy really bad. But it pays off when the bad guys bad sneaks up on the reader, beware the temptation to have him or her wear their badness on their sleeve.
The question of ‘how bad to make the bad guy/girl’ begs the question; are you writing for the story or for the reader. Do you believe that you write the story and that it will find its way into the hands of readers who love ‘that kind of story’. Or do you write for a specific reader, and you see the reader as you write, and therefore write in a certain fashion, for appeal to that special reader who you hope will stumble on your story, or has been following your series. That aside, one way to write evil into you plot is, ‘discovered evil’. Your character moves through the story with just an aura of bad, this lulls the reader into a sense of acceptance then this slightly bad guy or gal erupts in unrestrained evil and your reader is shocked and now reads to find out just how bad the bad guy really is.
In any story the protagonist is on a roller coaster. They’ll work through one problem and move on to the next, hopefully problems become more and more challenging. With ‘discovered evil’ the antagonist slowly emerges as creepy, bad, and evil. With correct placement the reader keeps turning the page to find out just how evil the antagonist really is and what evil challenge he or she has created for the hero. There are any number of ways to write discovered evil. The evil doer can be conducting some very nasty evil from a far, and so he or she may seem less evil. After all he doesn’t know what his evil minion are actually doing. However when they fail he may step in and do the evilest evil himself. Perhaps the evil guy has a distant background of evil, and maybe an evil that has been forgiven by the justice system or the victim. They may even be working on the side of the protagonist. The reader knows of their past evil but it seems to be in check. Then WHAM, at just the right moment ‘discovered evil’, and the reader shouts “I knew it.” Which is exactly what you the writer wants, to get the reader deeply involved in the story.
I opened this blog with the question; who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, or of writers. Indeed, you may question that you have enough evil in your soul to make the antagonist really bad, rest assured, you do. That evil may not reside in your soul however, but in your subconscious. How many scary movies have you watched, or horror stories have you read. And of placement, you already know how and where to place evil for the greatest shock value. Just think back to those movies and books and which ones took evil to that most shocking level. What the writer or screenwriter did was produce the greatest evil at the most inopportune time and place for the protagonist.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s the Shadow, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. And for the writer the evil lurks perhaps not in the heart, but in every crevice of the gray matter. And for every Jekle that sits down at the keyboard to write a story their lurks a Mr.Hyde just under the skin.