louche (lo͞oSH) adjective
1. disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way.

Straight up, I understand how tedious it is when wannabe writers like myself deep-dive into discussions of their own characters from their own novels that no one has read and probably never will read. I get it.

I’m searching for a universal truth on Wordcraft Wednesday.

I hit a brick wall with my WiP. For 60,000 words the villains have been doing villainous things. But the reader has never really met the whole tribe of them gathered in the same Legion of Doom bunker at the same time. That is the next chapter I assigned myself to write. I’ve been watching the cursor blink for three weeks. Not a frickin’ word.

So, I’ve been researching the experts who are renowned for writing rich, textured villains. How do they do that voodoo they do?

Elmore Leonard (1925 – 2013). Elmore left us last year, but crimeny. That guy was a clinician at milking a richness of character out of his bad guys.

Mr. Leonard called them “my guys” and delighted in their affable amorality and pragmatic professionalism. He took special pride in the technical skills these gun dealers, loan sharks, bookies, thieves, grifters and mob enforcers brought to their trade. They may be criminals, but they know their business and they honor their work ethic.

“The bad guys are the fun guys,” Mr. Leonard acknowledged in a 1983 interview. “The only people I have trouble with are the so-called normal types. Their language isn’t very colorful, and they don’t talk with any certain sound.”

Source. 

My Beautiful Wife and I are working through the catalog of Justified episodes on Amazon Prime, originally airing on the FX Network. (Apparently it is the only film adaptation of Leonard’s work that he didn’t completely despise.) It’s rare that Marshall Givens squares the sight picture of his Glock 17 on someone who the viewer has not already seen as some subset of sentient human being. Elmore villains are complicated and funny and real… and often terrifying in spite of all the aforementioned humanity.

Flannery O’ Conner (1925 – 1964).  The Interwebs fail me. I can’t find an analysis of Flannery O’ Conner’s style as it influenced Elmore Leonard. Surely, I can’t be the first to see the genealogical tree of Lenordian villains branching directly from Flannery O’Conner? Dozens of articles on the way she influenced the Coen Brothers, sure, but not Elmore.  Hmmm.

Flannery respected her Southern characters in both trope and truth.

It’s hard not to connect with each of the three generations trapped together on a misguided car ride in A Good Man is Hard to Find.

When the family encounters the story’s antagonists, the matter-of-fact earnestness of the Misfit and his criminal gang gets as much character respect as the family did, even after the Misfit’s gang slaughter the entire family. They are just doing what they think they have to do. As Mario Puzo coined the phrase, “It ain’t personal. It’s just business.”

Sometimes the business of the villain is merely unfortunate to those innocents who find themselves in the way. A well-drawn villain isn’t on the prowl for innocents to harm. The well-drawn villain is devoid of the Bwaaah-ha-haaaaa! A well-drawn villain merely looks past the humanity of others to achieve their goals.

The villains of True Detective Season 1 were child-raping, blood-thirsty Satanists. They were as villainous as villains can get. But they were doing their evil deeds to curry favor with Satan. Their goal was the advantage of dark power to service mortal ambitions.  They wanted something we all can understand: Political power. Wealth. Influence. The path to that “something we understand” involved a shortcut that few of us want to endeavor to understand.

A writer doesn’t have to like his villains. He doesn’t have to yuck it up with his villains. He doesn’t have to be empathetic to his villains.

But he damn sure has to respect his villains.

To respect his villains he must understand them. I had to write a short story featuring my villains (as anti-heros) that will not appear in my WiP.

Weird, yes, but effective. I’m ready to make that blinking cursor blur. Wish me luck.