I finally cracked the code on writing villain backstories

Used to just write 'they were betrayed once' and call it a day, which made for super flat characters. Then I tried this trick from a Brandon Sanderson lecture at BYU: pick one specific childhood memory and build the whole turn from that. Like for my last story, the villain grew up watching his dad lose everything in a flood in 2008, so now he hoards power. Anyone else got a go-to method for making bad guys feel real instead of cartoonish?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessawebb4d ago

Wait wait wait. Did you just say you picked a SPECIFIC real-world flood from 2008? Like the one that wiped out half of Cedar Rapids? That's wild, man. I mean, I get the idea of using a concrete event to make things hit harder, but pulling from something that real feels almost too real. Most people just make up some vague storm or betrayal, they don't drop a literal historical disaster into their fantasy villain's backstory. It's a gutsy move but it gives me the creeps a little, like you're using people's actual suffering for your D&D campaign or whatever. Still, I gotta admit it probably makes that character stick in your head way more than some generic tragic origin. Not sure I could pull that off without feeling like a jerk though.

iris_park4d ago

Is it really that serious though? People pull inspiration from all kinds of real world stuff all the time, movies, books, news articles. It's fiction, nobody's saying the flood was caused by a dnd villain.