An Easy Way To Create Your Superhero Fiction: Start With Your Villain and Work Backwards
What’s the most difficult part of creating a piece of superhero fiction? Or any fiction at all, really?
Is it the plot? Is it the characters? Is it the setting?
Yes.
It’s all of it.
People create entire worlds, but never get an actual storyline going. People create elaborate plotlines, but with dull, lifeless robots instead of characters. People map characters onto themes as part of a commentary of the human condition, but don’t know what to actually do with any of it.
To tell a compelling story, you don’t get to omit any of these things. You have to get all of these parts down pat, and you have to put them all together in a cohesive narrative.
But anyone who’s ever wanted to write a story but didn’t have a shred of an idea in mind knows that that’s a pretty tall order. Let’s say you know you want to write a superhero story. Okay, how do you know anything about your superhero? Their origin? Their villains?
I’ve been in this scenario before. The BLUE EAGLE universe isn’t my first foray into fiction writing. My first go at it was at the age of 17. And all I had were some cool action scenes, a barebones plot, and insufferable then-modern slang-talking characters. Because I was 17.
It’s hard to get your storyline, your characters, and everything else on an individual level. It’s hard to ensure your audience understands your characters and it’s hard to ensure that your universe stays consistent and free of plot holes.
But what if I told you that there was an easy way to create your story? A way to get most of the necessary elements of your story set up, working in unison, and relatively free of plot holes and contradictions?
What is this easy way to create your story? Start with your villain and work backwards.
Why Start With Your Villain?
It sounds so counterintuitive, right? Shouldn’t you start with your hero and go from there?
Honestly, full disclosure: I did. But then I didn’t have anything to do with him. What adventures would I send him on? What dangers would he face? Making things up as they go could work for smaller, more episodic stories, but not for elaborate serials.
But starting with your villain? That character is the catalyst for your entire story! What are the Fantastic Four doing if Doctor Doom isn’t plotting some sinister scheme? What would the Green Lantern Corps be up to if Sinestro’s Yellow Corps weren’t up to something?
Would there be a Lord of the Rings if Sauron weren’t trying to get his hands on the One Ring? A Sherlock Holmes mystery if Professor Moriarity didn’t have some ingenious machination at play? A Halo if the Covenant wasn’t trying to exterminate humanity?
Even if you get the basic concept and backstory of your superhero down first, start with your main villain and work backward from there. Understand their motivation and goals, their plan, and how their plan will be foiled.
Whatever your hero’s own wants and fears, they will be acting entirely in the context of the supervillain’s evil plans. Regardless of whether they want self-respect, to be a hero, to get the girl/boy, or to be free of a debt, they will find themselves at odds with the supervillain.
If you can understand your villain, what they want, and what they’ll do to get it, so much of your story just starts to fit into place.
It can even give you something to work with for your superhero. Maybe there was something missing from your superhero’s origin or goals that can now work with the broader narrative because you’ve fleshed out the story a bit more.
Perhaps your hero and villain are two sides of the same coin. Thematic opposites? Actual opposites?
How did your superhero get their powers? From a freak accident? Maybe it wasn’t a freak accident. Maybe it was the result of an experiment run by the supervillain to gain power.
Why does your superhero fight crime? Because their father was a police officer killed by a criminal? Well, maybe the father was actually a detective coming dangerously close to catching the supervillain, and the villain killed him.
Is your superhero a refugee from another planet? Perhaps instead of the planet self-destructing, it was destroyed by the supervillain.
The point is that your villain’s plans and motivation might only seem like a small part of the larger whole, but it’s not something that exists in isolation. It can act as a gravitational center for your superhero’s motivation and origin, for the internal conflicts that take place, for all sorts of things.
Start with your villain and work backwards. Trust me when I tell you that you’ll be shocked by how well everything falls into place.
A Practical Guide to Villainy
There’s a right way and a wrong way to start with your villain and work backwards, of course.
For the purpose of this approach, the wrong way is to approach creating your supervillain the way you would approach creating any other character: Name, appearance, powers, origin.
Instead, you want to start with their plans. Actually, scratch that. You want to start with their goals.
It might seem a bit off to start writing up the evil plans of a supervillain when you may not have much more than a name, if even that. But due to the nature of supervillainy, it’s actually easier than you might think.
Because every villain wants to either destroy the universe, take over the world, or kill the hero. Or some combination or variation thereof.
So you can take that classic one-dimensional desire and flesh it out or deconstruct it.
And you do that by asking questions. And sub-questions to those questions.
What does the villain want?
Why does the villain want it?
What are the villain’s plans to acquire it?
Why doesn’t the villain just use X to achieve it?
How will the villain’s plan fail?
Why doesn’t the villain just use Y to compensate?
And when I say ask these questions, I mean quite literally ask these questions. Get a piece of paper or start up a document and type them out with bullet points. Use indentation to indicate a line of questioning.
You can go from nothing to a full fledged character with a sinister scheme–and thus the main plot of your superhero fiction–in surprisingly little time.
As a matter of fact, let’s do this together.
Creating a Villain on the spot
Yes, that’s right, we’re gonna put my money where my keyboard is and create a villain on the spot.
And I truly do mean “on the spot”. No prep, no nothing. We’re gonna make this up as we go. And the idea is that by developing our supervillain’s plan, that will open the door to easier development of all other parts of a hypothetical story.
In other words, this could be the springboard of an entire work of superhero fiction.
So let’s begin, shall we?
Name: Slay Fever
What is his ultimate goal?: To control the criminal underworld of Crime City.
Why does he want to do this?: Crime City is a place with no rules, or at least, no “legitimate” ones. The strong make the rules, and with enough power, Slay Fever can ensure that no one ever rises to hurt him again. During his earlier years as a low level gangster, his family was killed by Don Macaroni’s men. The Don was untouchable, and had vast influence over the city and enjoyed great wealth while Slay had to keep his head down and his mouth shut if he wanted to enjoy a life of tolerable poverty. Since then, he’s worked his way up through the Macaroni Family, and he plans to be the boss of the Family and command their vast wealth and resources in order to become essentially a king.
What is his plan to do this?: He will orchestrate a series of killings of high ranking Family members that implicate the maligned superhero, Mighty Mace. With the ranks of the Family thinning out and the Don getting more paranoid, Slay will be able to get closer to the Don and earn his trust. He will persuade the Don to allow him to set up a sting operation, of sorts, staging a weapons or drug sale to lure Mace to a predetermined location where all available forces will be waiting for him. With the Don’s security diverted, he will kill the Don himself and frame Don’s lieutenant, N.O. (Number One). With N.O. being whacked by the Family in retaliation, Slay will claim leadership of the Family.
Why doesn’t he just kill the Don outright?: He will then have the full might of the Macaroni Family descending upon him, which is the last thing he wants. He needs to be in a position to take leadership, and that means earning the mens’ trust, killing the leader, and framing the XO.
Why involve Mighty Mace at all?: In order to earn the Don’s trust, there has to be something the Don fears. If it’s believed that Mace is targeting Family officers, then the Family is going to put their full might behind fighting back. That means resources and security directed elsewhere, and that means fear-bred trust in someone like Slay. Plus, the full force of the Family descending on Mace takes out a potentially dangerous superhero threat.
How will the plan fail?: Through his own investigation, Mighty Mace will learn that the killing of the Family officers is an inside job. He will persevere against the attempt by the Family to kill him. He will then confront Slay in private. In natural supervillain fashion, Slay reveals what he’s done and why. They battle and Slay will be victorious after the battle spills into the view of the rest of the Family. When Slay orders Mace’s death, Mace will reveal that he recorded their conversation and play it for the Family to hear. The Family will kill Slay instead, and the injured Mace gets away, though with the Family splintered and broken, taking them down later will be easy.
We’ll stop it there for now, but look at that. We’ve set up a character with some semblance of a backstory, motivation, and have ourselves the outline of a full story. High ranking mobsters getting killed. Our superhero doing an investigation while being framed and hunted by a powerful criminal organization. A full scale manhunt for the hero. A “darkest hour” moment that sends him on the run. A climactic confrontation.
It’s far from complete, but we’ve got ourselves the beginnings of a full story there!
And we can go back and tweak things. I don’t want to change anything since the whole point was essentially to free-write, but we can certainly add and modify things to flesh out the story even more. Maybe Mighty Mace and Slay Fever are brothers who went down different paths after the deaths of their family at the hands of Don Macaroni. Maybe Slay stayed under the radar as not to attract his brother’s attention. Maybe Mighty Mace refuses to kill his brother because of their blood ties, but has no problem allowing a faux “Family” to do it for him. And note the juxtaposition between their blood relationship and the large Family that Slay has at his disposal.
Ooh, could Slay have been killing the Family members in secret, but framed Mace after the latter rejected his brother’s offer to rule the city together? Could he harbor hatred toward Mace for not feeling the same burning hatred for Don Macaroni, for not using his powers to outright those who took their family from them? Could they–
We can go on forever. But you get the point.
It’s not that we created an entire story. But by starting with our villain, we have a framework to attach everything else to. Everything our superhero does–and all the growth they experience–will always be in the context of the trials and obstacles the supervillain places in their way.
Final Thoughts
You saw it live. Well, not live. But in real time. No, that’s what “live” means.
You’ll have to take my word for it.
But you did see it. An easy way to create your story. Start with your villain and work backwards. It all falls into place from there.
Of course, you’ll be heavily in the plotting stages and probably going to have a lot of stuff to write down. Don’t have 100,000-word documents with haphazard notes on your computer. You’ll be better off with a writing software that allows you organize your story and refer to them later. Or maybe you’re really good and you don’t need that. I dunno.
But regardless, starting with your supervillain and working backwards is an easy way to create a superhero story, no matter how simple or complex it is.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!