Villain Origin Stories
As a gardener I often start with the metaphors of seeds and compost for my story creation process but I really don’t think those are appropriate when it comes to villains. They are more like distillations or concentrations. For a good villain you do have to remember they’re human (assuming they are and we’re not in a supernatural horror story here of course) and they do think they’re right, they’re justified, they are the good guy in their own world. But at the same time we do need to enjoy them a bit as a bad guy and they need to be intense in some way. It’s a fine line to walk and whether we’ve been successful or not is always going to be largely in the eyes of the reader.
So who inspired my main villain Mr Darner?
No-one from my personal life, thankfully! But there are a gazillion petty tyrants in the world, and a few major ones and they all think they’re right, that they are only taking what’s theirs by rights. They’re all across the news every day. Cult leaders and their tactics are a group that particularly inspired me; Jim Jones, David Koresh, the attack therapy of Synanon.
Perhaps most surprisingly, my most direct inspiration for Mr Darner was a man who doesn’t seem to have been a villain at all. I found Father Arthur Osborne Jay in the pages of Sarah Wise’s ‘The Blackest Streets: the Life and Death of a Victorian Slum’. Father Jay was a charismatic thorn in the side of the establishment church. He ran boxing clubs to keep the men sober and off the streets. He ran a homeless shelter in his church basement and slept among the men himself. Sarah Wise’s book is excellent and as a real character, Father Jay stands out. The key part though, is that a man like that, with huge personal magnetism and working in the poorest of areas among desperate people, could very well have nefarious motives.
There’s no evidence, as far as I know, that was the case for Father Jay. But Mr Darner? Well, he’s not a very nice man at all!