I hate the word villain.  The villain is the bad guy.  I like antagonist a lot better, because the antagonist is just the person or thing that opposes the protagonist.  A villain is somebody evil.  A lot of them are evil enough to be stand-ins for the devil, and unless you’re actually writing a Christian allegory, you don’t want your antagonists to be that pure in their badness.

I recently read The Kite Runner, and I could empathize with Amir even as he lied and destroyed the lives of those around him because I knew why he was doing it.  The Kite Runner’s major flaw was that I couldn’t do the same for Assef.  Assef was just a flat villain.  Amir and Assef both did bad things, but we only got to see Amir’s motives.  A better book would have given the motives for both sides and let us ponder things out.  Instead, Assef pretty much just did things because he was “evil and a bit off in the head.”  Boring.  The difference between a villain (bad) and a non-villain antagonist (good) is that a non-villain antagonist has reasonable motives.  Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t a single motive that would have made me like Assef as a person.  But a motive would have made him more than a one-dimensional OMG SOO EVUL character.  People like this do exist in real life, but they’re hard to write about without appearing flat and dull.

Every character has their own story.  Try to think how, if your antagonist were the POV character, you would make the readers sympathize with him or her.  In a good story, every character could possibly be a hero.  If you have an antagonist who could never be a good protagonist because their motives are too unsympathetic, I suggest changing them.

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