Why Every Book Needs a Hero and Villain

One of the first exercises I take students through when teaching writing is to compel them to name their chief hero and villain. Yes, even if they are writing works of nonfiction. To do so is to make a giant leap forward in the whole process of writing a book.

We all think of heroes and villains in the fiction world—the good guys vs. the bad guys. But heroes and villains live in all books, from ghostly sci-fi thrillers to guides to gardening and gastronomy. Identifying your main hero and villain is essential in the early stages of writing a manuscript or piecing a proposal together. You can have more than one of each, but typically there’s a chief hero and villain you cannot ignore. They are the driving force of any book—the secret sauce to suspense and sustaining a reader’s attention to the very end.

How do you identify who these “characters” are in your book?

Now here’s the twist: Your hero or villain needn’t be an individual with a real name. They can be totally unhuman or invisible. A hero or villain can be an ingredient (e.g., gluten), a movement or trend (i.e., #metoo), a way of thinking (e.g., leftist), a habit or behavior (e.g., following a keto diet), or a status quo (e.g., climate change). The sky’s the limit; no boundaries exist in naming a hero or villain. Sometimes the heroes and villains are diametric opposites of each other or subtly go hand in hand like yin and yang. And sometimes they are less clear cut, counterintuitive, or surprising, or don’t totally reveal themselves until late in the story. Think of the last nonfiction book you read and try to name its hero and villain.

Memoirs, for example, often tell the “hero’s journey” of transformation by an author who must overcome obstacles and face enemies on the road to reward, renewal, and perhaps redemption. But memoirists might see the main hero and villain more so within their own internal thinking and behaviors than with the external circumstances and people or adversaries who get in their way on the journey. Nothing wrong with that. In Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, the chief villain is obvious: a “phone-based childhood” in the virtual world (and, by extension, an epidemic of mental illness among teens). The hero is also clear: the physical world and a “play-based childhood.” On works that dispense advice, the hero is the antidote to the villain. For one more example, consider any diet book you’ve read. It certainly had some villain or tribe of bad guys—foods and ingredients you’d do well to limit or avoid (e.g., sugar, carbs)—and the solution is the hero, usually a program to follow (e.g., low-carb, intermittent fasting).

So, who or what is your villain? And who or what will come save the day?