On Writing the Villain You Want

People who do not read dark romance ask me, sometimes politely, why the love interest is the villain.

The honest answer is: because in this genre, the villain is the interesting one. He is the one with the most to lose, the most to give up, the most to change. A hero who is good from page one has nowhere to go. A villain who is dangerous on page one has the entire book in front of him.

But — and this is the part that matters — a villain is not a monster. The difference is the work of the genre.

The four rules I write by

I am not interested in writing a hero who is just bad. I am interested in writing a man who is capable of being bad, who has been bad to other people, who could be bad to her — and who chooses, in the small moments and the big ones, to be something else with her, on purpose.

The rules I follow:

One: the line. Every morally grey hero has one thing he will not do. Not because he is too good. Because the line is his. He chose it. The heroine finds it. The book is built around her finding it.

Two: agency, hers. The villain is dangerous. The heroine is not stupid. She is, in fact, sharper than anyone else in the room — including him. The romance does not work if she is only a thing being done to. The romance works because she is choosing him, on purpose, knowing.

Three: cost. What he is, costs him. Every choice he makes for her is also a choice against the empire he built or inherited. The reader has to see the cost. The cost is the whole point.

Four: consent. I write content warnings the way I write love letters — carefully, at the top of the book, in detail. The reader knows what they signed up for. The reader gets the book they came for. Dark romance is a contract; the writer keeps it.

What I will not write

A villain who is fixed by love. A heroine who is broken into shape by him. A scene that requires the reader to swallow a violation without knowing it was coming. A book that uses dark as an excuse to skip the work.

The morally grey hero is not the absence of a moral compass. He is a compass pointing somewhere else, with one person on the planet he will choose to walk toward.

That’s the book. That’s the whole book.