I took a quick spin through my stories and discovered, as I suspected I would, that very few of them have a traditional villain. Catsignal appears in black on white, but the stories are in varying shades of gray.
Suzannah Freeman reminds us why villains are villains and what villains do in a story. David B. Coe writes about how the traditional villain has given way to a more nuanced character as well as the greater use in fiction of the anti-hero. He tells us about some of the villains in his stories and how he made them believable.
Melissa Donovan sees villains everywhere she looks, which is an approach I appreciate and have used. Similarly, Marie Brennan suggests that rather than out-and-out villains, we can set up antagonists for our protagonists. Her line of thinking seems to be along the same lines as what Brannon Braga has said: “The key to writing villains is to make them feel that they are the heroes of the piece.” Before that, Robert A. Heinlein’s Lazarus Long said, in part, “Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes.” That’s also useful for writers to remember.
Kurt Vonnegut, in one of his long introductions to one of his novels, writes that a reader once told him that there weren’t any villains in his novels. He realized this was true. I think that’s one thing I like about Vonnegut.
Shakespeare is full of villains, and Iago (in Othello) might be the most dastardly of them all. Even in soliloquy, when by convention the character can only speak the truth as he sees it, Iago seems completely evil and unsympathetic. Shakespeare seems to me to pull this off, but in general I’m with Heinlein.