But that would be boring. Here are several ways to make it seem like a lone villain actually has a chance of winning.

1. Use minions.  Technically, this is cheating, but I won’t tell if you don’t.  You can always have your heroes fight your villain, and in between hundreds of nameless, faceless villains get in the way.  The best example of this is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Whilst they battle Shredder about 100 Foot Clan warriors usually jump in.

2. Give your heroes something else to do.  Defuse a bomb, free the hostages, stop the plane from crashing… if there is something else needing done, you can safely split your hero team, making it more plausible for your villain to win.  This also raises the excitement level by bringing in time limits.

3. Make your villain AWESOME.  What do I mean by awesome?  Simple.  Make your villain Neo from the third Matrix film, so ridiculously powerful that hundreds of Agent Smiths are required to do battle with him.  The downside to this is that when your heroes do win, it may look contrived.

4. Give your villain a weakness.  No, don’t be ridiculous, like kryptonite.  The best example of this I can think of is a big robot, totally unstoppable but very heavy.  In water it will sink and the water will get inside and frazzle its innards. The heroes could exploit that by getting the robot onto a bridge and taking the bridge out.  1 or 2 heroes as decoys, 2 or 3 to take out the bridge.

5. Add civilians.  Number 4 is going to be infinitely more exciting when the bridge is full of gridlocked rush hour traffic.  Can the heroes justify killing a few hundred innocents to save millions?  Do they have time to get everyone off the bridge?

6. Life gets in the way.  One of your heroes’ girlfriends is pregnant and in labour, one of your heroes is getting fired from work if he doesn’t go in today, one of…  you get the idea.  You don’t need the entire team to turn up for every battle, and sometimes it can be fun to have your hero sitting through the most humdrum situation ever… doctor’s appointment, parent’s night, job interview… and keep cutting back to the fight.

7. Use your environment.  The villain may have set traps, part of the ground might be unstable, the fight might be inside a burning building – these are all good ways to increase the difficulty for the heroes without increasing the number of villains or making them stupidly powerful.

8. Villains are bad. Seriously, it’s embarrassing how often in fiction villains act like heroes with a different agenda.  Let them lie, cheat and steal.  Let them watch camera-phone videos of the heroes posted on Youtube and work out their weaknesses.  Have a flaming hero?  Well, fire needs heat, fuel and oxygen – take away the oxygen and your hero just became powerless.  Have a superfast hero?  Put oil on the floor.

What do you think? What are some other ways to challenge teams with lone villains?

Some writers, particularly novice male authors like myself, tend to write fiction as a series of actions. That is generally a mistake. Although action can be used to engage readers, it can distract you from developing the characters, scenery and dialogue that make a story work.

A piece with too much action frequently reads like a movie script. The author provides little except for what is absolutely necessary to understand the action. Most pieces that begin with an action scene suffer from that problem. The author shows us a character, but frequently doesn’t take the time to establish why we should care about him or his plight.

Likewise, action movies often start with an unintroduced character doing something dramatic and usually dangerous. That does not translate well to novels because movie actors can use their presence to communicate who they are and why the audience should care. Furthermore, movies are inherently more visceral and less cerebral. A novel reader has to create a character from the group up with only the clues you provide.

Many novelists write in an action-dominated way because they fear that an audience will get bored of a character if “nothing happens”. Usually these authors are males and, if asked for examples of stories where “nothing happens,” will almost invariably give works written by females. I think guys are afraid that focusing on details like character and scenery early will make their work into chick lit. I’m only one guy, but I think that I absolutely have a problem with a surplus of action/character-growth vs. exposition and scene-setting.

I think that most action-dominated novelists tend to misunderstand the problem they’re trying to avoid. Pieces that are heavy on exposition/scenery tend to fail for the same reason as action-dominated pieces: the characters are not engrossing. Strong characters are a prerequisite to compelling action. Let me demonstrate this with a quick writing exercise for you: please take five minutes to write a quick fight scene between two guys. Let’s keep it short, at most 250 words.

I’ll give you some time to finish…

Finished?

I’ll be blunt with you. I am at least 95% sure that your action scene sucks. That prompt made it virtually impossible to write a scene that readers would care about. Re-read your fight scene.

WHY ARE THE CHARACTERS FIGHTING?

Your sample probably glossed over this, but it is the main question of any fight scene. Why. Why should we care who wins? Why does this fight matter? Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that you created a scene with a Protagonist punching the hell out of a Villain(s).  Fight scenes with faceless combatants are dreadfully boring.

Fellow Superhero Nation contributor Cadet Davis offers this rebuttal: “characters matter, obviously. However, I still think that my action scene is compelling even though we don’t know why the characters are fighting. In general, I would say that strong language and sentence craft can make a fight interesting even though the characters might be dull.”

I respect Cadet’s opinion, but he is absolutely wrong. You probably have a favorite fight scene. Did you enjoy the fight because the fight itself was memorable and the punches were described in great, vivid detail? Or did you enjoy it because the fight was a fitting climax to a conflict between two great characters? Let me put it another way. Have you ever enjoyed a literary fight between two mediocre characters? I would argue that it’s actually impossible to write a strong fight scene if the characters are disappointing.

Many fantasy authors seem to agree with Davis. Christopher Paolini, the author of Eragon, is a prime offender. Eragon’s climax is a siege similar to the Battle of Helm’s Deep (from Tolkein).

I thought that Paolini’s use of language was uncharacteristically strong in this scene. I found his descriptions of the dragon’s actions vivid, almost exciting. Regardless, the scene failed for several related reasons.

1. The battle was a climax to a banal conflict between an Evil emperor and his oppressed, Good subjects (led by Eragon). By the time Paolini’s battle started, it never could have been anything but an “epic” brawl between mobs of faceless Evil enemies against The Good Guys.
2. It failed to answer this question that had been bothering me since page 1 of Eragon: why is Eragon the hero of this book? There isn’t anything special about Eragon, anything that screams that this story and this world are unquestionably about him. The selection of him as the main character seems completely arbitrary. By contrast, the audience connection with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader was so strong—even though these characters were themselves archetypical!—that their fights felt intense and climactic even though the fights were technically middling.
3. The scene was like a rolling LOTR homage.

To recap, compelling action requires strong characters. Focusing too heavily on action is a problem because 1) we probably won’t care about whether the character lives and 2) we aren’t invested in his mission. It’s important to spend enough time on character, mood, scenery and world-building to immerse in the story, particularly the story’s conflicts. If we care about the conflict, it’s hard to write a bad fight scene.

I wish you the best in your writing endeavours. If you need beta-review assistance, please e-mail us at superheronation-at-gmail-dot-com. Good luck!