Everyone thinks they’re empathetic.
Ask a writer if they understand people different from themselves and they’ll say yes. Of course. That’s the job. They’ll tell you they care about perspectives outside their own, that they believe in nuance, that they reject simple binaries of good and evil.
They’re usually lying. Not deliberately—they believe it. But performed empathy can be a shield from truly understanding the mechanisms behind rendering complex psychology on the page.
Here’s what I mean: claiming you understand people who think differently costs nothing. It’s an identity badge, a way to signal sophistication without doing the actual work. You can call yourself radically empathetic while never once inhabiting a worldview that genuinely threatens your own.
The tell is always in the writing.
If your antagonist exists only to be wrong, that is, to be defeated and confirm the reader’s existing moral universe, you haven’t written a character. You’ve written a scarecrow stuffed with everything you despise, propped up so your protagonist can knock it down.
Scarecrows don’t reveal anything about the villain. They reveal the author. They say: I don’t understand people who disagree with me. I’ve never tried. I don’t intend to start.
The Method Acting Frame
Stanislavski’s “magic if” is usually taught to actors. It belongs to writers, too.
I discuss the extensive overlap in another post:
The technique is simple: you don’t observe the character from outside. You don’t describe what they do and assign reasons for it. You ask yourself, instead, If I were this person, with this history, in this situation, what would I do?
Not what would a villain do. What would I do, if I had lived their life.
This is the difference between watching a character and inhabiting one. Most writers watch. They describe behavior, assign motivations, move figures through plot like chess pieces. The character does cruel things because the story needs cruelty. The character wants power because wanting power is what antagonists do. It’s all mechanical. You can see the author’s hand on every lever.
Method writing requires you to disappear into the logic. To find the internal coherence that makes choices feel inevitable from inside the skull. Not justified. Not excused. Inevitable. The character couldn’t have done otherwise, because this is who they are, and you know that because you’ve been them.
This is uncomfortable. It means genuinely understanding why someone would do things you find repugnant. You have to find the version of yourself that could make that choice. The version that exists under different pressures, different wounds, different circumstances.
This is generally understood but recently conflated with “if you write this you must be this” illiteracy. But that did come from somewhere and it’s fascinating to see that actors, enacting the same technique, are understood to be playing a role, where writers are—increasingly—not.
When I write institutional antagonists, I can’t make them stupid. I can’t make them cartoonishly corrupt. I have to ask: why would I stay loyal to a system I knew was broken? And the answer is always human. Because I built my identity inside it. Because leaving would mean admitting my life was wasted. Because the structure gives me purpose and status I couldn’t find elsewhere. Because I’m afraid of who I am without it.
That’s not villainy. That would only be me albiet under different pressures.
Most writing stays shallow because this work is genuinely hard. It requires psychological risk from the author. You have to touch the parts of yourself that could become the thing you fear. And most people would rather write scarecrows than look that closely.
The Psychology Gap
Most writers don’t have a functional model of why people do things.
They work from types. Surface behavior. Tropes inherited from other fiction. Their villains are cruel because villains are cruel. Their heroes are brave because heroes are brave. The psychology goes exactly one layer deep, which is to say it doesn’t go anywhere at all.
I came to writing through intelligence analysis. Specifically, the part of the job that requires you to model how people think, what they want, and what they’ll do next. You learn fast that humans don’t operate on logic. They operate on attachment, insecuriy and wounds they don’t examine. You learn that the difference between instrumental aggression and hostile aggression changes everything about how someone behaves. You learn that shame drives more destruction than guilt ever could, because guilt says I did something bad and shame says I am bad. Guilt can be repaired. Shame has to be defended.
This isn’t all just academia. When you understand attachment theory, you understand why your character clings to someone who hurts them. When you understand defense mechanisms, you can write denial that feels lived-in rather than convenient for the plot. When you understand narcissistic wounding, you can write a villain whose cruelty makes sense. Not excusable, never excusable. But that is not the point. Sense and coherency is.
Without psychology, characters are assembled from parts. The brooding loner. The power-hungry tyrant. The cold manipulator. You’ve seen these figures a thousand times because writers keep grabbing the same pieces off the shelf and stitching them together. The result is a character that functions, technically, but never surprises. Never feels like a person who might exist off-page. Those can haunt.
With psychology, characters become inevitable. The reader can trace the forces that made them. They recoil from the outcome but they understand the machinery. They can’t dismiss the villain as simply evil, because they’ve seen the path. They know, in some uncomfortable way, that the path was walkable. That anyone could have walked it, given the right wounds and the wrong circumstances.
The gap shows most clearly in antagonists. A psychologically literate writer can articulate why their villain believes they’re correct. An illiterate one just makes them cruel and calls it characterisation.
Why This Is Hard or: The Ego Problem
Here’s a truth: most writers only create characters they’d want to be friends with.
Protagonists get the author’s best qualities, or the qualities the author wishes they had. They’re brave when it counts. Kind beneath the rough exterior. Misunderstood but ultimately good. The protagonist is a wish-fulfillment proxy, the author’s idealised self moving through a world that will eventually recognise their worth. And even the most “anti-hero” is really just a soft, fuzzy thing that oh-so-secretly wants cuddles and love.
Antagonists get the opposite treatment. They become receptacles. Everything the author fears, despises, or refuses to examine in themselves gets poured into the villain. The result is a figure that exists only to be Other. Easy to hate. Morally uncomplicated. Safely distant from anything the author might have to own.
This is projection wearing a plot.
The problem isn’t that it’s lazy—though it is. The problem is what it reveals. When your villain is cardboard, you’re telling the reader something about yourself. You’re saying: I have never genuinely inhabited a worldview I find threatening. I’ve never asked what it would take to make me into someone I despise. I don’t understand people who disagree with me, and I’ve decided that’s their failure, not mine.
That’s not really characterisation, is it.
And I know that if you’ve read this far you’re the likely sort to agree and so, perhaps, I’m preaching to the choir when I say this but: Your work will be so much more impactful if you don’t merely use your own ideology to build characters around but rather use it to inform your exploration of another.
Or your cast will be inhabited by a dozen flavours of you. A dozen flavours of, perhaps, your most palatable beliefs.
The ego wants safety. It wants to write heroes who validate your self-image and villains who confirm your moral superiority. It resists the method acting work because that work is threatening. To do it you must admit the villain is in you somewhere. You have to find that seed and water it enough to watch it grow. Most people would rather not know what flowers.
The Formula Problem or: Where Shallow Writing Comes From
This is where formula fantasy fails hardest.
You know the shape. The Dark Lord wants power because Dark Lords do that. The villain is cruel because cruelty is villainy and villainy requires cruelty. There’s no interiority. No sense that this person believes in what they’re doing. No coherent psychology beneath the armor and the speeches about domination or snapping or whatever else.
The villain exists because the structure requires a villain. That’s it. That’s the explanation.
I won’t name specific books, but you already know the ones I mean. The villains who monologue about darkness and power as though those are motivations rather than aesthetics. The antagonists who do evil things for evil reasons, tautologically, because the author never stopped to ask what a real person would want in that position. You’ve read these books. You might have loved them when you were young enough not to notice the scaffolding.
The result reads like fiction written by someone who has never met a human being with genuinely different values. And certainly not from out behind a keyboard while blocking and calling them a bigot or phobe or whatever emotionally satisfies them that they did the right thing not trying to understand them.
Really, people we disagree with aren’t always wrong, but rather are someone who arrived at their conclusions through a coherent process you could follow if you but tried. The villains in formula fiction aren’t people. They’re obstacles. Abstractions to be overcome so the hero can complete their arc.
This is what happens when writers skip the psychological work. When empathy stays performative. When the ego protects itself from the contamination of genuinely understanding the opposition. You get villains who function mechanically but collapse under the slightest scrutiny. Who exist to be defeated rather than understood.
And readers feel it, even when they can’t name it. They finish the book and forget the antagonist’s name by the following week. Nothing lingers. Nothing haunts. The villain was never real enough to leave a mark and no amount of CGI or dramatic prose can make that less true.
The Craft Principle
If you can only write characters you like, you’re not writing fiction. You’re writing propaganda for your ego.
So then the work is to understand people. All of them. Including the ones whose existence makes you uncomfortable, whose beliefs threaten yours, whose choices you find repugnant. Psychology gives you the scaffolding: the attachment styles, the defense mechanisms, the shame and wound and compensation that drive human behavior beneath the surface. Method acting gives you the practice: the discipline of asking what would I do rather than what would a villain do.
The result is characters who feel like they exist independently of your approval. Who breathe on the page because you’ve breathed through them. Whose interiority is so coherent that readers can’t dismiss them, can’t write them off, can’t maintain comfortable distance.
I’ve written before about what this produces on the page.
This essay is about what it requires from the author. The psychological risk. The ego dissolution. The willingness to find the villain inside yourself and understand them well enough to write them true.
The alternative is children’s morality plays. Stories where the good people are good because they’re like you, and the bad people are bad because they’re not. Safe. Predictable. Forgettable.
You can write that if you want. But don’t mistake it for craft.
Next : Why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Game of the Year win matters for worldbuilders, and the uncomfortable question the game asks anyone who builds fictional worlds.
Fair winds,
D. S. Black