Villain Tips and pointers

The creation of a truly villainous character can become especially intense. Try writing about him in smaller chunks than you ordinarily would. If you don't take a small break every half-hour or so, you may find yourself absorbing a portion of the villain's negativity, which can affect your relationships with the people you care about.

Avoid the temptation to start a villain from one of the deadly sins. If you do, you'll end up with a parody of a bad guy instead of a true villain. It is one thing to end up with a character that is the epitome of a deadly sin. Just don't start there.

A good villain usually has plans or goals other than "bug the good guy". For example, the James Bond villains usually want to take over the world, or steal something valuable. Becoming Bond's enemy is a result of their goals, not their original goal. There are some villains that really only want to kill the hero, maybe for revenge, but that is the exception, and if you don't take care to create a credible goal for your villains, they will seem unconvincing and fake.
Try to make your villain three dimensional, by the end of the story, they reader should know why he or she is that way.

Avoid making the name stupid- for example, if the character is a wicked vampire/witch etc Queen, you would expect her to have a name like Iriadnea or something, not Jane. But if you are writing comedy, stick with a dull name as a sorta anti-climax.

You might never actually use the "turning point" in your end result, but remember: it's not there for the reader. It's intended for the writer to understand the character's motivations.

For a novel, you may wish to create several "turning points," but they should all reaffirm the initial incident in shining detail in the mind of the villain.
Think about motive. There is something the villain wants, or something he thinks must happen, and he has a belief, sometimes a fanatical belief, about what he thinks is necessary in order to attain this goal.

The villains that work the best are the ones where their motive may be basically understandable, but their ultimate goal and their processes are extremely twisted.
Subtlety is often better. Some of the best villains in fiction are those who believe, in absolute sincerity, that their actions are good and helpful to others. Such a villain's "turning point" might be a discovery that disturbs his smoothly running life, and his subsequent actions are only an attempt to correct matters. Such villains may end up violating their own ethics, believing that they are preserving the sanctity of said ethics!

Concerning names. Names for Heroes and Villains can set the mode for the personality of this villain or the genre of the story. Billy Bob Johnson might be a hill billy farmer who wants to take over the hero's family's land. Sir Oswald Walter Richardson III might be a rich tyrant who is intent on becoming the mayor of the city and turning a small town into a tourist resort, something the hero is against highly. Coco Bean might be the villain in a comical story who wants to create a kind of pie that will make anyone who eats it break out into fits of laughter at inappropriate moments. Be creative with names, they really help.