Embracing Our Villain Eras: On Writing a Complicated Villain with Megan Kamalei Kakimoto—Feb. 1

A villain can be one of the most challenging characters to write—and also one of the most enjoyable.

Together, we’ll explore the sliding scale of villainy, from the morally bankrupt to the morally ambiguous, while letting empathy guide our thoughts, discussions, and writing practice.

We all like to believe ourselves inherently good. Yet characters, just like the people who write them, contain multitudes—especially those characterized as villains. A complicated villain draws both empathy and anger from our readers, and we must get comfortable with a little productive discomfort if we are to create a believable villain.

In this seminar, we will examine the sliding scale of villainy along with craft techniques and various approaches to creating productive discomfort by studying the works of Danielle Evans, Lauren Groff, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Kate Folk, and we will bring these lessons to our own complicated villains through writing exercises. All the while, we will let empathy guide our authorial decisions in respect to our complicated, compelling, and ultimately human villains.

What you will learn

• How to create productive discomfort in our fiction (rather than disgust or repulsion). 

• How to use beginnings and endings of stories to influence the way our villainous characters may be received. 

• How to navigate the subjective midpoint between productive discomfort and taking care. 

• How to afford our characters the full range of their humanities.

Workshop takeaways

• An expanded understanding of the sliding scale of villainy.

• How to implement specific craft techniques to craft complicated and compelling villainous characters. 

• A strengthened practice of close reading a text. 

• A series of writing exercises and reading recommendations related to the workshop. 

• An opportunity to share and discuss your work with a community of writers.

Additional info

This workshop will be recorded for the convenience of those unable to attend live. The recorded session will be emailed to participants the following day.

About the Instructor

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. Named a Fall 2023 “Writer to Watch” by Publisher’s Weekly, she has received the “Author Under 35” Award by the HONOLULU Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her work has been supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and a Lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.