Hello and welcome to the Story Grid podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better

writer. I'm your host Tim Graal and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story

that works. Joining me shortly as Sean Coyne, he is a creator of Story Grid, the author of the

book Story Grid and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, I bring Sean a

question that I've been thinking about and some other people in the story grid community have

been talking about. And that is the nature of evil and how to make sure that you are coming up

with a really good and believable villain.

So I bring this question to Sean and he had some really good insight on it.

So let's jump in and get started.

So Sean, a question came up in the level up your craft community the other day and we've

been asked this a couple different times and then I feel like I'm even dealing with this a little bit with the threshing.

And it's this basic thing about the nature of evil.

And figuring out how to do a villain, especially when I'm thinking about action, right?

Because the villain is what drives

the action. That's who kicks off the story and all that kind of thing. But I feel like,

you know, but then there's always like the speech and praise of the villain, right? So there's

always a point where the villain gets to explain themselves and they, you know, make some good sense.

So when you're thinking about stories and villains, how do you step into this idea of evil

and what kind of direction do you take? And then I guess, how do you make sure you have an

actual compelling villain that is evil,

but also I don't know what the word would be, like sympathetic?

Right, right.

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