Do you find writing believable villains more simple or
more difficult than writing believable heroes? Why?
I find writing any character hard... at least until I "get" him or her. After that, it's pretty smooth sailing.
As far as making them believable, as long as they have drives and foibles and issues and quirks, people are people, villain or hero.
This is a valid point; you have to feel and know a character whether hero or villain before you can really write them well. And the villain might be a little harder for some people because most of us have a tendency to write him as a one-sided bad guide without digging deeper into his character because we have to remember he is human and he has motivations to do what he does, too. He is not just an object to drive the plot forward and spur the hero on, which is a function for him/her, but he ended up a villain due to something that shaped him/her in the past. This is where motive comes into play and where we have to build the villain as three-dimensional as we would the hero. The need to create a villain that readers love to hate. Take care!
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