The Character Sympathy Hack

Today while driving I listened to the most recent episode of Writing Excuses, one of my favorite writing podcasts. The episode was titled Three Pronged Character Development, and you NEED to listen to it.

Adventures in Evil

The subject of villains came up between me and another writer friend who is plotting an arc for a very virtuous, idealistic, squeaky-clean sort of fellow who eventually turns entirely batsh*t-crazy-evil. How does one go about this? How do you convincingly portray the loss of respect for life that is necessary in this kind of Villain With a Capital V? …