Lit Fest 2025

The art of making satisfying villains, and the art of saying something new about bad, banal acts—all this can be tricker than it appears. How do we capture the reality of sinister characters without caricature? How do we dramatize bad behavior without glamorizing it or sermonizing, charting a course between theology and pathology? When is it worth separating bad people from bad acts? How do we steer clear of stereotypes? With so much real-life villainy afoot, with readers turning to books both for solace and for answers, these questions feel urgent as ever. Let's have a look at what successful stories have done, and how they've done it, and let's try a bunch of exercises together to make an old problem new.