Empowering Antagonists

Notes from “The Fire in Fiction” 

Cardboard villains don’t scare us. Stereotypical antagonists lack teeth. By contrast, an antagonist who is human, understandable, justified, and even right will stir in your readers the maximum unease. In creating antagonists, reject the idea of evil. Make them good. Make them active. Bring them on stage and into your protagonist’s face. An antagonist who merely lurks isn’t doing much for your story. 

Step 1: Find five ways and times at which your antagonist will directly engage your protagonist. 

Step 2: Write out your antagonist’s opinion of your protagonist. What does your antagonist like about your protagonist? How does your antagonist want to help your protagonist? What advice does your antagonist have? 

Step 3: How can your antagonist be summarized or defined? A boss? A senator? A mother-in-law? List five stereotypes associated with such a type. Find one way in which your antagonist is exactly the opposite. 

Step 4: Create four actions that will make your antagonist warm and sympathetic. 

Step 5: Assume that your antagonist is justified and right. Make her case in writing. Find times in history when things ran her way and were good. Find a passage from theology, philosophy, or folk wisdom that supports your antagonist’s outlook. Choose one character whom your antagonist will win over. In what way does your protagonist agree with your antagonist?

Protagonist versus Heroes

Excerpt from The Fire in Fiction

 

FINDING A PROTAGONIST’S STRENGTHS

Step 1: Is your protagonist an ordinary person? Find in him any kind of strength.

Step 2: Work out a way for that strength to be demonstrated within your protagonist’s first five pages.

Step 3: Revise your character’s introduction to your readers

Without a quality of strength on display, your readers will not bond with your protagonist.

FINDING A HERO’S FLAWS

Step 1: Is your protagonist a hero—that is, someone who is already strong? Find in him something conflicted, fallible, humbling, or human.

Step 2: Work out a way for that flaw to be demonstrated within your protagonist’s first five pages.

Step 3: Revise your character’s introduction to your readers. Be sure to soften the flaw with self-awareness or self-deprecating humor.

To make heroes real enough to be likeable, it’s necessary to make them a little bit flawed. However, this flaw cannot be overwhelming.

THE IMPACT OF GREATNESS

Step 1: Does your story have a character who is supposed to be great? Choose a character (your protagonist or another) who is, has been, or will be affected by that great character.

Step 2: Note the impact on your point-of-view character. In what ways is she changed by the great character? How specifically is her self-regard or actual life different? Is destiny involved? Detail the effect.

Step 3: Write out that impact in a paragraph. It can be backward looking (a flashback frame) or a present moment in exposition.

Step 4: Add that paragraph to your manuscript.

Greatness is not always about esteem. Those affected by great people may be ambivalent. Whatever the case in your story, see if you can shade the effect of your great character to make it specific and capture nuances. The effect of one character upon another is as particular as the characters themselves.