Educational Antagonists: by Angie Powers

NaNoWriMo is underway. For those of you still chugging along – Congratulations! It’s a huge thing to do. It’s funny that we need an outside structure sometimes to make us do what we burn to do. Rather than bemoan the fact, I’m glad that there are so many wonderful structures out in the world to help us get where we want to go. And the best structures often terrify us, force us out of our comfort zone, push us to be more than we ever considered we could be.  Hmmm. Sounds like a great antagonist to me.

I can hear a certain number of you saying, “Wait. Antagonists are obstacles. They are the ones pushing the protagonist away from her goal. The opponent.”

And to that I say, Yeah, exactly.

I had the wonderful opportunity to go to the Cinestory Retreat in Idyllwild. While there, I was exposed to a great number of wonderful, thoughtful teachers and business people from the film industry. There are many things that stick with me from that experience (and if you write screenplays, do consider applying. It’s an awesome experience) but one that sticks out most is from Meg LaFauve. To paraphrase, an antagonist is the one person who can truly push the antagonist to change. There is a relationship there.

So yes, the antagonist creates obstacles, but they are meaningful obstacles. In a romance, the love interest often IS the antagonist. Why? Because that is the relationship that pushes a character to change the most. And it hurts.

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

In Arthurian legend, Guinevere is the antagonist. She gets a bum rap, but there you go. Mordred might be plotting and scheming – he IS the bad guy, but it is Guinever’s actions that push Arthur to examine his world and his response is ultimately what destroys it.

You could argue that in Emma Donahue’s Room, the mother is actually the protagonist (though not the narrator) and the child is the antagonist — that is, his arrival pushes her to seek escape and to not stop when she had given up before. The person who captured/imprisoned her is the bad guy, for sure, and created the box that held her, but her child and his needs are what drive her to do more than she would have done for herself. Yes, the captor pushes, but the child matters.

And sometimes the bad guy IS the antagonist, but the obstacles are still relevant. The Joker in Batman is probably the ultimate antagonist for him. The Joker represents chaos —  he isn’t driven by greed; his singular goal is to upset and unsettle. Batman is all about control, order. Joker, then, pushes him to examine himself and his world view.

And in anything that has to do with big non-specific things — those stories that are person vs. Nature, person vs. Society, you still have characters who personify/represent some part of the antagonist if it’s nature or society. But — Nature and Society as antagonists still have to be relevant — who is your protagonist and what do they need to learn?

So today — take a minute and think about what your protagonist is and what they need to learn.

1) Brainstorm 5 ways the antagonist is ideally suited to pushing that character to their limit.

2) Now brainstorm 5 obstacles that your antagonist can throw at your protagonist that go right for the gut.

3) Use that list to get yourself out of a writing jam if you can’t figure out what to write next, or order them in level of escalation and use it as a guide from here on out.

Let me know how this worked for you!