1.04 The Antagonist

We’ve talked about protagonists, building character arcs and romantic interests, but there is one category of load bearing characters that we’ve neglected to discuss in depth, and that is the antagonist.

In some novels, this will be a singular villain. In others it’s a concept, an environment, the local status quo. Unlike a protagonist, who needs to be a tangible entity that makes choices that affect the novel, your antagonist doesn’t technically need to be a person at all. They can be, of course, and you can use many of the same guidelines in building protagonists to craft them. But if you find yourself in an early brainstorming stage and don’t want to fall into the well-trodden trope of a dastardly, mustache-twirling baddie, keep yourself open to the idea that the driving force working against your main characters need not have a pulse.

Because the antagonist is unique in this way of not requiring a flesh-and-blood presence in the world, let’s break down three common routes for building an antagonist—a human* entity, an environment, or an idea—and what can make each route effective for your story.

*I say human, but given that I work within fantasy and science fiction genres, take this to mean humanoid, or whatever living, breathing, speaking creature with which you’ve populated your books.

What is the Role of an Antagonist?

There’s not a singular answer to this question, and much of it depends on the type of antagonist you choose. If you aren’t sure, then reframe the question: what is the protagonist’s biggest hurdle? What is the final boss fight, the climax at the end of the journey or, if it’s more intangible, what is the root of the character’s struggle?

You may want a physical entity who works directly against the protagonist’s interests. Build their tension toward an inevitable showdown. You may want the antagonistic force in your novel to be more elusive, as something the characters can neither fight nor escape, but simply endure. Deciding this will shape the course of your novel and may even help define your genre.  

As with protagonists, you can have more than one antagonist. Surprise your reader by baiting them into believing the villain is one person and switching it to a different, more trusted character once certain information comes to light. If you’re playing with a mystery genre, unveiling who the antagonist is might be the crux of your plot!

The Personal Antagonist

Traditionally, when we think of a villain, we picture a person, which makes this category perhaps the most common form of antagonist in genre fiction.

The scope of your story will greatly impact who this villain could be. They may be a person of tremendous power and influence (think: your duplicitous king, your mad sorcerer, your corrupt politician). It may be a beast or evil incarnate who threatens the world itself (think Smaug of The Hobbit, or Sauron of Lord of the Rings). It may also be Susan, the head of the HOA.

Not every antagonist needs to be Alduin, the World Eater, and it helps to know the stakes and genre you’re working with to determine who the most effective antagonist will be. A seemingly docile antagonist can be just as impactful as the most monstrous, so long as they suit the story.

Occasionally, you just need an evil dude who does evil deeds. Fantasy genres are chock full of ’em for a reason: when it works, it works beautifully. Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite stories of all time and Sauron is just a big, bad dude when you boil him down. That doesn’t cheapen the story; Tolkien wrote him that way intentionally to represent what appears to be an unconquerable evil that forces the races of Middle Earth to unite one last time. It also presents the glorious contrast to the story’s central protagonist: a gentle hobbit of the Shire, who is no great swordsman, no promised hero, just a little creature who takes on an incredible burden. If Sauron was written to be a nice guy who’s just misunderstood, this story wouldn’t have the power that it does.

So how do you avoid the pitfall of a boring villain? Consider the context of the story and if a reversal of expectation will help or hurt. If your protagonist is a legendary warrior, that sets up the expectation for an epic final battle. That may be what your readership is itching for. But what happens if the hero realizes the fiend they’ve been chasing isn’t just evil for evil’s sake? What happens when the hero learns that this antagonist is something far more human: a creature that’s been hurt and oppressed, made by the society the hero has sworn to protect? What if the hero realizes they’re no better than the antagonist?

Even if you’re not trying for the misunderstood villain, you should define what motivates your antagonist to act against the hero. If they have evil intentions, what’s driving that goal? Actors have stated many times that the best way to embody a villain is by playing a person who believes they are right. And this is true to life. Most real people that we might consider villains have justified their actions to themselves. The reader doesn’t have to agree with it, and we don’t have to sympathize, but the antagonist should have conviction in why they’re behaving this way.  

The Environmental Antagonist

Within the realm of literary fiction, it’s not uncommon for the antagonist to be an environment or an idea more than a single person. In Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath, the overarching “antagonist” is the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that ravaged crops in the 1930s. You could also argue the widespread exploitation of workers acts as an antagonist more than any one individual offender.

Another example: in Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler takes her characters through a harrowing near-future dystopia. This version of the United States suffers from drastic climate change, limited resources, and a crumbling of social infrastructure that descends into total lawlessness. It is a survival story, and the environment in which the characters live behaves as the constant hurdle they must overcome.

The role that these environments plays in Parable and Grapes of Wrath is important, and their unpredictability drives most of the stories’ sharp turns. Yet in both cases, the plot doesn’t center around fixing that environment. The main character of Parable can’t change the world around her, and I wouldn’t say that’s her goal. Her journey is spiritual; it is the construction of a belief around defining God as Change in a place where lasting stability doesn’t exist. The Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath are simply trying to make it and stay together.

This is one of many ways the Environmental Antagonist can be used. There are also situations when a non-human, non-living entity can play a more active role in the plot. Horror genres love playing with this idea: places that grow sentience, houses and towns that become vengeful and murderous. I’d argue that your standard zombie apocalypse story uses an environmental antagonist—in that case a virus—that can’t be defeated with brute force.

These antagonists can prompt you to ask what it means to fight against something you can’t touch. To grapple with a world you can’t change. Is the goal then simply to survive it at all costs, or is it about making changes that have small ripple effects? Is it about acceptance? Endurance? The way we take care of each other in times of crisis?

If you want to double up on antagonists, adding an environmental factor can be a fantastic option. N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy deals with a combination of personal antagonists, cultural ones, and the looming environmental disaster that threatens everyone.

The Cultural Antagonist

While you could argue this nests under the umbrella of environmental antagonists, I will make a distinction for the antagonist that is even more elusive: the idea. While a chaotic climate disaster is, indeed, inhuman, it still has physical effects on the world and the characters that make it nearly tangible. But what happens when the antagonist is a social construct?

That’s where you get perhaps the most insidious of all antagonists. Sometimes what your character is up against isn’t an evil king or a deadly virus, but a cultural bias. You can’t cut that with a sword or brew up a cure for it, yet its impact can be just as strong, just as deadly. Individuals may enact that antagonist’s will by becoming agents of discrimination or hate, but it doesn’t make them the antagonists (unless of course they are reoccurring figures).

I find this category to be the most challenging to confront, especially if your intention is to “fix” the problem by the end of the book. Readers can suspend their disbelief that an evil wizard can be stopped, that a worldwide virus can find a cure, and the aliens can be stopped, but to suggest a cultural bias can be righted will take an immense amount of convincing. Changing one person’s mind is miraculous, but under the right circumstances and with enough intimate experiences, it can be done (and such shifts can serve as beautiful microcosms for stories like these—because if one person can change, maybe others will too). Yet to suggest an entire community, a state, a country can have a single cultural upheaval that makes everyone go, “Aw heck, we were wrong!” is simply not realistic. It may also be reductive of a complicated social issue, which could offend readers more than it moves them.

That isn’t to say you can’t have a cultural antagonist—an insidious idea—that your protagonists work to reverse, but handle it with great care.

The Antagonist’s Role

Whether you’ve chosen a physical antagonist or one of the more abstract forms (or a combination!), your next step is to consider what kind of role they play in the story. I’ve talked a lot about the importance of crafting active characters, particularly where your protagonist is concerned. Characters who don’t take part in their own stories and just let the plot happen to them can become tiresome and slow the pacing down, but antagonists don’t necessarily follow the same rules.

If you are working in the realm of a physical villain, you will want to consider following that same guideline. What actions does your antagonist take that causes the biggest problem in the plot? (The ones that the protagonist seeks to overcome.) What are their motives, and how can they maintain an active presence throughout the story, even if they have no chapters in their POV?

You don’t want your antagonist’s first real appearance on the page to be at the end of the book during the big confrontation. Even if that’s the first time the characters meet, the antagonist’s influence should be felt much earlier or else this person will be a stranger, you don’t want to be getting to know the villain at such a late stage in the book.

As mentioned in the above examples, you may opt for an antagonistic force that is more ubiquitous in the world. Its presence may be constant, but how often it steers the story is up to you.

A Note on POV Antagonists

I have seen many instances in which the villain of the story becomes one of the POV characters, and it can be done to awesome effect especially if the reader doesn’t know that character is an antagonist. I have also seen it done poorly, so I will detail my general disclaimer about villain POVs.

Many writers include this POV for the reader’s benefit. They want to convey the dastardly deeds that are coming down the pipeline or possibly lend insight into the why of the antagonist’s actions. The risk here is giving too much away too early. More often than not I’ve found the information gleaned in those chapters would have been far more impactful had we learned it with the protagonist. Knowing a villain’s plans to disrupt the story telegraphs the plot points before they happen and can rob the reader of the excitement of discovery. Instead, we impatiently wait for the protags to catch up to what we already know.

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Ultimately, how you construct your antagonist is going to be wholly dependent on the type of story you’re itching to tell. Whether it’s the physical manifestation of evil, a haunted house, or your mother-in-law, consider what drives the antagonist in the same way you consider what’s driving your protagonist. If it’s something intangible like a virus or a natural disaster, it may not have any emotional intent whatsoever, but if you’re dealing with a more conscious antagonist, you’ll want to ask about their motivations. Don’t just tell us the evil genius wants to end the world as we know it, ask why. Particularly if they are part of the world they’re looking to end, what could that person stand to gain?

There are as many ways to build an antagonist as there are ways to tell a story, and I would argue their importance may equal that of the protagonist in constructing a compelling plot. So play with all the ways your villains and chaotic forces might manifest in the story, how many levels of antagonist can be involved, and when your characters and readers find out who they are.

Antagonists Recap:

• Next to the protagonist, the antagonist is the most important character to develop, and unlike the protag, they can be far more abstract.

• Consider what kind of antagonist will best serve your story: the personal, the environmental, or the cultural antagonist. Maybe you want a mix of all three!-

• Does the reader/protagonist know who the antagonist is at the outset? Is learning their identity central to the plot?

• Ask what role your antagonist plays in the story: are they passive and more encompassing? Are they a wicked political figure who reinforces a cultural belief? Are they aware of the protagonist, and how often do they interact?

• Take care when making an antagonist a POV character. You don’t want to give away too much to your reader!