The Craft of Writing, Part Six: Prime Characters

Good day, fellow humans! I hope the day is treating you well. It’s been good for me, but I’ve been really struggling to stay on top of everything, hence the slightly late blog post. But I’m here now, so let us dive in together!

For today, we’re going to look back about a month to my blog post about characters. In that post, I stressed the importance of dynamic and developed characters, characters who have deep motivations and ultimate growth (depending on their importance in the story). This is crucial if you want to have memorable and, frankly, good characters in your story. But there’s a little more to it with two of them: the protagonist and the antagonist. Let’s examine each of these individually.

The Protagonist

The protagonist is your main character. He’s Harry in the Harry Potter series, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Tris in the Divergent trilogy and Thomas in The Maze Runner series. If your story is in the first person, this is the narrator. If your story is in the third person, this is the person that the narrator is stalking like a creeper. Considered the “hero of the tale,” this individual, above all others in your whole work, needs to be your absolutely most well-developed and well-written, ultimately achieving the most growth throughout the story.

Traditionally, the protagonist is described as the character who reacts to the events of the story. In The Choice of Anonymity, my protagonist is Cale, who is responding to the destruction of his hometown. He’s trying to both survive it and discover the truth behind what’s happening. This, in my novel, is what is considered the “hero’s quest.” Your story is, in totality, the tale of your protagonist, his “quest,” that which forces him to grow and become the hero that you want him (or her) to be in the climax. Your story should therefore revolve around him (or her).

The Antagonist

The antagonist, on the other end of the spectrum, is the character who “antagonizes” the protagonist. This is your villain, the person who is pushing the events of the story. He’s the one who gets the plot rolling, who manipulates the events as best he can. He is Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the madman who draws Batman out of hiding. At the core, he is the one who instigates the events which force the hero to begin his quest.

Now too many times, I have read stories or seen films in which the antagonist is evil for the sake of being evil. He seems to be causing problems just for the sake causing problems. If your villain is the Joker, then this is okay because it’s his chaotic state of being, but I would consider him an isolated happenstance occurrence. For virtually all else, however, the villain needs to be nearly as developed as the hero. He needs to have a history (either merely hinted at for the sake of mystery or outright stated) and deep motivations for the things he does. He doesn’t just blow up buildings “because he’s evil;” He blows up buildings because the people who drove him mad work in those buildings, and he’s destroying them out of revenge. Or because they hold records of his past misdeeds. Or because there are individuals in those buildings who threaten his greater overall plan. But a character who does bad simply because he’s bad is just…badly written. Furthermore, if you take deep motivations and past hurts into the characterization of your antagonist, then you open the possibility of exploring the gray areas of morality, and this forces the reader to grow along with the protagonist.

The Relationship Between the Two

According to standard writing formulae, the climax will feature a confrontation between the protagonist and the antagonist. This ultimate battle will deal the final resolution of your work, and it will represent the glorious battle between order and chaos, darkness and light, good and evil.

But there’s some groundwork you need to build before you get there. You see, my highest recommendation is that you connect the backstories of your two characters in some way. Maybe they were once friends who became enemies (like Superman and Lex Luthor in Smallville). Or perhaps they had a happenstance run-in that ultimately set them on a collision-course toward confrontation. In any case, having some connection between them personalizes that final battle, making it not only something that the world needs to have happen, but something which they both psychologically need to have happen. The hero can’t have mental closure from a past tragedy unless he confronts the one responsible for it. The villain can’t be fully satisfied unless he’s personally dealt with this greatest of threats. This gives ultimate closure to the winner of that battle, and it brings the hero’s quest to a satisfying conclusion.

The relationship between these two is something vastly important as they fulfill their predestined roles, for their story is the symbol for all of the quests that we face, both together and alone.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss how you can become more efficient as a writer!

The 2 Future Worlds

Good day, my few but loyal readers! I apologize for being a few days late on this one, but the holidays have contained much madness. But alas, I promised a description of two literary futures, so here we shall proceed!

When you think of the future, in literary or in movie terms, there are often two very different scenarios that come to mind. There is, of course, a third option, in which the future is simply as it is today only with better technology, but for the time being, I will focus on the prominent two: Dystopic and Post-Apocalyptic. Both of these can be described mostly by the form of government that is around (or not around) within the world of the story.

The Dystopic – always a favorite for my fiancée – is defined by an overly-oppressive government, one which tends to dictate most, if not all, of the decisions that characters make in their lives. Common examples of this are George Orwell’s novel, 1984, the popular Hunger Games series and the upcoming film adaptation of Divergent (as well as the book it’s based on). Even The Matrix bears strong Dystopic qualities as the Matrix itself acts as an oppressive (albeit unknown) government controller. The characters in these works often possess very little free choice, though having grown up in that environment, they tend not to notice. But delving deeper, the controlling government is often in possession of some dastardly dangerous secret, some event or fact that they are hiding from the general population. Typically, it is the job of the protagonist to discover what this secret is, expose it to society, and bring about a radical revolution that, more often than not, ends up tearing down the whole government.

Now on the other hand, my personal favorite is the Post-Apocalyptic. Defined here by an almost complete lack of government, the Post-Apocalyptic world always takes place after some enormous, apocalyptic event (hence Post-Apocalyptic). The event could be nuclear war, terrorist attacks, an alien invasion, a plague-virus outbreak, or anything else that drastically reduces the human population to the point that most or all governments are rendered extinct. As such, lawlessness reigns as roving bands of humans or humanoids constantly threaten the life of the protagonist and anyone who travels (travel is an important plot element) with him/her. While Post-Apocalyptic works currently tend not to be as popular as Dystopic works, they are more prone to the slow development of cult followings. Some popular Post-Apocalyptic works are The Book of Eli, Mad Max, Falling Skies and virtually anything zombie-related (the zombie genre is essentially the poster-boy for the Post-Apocalyptic genre). However, in my opinion, the most important work in showing this worldview is Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, a novel that is essentially the dictionary definition of Post-Apocalypticism. Sometimes it is the job of the protagonist to determine what happened, but often it falls on him/her to establish a new society that will eventually evolve into a new world order many generations later.

There is an oddly unique relationship between the two worldviews of Dystopic and Post-Apocalyptic. While the Dystopic hero tries to discern the truth against the vast resources of the antagonistic government, the Post-Apocalyptic hero simply fights for survival against a seemingly endless horde of often cannibalistic enemies. Truth is the goal of the oppressed Dystopic while survival is the hope for the threatened Post-Apocalyptic. The Dystopic is reassured by worldly control, while the Post-Apocalyptic is assured of complete freedom. But more interesting is the temporal relationship between the two, for the societal collapse in Dystopic literature’s climax is often the Apocalypse that precedes the Post-Apocalyptic scenario. In the film, Cloud Atlas, for example, the Dystopic world of New Seoul in the 2140s precedes the Post-Apocalyptic world of the hero, Zach’ry, who lives “106 Winters After the Fall,” the “Fall” undoubtedly being the Apocalyptic event between the two.

But who knows, perhaps the society established by the Post-Apocalyptic hero is destined to evolve into a new governmental Dystopia, which is destined for another fall after its time has ended. Perhaps these worldviews are simply reflections of our own history, moving from strong government, to collapse, to lawlessness, to the establishment of a new government destined to overstep its bounds before falling once again in an endless cycle. In reading of our future, perhaps we are actually reading of our past as well.

Until next time, friends…

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I share some of my comic strip, Day 7, which covers the comedic interactions between a Sasquatch, a snail, a snake and a giant squid!