Antagonism... why?

How the hell do you write an antagonist anyway? Every time I try, they just end up being zero dimensional morons that end up getting curb stomped in zero seconds because I’m too angry at what they represent to do anything else at all.

Disconnect you(the author) from the antagonist(the character) and it will write itself.

You are investing yourself too hard into your own work.

Put some distance between it and you and you will be able to handle it just fine.

"You" are NOT the "Antagonist" and the "Antagonist" is NOT "you".

An author must always put as much distance between "themselves" and their "characters" as possible.

What is the minimum-distance?

The same one as the distance between "God" and "Mankind". (Since the author does create a whole fictional universe to write their story after all...)

Remember that.

Edited by TitanJump on Jan 14th 2022 at 7:00:11 PM

I'm assuming you're talking about villains? This is a good question and an important one too, since I believe that good villains are just as, if not more, important than good heroes to a story.

To answer your question specifically though...

Something I try to do in my writing is to not create "heroes" or "villains" but to instead create people. What I mean is that everyone has a motivation, a backstory and a series of circumstances that have pushed them to seek their goal. The only difference between them is what that goal is, and how charismatic and/or sympathetic we find the character.

But I understand exactly what you mean by being disgusted/angered at a character's actions or ideology and so it bleeds into your writing. So let me give a tip based on a similar scenario and how I resolved it:

One of my villains is a massive Boomerang Bigot towards their own kind and sees them as monsters in need of constant restraint. Their entire ideology results in them actively oppressing and terrorizing their own people. In real life I despise this kind of thinking and find it unforgivable.

Yet I stuck to my methods of writing and gave this villain a backstory, a reason behind their line of thinking and made them a rational person with distinct goals. In no way did I ever excuse their behavior, but I made sure they weren't a mustache-twirling bad guy. There was evil, but it was tempered by an audience understanding that this person was made who they were by life experience that fueled their beliefs.

...I did give them an ignoble blubbering death but that's the extent of letting my personal feelings intrude into the story .

So don't create "heroes" or "villains" just make characters and put them on opposing sides. Make sure the bad guys are given a reason for why they do things even if those reasons are odious, and you may find your irritation with them decreasing enough to give them the representation they deserve.

The two answers here are sufficient, and we have SoYouWantTo.Write A Villain.

I can see this going to as productive a place as this thread otherwise.

But doesn’t mean that the resulting work is no longer “me”? If I write a racist character, then I’m tacitly endorsing racism.

But if their motivations clash, then that just means they’re both wrong.

No, what you made was a Complete Monster. There is literally, objectively, no reason on the planet to ever cause another person harm. No belief system could ever justify behavior like that.

That's not (necessarily) true: to depict a thing, to say that it exists, doesn't necessarily imply that one supports that thing.

However, another thought occurs to me: have you tried writing stories with No Antagonist? After all—as that page shows—a work needn't have one; perhaps you'll find such stories more congenial to you as a writer.

I agree that creating a good antagonist can be hard and that making them sympathetic can be even harder, but antagonist characters who aren't just one-dimensional Card Carrying Villains are realistic and they're what a lot of people want out of their story villains nowadays. A lot of my antagonists, actually, are things that you can't defeat in battle- they're things like society as a whole, or the hero's own mindset, or they're nature itself, or they're a person who isn't even "bad", by any measure.

You know, you don't have to write stories with "villains" or "Man versus Man"-type conflicts at all, if treating a human being or something with similar moral capabilities as a human as evil isn't your thing. Man versus Man is just one of the nine different types of Conflict.

I read a romance where the conflict was "Man versus Self"- the protagonist believed that they weren't worthy of love or companionship due to a bunch of past trauma, and the plot was about them learning to overcome that. All of the sources of the trauma were long-gone and "fighting" them wasn't going to make the protagonist's scars go away or magically make them be "normal".

Gary Paulsen's work is almost exclusively "Man versus Nature" stories about people having to survive in the wilderness, sometimes for weeks or months on end. Winter, wild animals, the cold, rain, and finding food and shelter don't have morality, and they can't be defeated or permanently removed, only avoided or temporarily staved off.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jan 14th 2022 at 3:05:22 PM

There is no reason for anyone to be a murderer or a homophobe or a racist. Therefore there is no reason to understand why one should be one either.

I have with my “training a new worker at the dollar store” story. And even then the new worker making mistakes pissed me off too much to continue.

Anything that’s a force or society or not a person can’t be defeated though.

And anyone who wishes harm on anyone for literally any reason is OBJECTIVELY evil. There is no reason to waste time on them.

It's true that you can't defeat nature or society. But the conflict and story isn't about the protagonist defeating those things so they're gone forever and are never a problem again- it's about the protagonist weathering their way through them, finding a way around them, or changing their relationship with or outlook on them. And all of that can definitely be an exciting and interesting story, if not more interesting because the solution cannot simply be boiled down to "stop this person or people", and simply finding the solution can be a story and a half in itself. You should try some of the works on the No Antagonist page for inspiration.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jan 14th 2022 at 3:36:53 PM

I’ve BEEN trying “no antagonist” and the conflict is still too hard for me to deal with. The closed to antagonism in this story is a new coworker who isn’t getting the hang of her job. And because of this I can’t identify with her, nor find a reason not to just kill her off immediately

We're treading back into the same territory as your prior thread. This is not a writing problem; I would recommend therapy.