Friday, November 2, 2012

Giving Your Antagonist Valid Emotion and Logic

Having valid emotion and logic ties in with having a background/goals and vulnerabilities. By looking at who the character is as a person, you can more easily see how that character might act. Faith Baldwin, who has written over 100 novels said “What you need is valid emotion-an identification with your characters, good, bad or indifferent; a sense of walking in their shoes for the length of time you are creatively occupied with them. If you do not care about your characters, no one else will, even if you have a perfect plot, excellent characterization and logic-and every writer needs to use logic…”

 Put yourself in the Antagonist's shoes
So, when you create a character, it’s not just a about creating a beginning, middle, end, strengths, and weaknesses. Baldwin also said “know how they feel, why they feel it, and how they would express it”. It doesn’t matter whether it is a villain or main character. Put yourself in the character’s shoes. Treat them as if they were a real person and ask yourself, how would they act and feel? If you have read my previous blog posts, you should have a back story created for your character, and a list of goals and personality traits for your antagonist. So when you insert this character into your story, ask yourself, based off of this person’s past and personality, how would this person react to a given situation/opportunity/event?

Here is a short example of making logical reactions in a character:
Emma was attacked by a dog when she was four. Ever since then, she had a terrible fear of dogs and avoided them at all costs. Now, she is eleven years old and is offered $50 to feed the next door neighbor’s dog while the neighbor is on vacation. She really wants to buy a new pair of shoes because her current ones are worn out, so she decides to take the dog-sitting job. 
When she reaches her hand to open the door to the house with the dog, how might her emotional response be?

Logically, she would be nervous; her hands would sweat. Her eyes might tear up a little from her dog attack memory. She would probably open the door very slowly and have a worried expression; eyes darting all over the house waiting for the dog to jump out at her.

As you can see here, I examined her past occurrences and logically decided how she would act when put in a certain scenario. This allows the reader to connect with the character and understand the why behind the what.

References:
Baldwin, F (2008, March 01). Infuse characters with sincere emotion. Writer (3), 20. Retrieved from http://elibrary.bigchalk.com

The Importance of Balancing Your Character

Most people should be familiar with the term, “Mary Sue”. This is a name given to a character when they are too cliché. An example of a cliché character is someone who can easily solve the hardest dilemmas in the story; someone who has more strengths than weakness and is not evenly balanced. If your antagonist does not have a balance of strengths and weaknesses, your antagonist could fall in the cliché category. You should try to avoid this category because it can make the readers become bored with the story.

How can you make your antagonist balanced?

You need to make sure your antagonist has strengths and weaknesses, both in personality and preferably physically as well. (This concept can be applied to any character you make, not just an antagonist, so keep that in mind.)

Personality Balance
Here are a some exmaples of how you could make your character balanced:

Strength: Your antagonist may be good at planning ahead...
 Weakness: but is terrible at remembering the details when trying to execute the plan.

Strength: Your antagonist can use easily use words to break down another person...
Weakness: but the downside is that your antagonist ends up down talking his or herself as well and ends up feeling self-hatred.

When you are making your character, it is a good idea to write the strengths in one column and the weaknesses of that character in another column. Look and see if the strengths outweigh the weaknesses. You may have to make some changes to the character to balance their traits.
     
In Choate’s article, 4 WAYS to bring characters to life in children's writing she gives another useful piece of advice: “Inner conflict. Characters who have it all together are certainly admirable but will undoubtedly bore the reader. It is difficult to care about someone or even to be mildly interested in him if he doesn't have to struggle for anything.” So keep in mind that a weakness your antagonist could have is inner conflict. An example could be that your antagonist used to love the main character, but then felt betrayed and therefore has conflicting moments when taking action against the main character.
  
 Physical Balance
As for physically balancing a character, you simply want to avoid making the character cliché. You don’t want your antagonists to have a mustache and laugh maniacally every time they are mentioned in your story. Make your antagonist have a characteristic that sets him or her apart. Maybe he or she has long blonde hair with a streak of grey on the right side and one hand is scarred from a dog attack. You have so many options, so why make your character like everyone else’s? Give your character vulnerabilities, flaws, and unique twists.

References:
Choate, McBride, J. (2007, December 01). 4 WAYS to bring characters to life in children's writing. Writer (12), 24. Retrieved from http://elibrary.bigchalk.com