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