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