Autumn R. Rivers's Blog
October 27, 2014
Real to life villains that love to hate.
How long did you spend carefully developing the protagonist for your current novel? If you're like most people, probably a long time. In fact, you probably have a few character sheets worth of information on them lying around. You also may have taken personality quizzes as your character, Tried out a few of their favorite hobbies or, (If you're artistically inclined)made a few sketches of them.
Why should your antagonist be any different? I have read far too many novels where the author got almost everything perfect. The setting is beautiful, the plot keeps me reading, each event drives the story forward as it should- But the villain just isn't believable.
Most new authors seem to think that the villain doesn't really matter, after all, in many ways they're just another obstacle for the protagonist. But they're also people. You wouldn't dare just stick in a generic farm boy hero absolutely starving for adventure would you? Not unless you wanted to set him apart somehow from the others of his genre. Perhaps he is utterly convinced that he is a cow like the ones he's been forced to milk since a young age. Maybe he goes on a quest to end all beef. This is of course, only an example.
The point is, that you're doing the exact same thing when you use the typical mustache-wearing-tying-women-onto-railroad-tracks-so-evil-he-even-kicks-puppies-villain.
So how can you fix this? Actually, it's pretty easy. Stop thinking of them as an obstacle, and start thinking of them as a character. Your antagonist should have goals, and dreams, and emotions. (Unless he's a vulcan or something similar.) And even though it's easy to use "Evil" as his prime motivation, it's almost never the best thing to do. Of course, if your villain is schizophrenic and spends half the book convinced he IS a mustache-wearing-tying-women-onto-railroad-tracks-so-evil-he-even-kicks-puppies-villain, and the other half helping your protagonist, then it begins to get interesting. I've rambled on for plenty of time now, without actually telling you much I'm sure, so I'll end here with a list of do's and don'ts for making villains that truly love to hate.
DO:
-Give them an interesting past
DON'T:
-Make them the jealous younger brother to the king (seriously, stop)
DO:
-make every action that they do have consequences, as you would for the protagonist
DON'T:
-Think that the final consequence must always be death. I have read plenty of wonderful stories where the villain just skips off at the end, never to be heard from again. (Until the boring sequel nobody liked)
DO:
-Make them mysterious
DON'T:
-Have them give the reader absolutely no information about them
DO:
-Give them cause to dislike the protagonist
DON'T:
-Think it can't be someone close to the protagonist. (Excluding overprotective fathers and evil step mothers of course)
Well, I certainly hope this helped you, because I probably could've used a list like this when I first started writing. (I suppose I didn't realize "Robby Rotten" was not an appropriate antagonist example...)
Why should your antagonist be any different? I have read far too many novels where the author got almost everything perfect. The setting is beautiful, the plot keeps me reading, each event drives the story forward as it should- But the villain just isn't believable.
Most new authors seem to think that the villain doesn't really matter, after all, in many ways they're just another obstacle for the protagonist. But they're also people. You wouldn't dare just stick in a generic farm boy hero absolutely starving for adventure would you? Not unless you wanted to set him apart somehow from the others of his genre. Perhaps he is utterly convinced that he is a cow like the ones he's been forced to milk since a young age. Maybe he goes on a quest to end all beef. This is of course, only an example.
The point is, that you're doing the exact same thing when you use the typical mustache-wearing-tying-women-onto-railroad-tracks-so-evil-he-even-kicks-puppies-villain.
So how can you fix this? Actually, it's pretty easy. Stop thinking of them as an obstacle, and start thinking of them as a character. Your antagonist should have goals, and dreams, and emotions. (Unless he's a vulcan or something similar.) And even though it's easy to use "Evil" as his prime motivation, it's almost never the best thing to do. Of course, if your villain is schizophrenic and spends half the book convinced he IS a mustache-wearing-tying-women-onto-railroad-tracks-so-evil-he-even-kicks-puppies-villain, and the other half helping your protagonist, then it begins to get interesting. I've rambled on for plenty of time now, without actually telling you much I'm sure, so I'll end here with a list of do's and don'ts for making villains that truly love to hate.
DO:
-Give them an interesting past
DON'T:
-Make them the jealous younger brother to the king (seriously, stop)
DO:
-make every action that they do have consequences, as you would for the protagonist
DON'T:
-Think that the final consequence must always be death. I have read plenty of wonderful stories where the villain just skips off at the end, never to be heard from again. (Until the boring sequel nobody liked)
DO:
-Make them mysterious
DON'T:
-Have them give the reader absolutely no information about them
DO:
-Give them cause to dislike the protagonist
DON'T:
-Think it can't be someone close to the protagonist. (Excluding overprotective fathers and evil step mothers of course)
Well, I certainly hope this helped you, because I probably could've used a list like this when I first started writing. (I suppose I didn't realize "Robby Rotten" was not an appropriate antagonist example...)
October 20, 2014
Welcome to my blog!
Hello! Autumn R. Rivers here, with my new blog! (Be patient with me, I've never done this before) I will be posting about writing and future projects you can expect! So for right now I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who has taken time out of their lives to read my first published novella, "Fiction". Hopefully it will be the first of many to come. And as for future projects, NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I do plan to participate! No spoilers as to the novel I hope to finish, but I will tell you that it MAY be about wolves! ;)
-Autumn
-Autumn
