Heroes & Villains: You Need Both
10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY
#4 GOOD GUYS & BAD GUYS
Where would Luke Skywalker be without Darth Vader?
Harry Potter without Valdemort.
The Three Little Pigs without the Big, Bad Wolf?
Black hats, white hats; good guys, bad guys; heroes and villains. Protagonists and antagonists. Each plays a particular role in a story. Get that part right and Loyal Reader cheers for the good guy and hisses at the bad guy and stays up all night to see who wins. Get it wrong and Loyal Reader takes your great American novel along on camp-outs to use when he runs out of toilet paper.
Let’s start with the role of the protagonist, who is the character Loyal Reader identifies with, whose fate matters, the character who either has a goal we hope-hope-hope his relentless struggle will attain for him, or a catastrophe we hope-hope-hope his relentless struggle will succeed in averting. It is the protagonist who drives the plot forward, whether he is Frodo in Lord of the Rings who must succeed in his quest or the world will be covered in darkness or Woody in Toy Story III who must save his friends from a murderous teddy bear. Of course, protagonists like Batman and James Bond drive the plot as well, even though they are not engaged in striving toward a goal themselves but are caught in a deadly struggle to keep all manner of evil dudes from fulfilling theirs.
Which brings us, of course, to the evil dudes, the antagonists whose job it is to thwart the protagonists. If the hero wants something, the villain is set in place to see that he doesn’t get it. If it is the antagonist who wants something, it’s his job to run smack through the middle of the protagonist in his headlong dash toward whatever it is he’s determined to have or do.
There are several ways I’ve seen fledgling novelists stray from the middle of the road into the potholes in creating their white hat/black hat characters. One of those is the propensity of beginners to create a protagonist who is too perfect, a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, (dimples, a chin cleft and a widow’s peak, too) 6-foot 6-inch hunk with washboard abs who just exchanged his Super Bowl ring for a badge and now solves bloody, serial murders by day, writes gentle love songs to his chaste sweetheart by night and works in the soup kitchen at a homeless shelter on weekends.
Maybe all that perfection is why some beginners can get bogged down in the second most common mud hole in the road—they just flat out like their characters too much. Consequently, they’re unwilling to put their hero in real danger, allow him to suffer loss or be in pain—whether physical or emotional. Loyal Reader can smell that on page three, by the way, and ten pages in he’s stuffing your book in the duffle with his tent and sleeping bag. Where’s the fun for readers if they can’t possibly identify with the hero and know they can sail through the story without any real angst because Rock-Abs is going to come out of every fray without a scratch. Stereotyped, unscathed heroes make good Saturday morning cartoons and lousy novels.
But in truth, I have seen way more writers turn their villains into stereotypes than their heroes. Even writers who have the Normal-Hero gene often lack the Three-Dimensional Villain gene.
It is such an easy pothole to stumble into. After all, what better way to make the hero, well, heroic than by making the villain the absolute meanest dog in the junkyard, the kind of guy who’d spread oil on the floor in a nursing home or tear the bottom out of airplane air-sick sacks. And genuinely, seriously, much, much worse. So we pile on the vile attributes in an effort to make our hero’s triumph over the evil dude even more dramatic. Unfortunately, that doesn’t improve the victory, only cheapens it. Antagonists with real human attributes, who have mothers and goldfish and girlfriends and were once gap-toothed first graders and awkward teenagers make far better villains. When Loyal Reader can identify in some small way with the villain as well as the hero, he is much more engaged in the story and has a greater stake in its outcome.
The absolute bottom line about protagonists and antagonists is the four-letter word we will use to measure all our efforts when we come to the discussion of characters. That word is REAL. And how, exactly, do you make both hero and villain real? We’ll talk about that.
Until then …
Write on!
9e
