The Perfect Enemy: Crafting Antagonists Your Readers Will Love to Hate

Give Your Protagonist an Opponent Worth Beating

You know your protagonist wants something badly. You know what stands in the way. So why does the middle of the book still feel like it's coasting?

What You'll Learn

• How to tell an antagonist from a villain, and why treating the two as the same character quietly drains the conflict out of a manuscript
• Techniques for building three distinct kinds of opposition: the rival who wants exactly what your protagonist wants, the opponent who blocks the goal while believing he is doing the right thing, and the environment itself
• Methods to layer the four categories of conflict—physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental—so pressure reaches your protagonist from more than one direction at once
• Strategies for giving a non-human antagonist genuine motivation, from the shark in Jaws to a blizzard that isn't coming for anyone in particular
• How to write an antagonist who is certain he's the reasonable one, using a working model from Brad Thor's Path of the Assassin
• Guidelines for keeping a recurring antagonist fresh across a series without defeating them too early or letting them turn unbeatable
• Methods to make your protagonist's own indecision the opposing force, the way Shakespeare does throughout Hamlet

Through this comprehensive approach, you'll stop thinking of opposition as one bad guy and start building it as a system. I begin with the vocabulary, because the confusion between protagonist, antagonist, and villain is where most of the trouble starts—your villain is always an antagonist, but plenty of antagonists are nowhere near villainous. From there I work through the three broad types with examples you can study on your own: a thriller where two men chase the same terrorist and cannot stand each other, a film where loving parents and a scheming headmaster do very different kinds of damage, and a survival novel where the antagonist is a Canadian lake and everything around it. Then we drill down into the roles writers overlook—the ex who reappears, the aunt who won't stop helping, the witness with a private reason for saying nothing—and finish with the two tests every antagonist has to pass: real motivation, and a collision with your protagonist's goal that makes compromise impossible.

Perfect for:

• Writers whose middle chapters sag, where the protagonist has a goal but nothing is genuinely pushing back
• Novelists whose bad guy exists mainly to be caught, and who want to give him reasons a reader can follow
• Authors writing a story with no villain in it at all, who need the conflict to come from somewhere else
• Series writers with a recurring antagonist who has to return book after book without wearing thin

This workshop equips you with a way of thinking that carries across genre and story length. The examples run from middle grade adventure to political thriller, from romantic comedy to Shakespeare, because the principle doesn't change with the shelf: whoever or whatever opposes your protagonist has to want something of its own. Whether you're outlining, drafting, or revising, you can take any scene and ask two questions—who is making this harder, and why—and know what to do with the answers.

Whether you're writing your first mystery or your fifteenth novel, this session will change how you look at everyone standing between your protagonist and what she wants. Not every obstacle needs to be evil. Some of the best ones aren't even people.

A protagonist is only as strong as what opposes her. Rent the replay to get my full guidance on each of these techniques—including a live Q&A where I answer questions on writing a spiritual enemy, building menace when the antagonist stays mostly offstage, how many antagonists is too many, turning an antagonist into an ally, and finding the headspace to write beliefs you personally find repugnant.