An antagonist really should be made the same way that a protagonist is made - character sheet, motivations, appearance, all of the regular works! If it helps, picture the antagonist as the hero in their own story, and maybe write out an outline of how they would respond to the world/the other characters' actions.
name: key/string/perks pronouns: she/her/hers and they/them/theirs
novel: the clocktower (camp nano apr 24) poetry: the beauty of the untold (napo 2024)
Hey! Wow, so I'm a year late. BUUUUUUUUT I am here all the same, so I'm just going to drop a few of the tips I myself use!
1. Remember-- your antagonist is still a person (likely) so give them traits to show they are human. This is not to say that you should give your antagonist a sad background story to make people sorry for them because that isn't what I'm suggesting at all. But they need to have good and bad traits. An antagonist is far more creepy if they show that they are human and the readers have a few things they can relate to within the character. They're also more hateable if people can identify others within them. I'll use a common example--
Everyone hates Umbridge more than Volemort, and here's the reason: No one knows a Voldemort. Everyone knows an Umbridge.
2. The antagonist will have a reason for everything they are doing-- you need to know it. You can't just know your protagonist like the back of your hand. Arguably, you should know your antagonist better than you know your protagonist, because in most stories, the protagonist can always be counted on to do the right thing in the end. The antagonist is the one who is unpredictable. You need to predict their movements and know what they would do. Get inside their head. Unless your antagonist has no human traits, then after a long time writing them, you as the author should begin to feel attached to them, no matter how awful a person they are. Antagonists almost always have good intentions, at least in their eyes, they're just going about things the wrong way.
3. Roleplay. So I'm pretty biased on this one because the current closest character to my heart is a man who I have roleplayed with consistently for the past two years, pretty much every day. I've gotten to know him inside and out, which is how I got in touch with realizing that even though he's the villain in his original story, he can still be a protagonist in his own, like EditorAndPerks said. Find someone who also has a character they want to test and put them in a random scenario. I'm currently working on developing a thirty-year-old character who manipulates everyone, and I found someone to roleplay him in high school with to see how he developed into who he is in present time. A lot of roleplay servers are open to previously created characters as long as you adapt them a little to fit the story, so find some ways to play around with them and use them!
These are the main three pieces of advice I could think of, and I'll update this if I ever think of more. I hope this helps!
he/she/they
winter you are an adorable bean and I love your bad social awareness xD ~Omni omni played robin hood, stole winter's brain cell ~Silver winter is the only person who would survive the machine uprising ~Europa
Idk if anyone has covered this yet, but there are __ focal points in an antagonist.
1. The antagonist cannot be the antagonist purely to be evil. If your antagonist goes around killing and enslaving people for no good reason, the reader will not be satisfied. Sometimes, reasons like revenge or money aren't good enough. It's up to you to find a good incentive for the antagonist. Really, the antagonist is that one character with good intentions but bad follow-throughs.
2. Make the antagonist understandable. This usually isn't that important, but the more understandable an antagonist is, the more the reader will try to understand the antagonist. When the reader truly understands the antagonist, the story can get really, really interesting.
3. This kind of joins along with what I said in reason #1, but remember that the antagonist definitely does not have to do bad things. It can simply be a person who is impulsive and likes to act recklessly, resulting in very bad times for the MC. In fact, there were a few very good books where the MC is an antagonist.
4. Speaking of MCs, remember that you don't need only the MCs to have character development. If your antagonist has great character development, the reader will be very satisfied.
Anyways, that's about my two cents for writing antagonists. I hope it was useful!
The wince that you wince when you see your quote in the quote generator is quite a wince, I tell ya. To know that the whole YWS community has read and judged your quote is quite an awkward feeling like oh noes.
*manly blush* — Arcticus
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