He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled

These 7 Types of Antagonist Can Save Your Novel

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You can’t have a story without an antagonist. You could, it just would be really boring.

My goal in this post is to radically expand your vision of what an antagonist can be. In my work as an editor, I’ve found that writers tend to get into these ruts and keep on writing the same exact type of antagonist. But by the end of this post, you’ll be equipped with a whole range of antagonists that you can draw on and deploy in your novel.

1. The Ally Antagonist

An ally antagonist is a friend who becomes the antagonist. Honestly, this is one of my favorite types of antagonist because you get three things:

  1. Fantastic character change — because we get to see a friend transform into an enemy.
  2. The surprise of a major character reveal — there’s gonna be fireworks when the protagonist learns of this betrayal from a former friend.
  3. A strong emotional reaction from the reader — because they’re shocked by the betrayal.

Look at The Social Network, which examines the way that Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin start off as friends and business partners, and then we see Zuckerberg use lawyers to cheat Saverin out of all of his shares in the company.

A popular version of the ally antagonist is when a trusted mentor turns into the antagonist. For example, look at the Star Wars prequels, where we see Chancellor Palpatine turn from a respected leader into the main antagonist. Or in a romance, it’s when the best friend ends up cheating and sleeping with the love interest.

2. The Inner Saboteur

You don’t have to have external antagonists. You can make the protagonist into a self-saboteur.

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will Hunting is his own worst enemy. He is a bonafide math genius, but he refuses to use his gifts. He could win a Nobel, but he’s stopped by his identity issues and abandonment fears. For example, instead of going to interviews with really prestigious companies, he sends his friend instead, Chuckie, who is played by Ben Affleck, and who just screws with the interviewers. At every step along the way, Will is self-sabotaging, and he can’t help it.

But if you’re gonna do this in your own book, I will tell you to watch out. It’s rare to find a book where the only antagonist is an inner saboteur. That results in a lack of dramatic action because it’s all in their head. Usually, you need external conflict as well, so make sure you pair up the inner saboteur with another one of these antagonists.

3. Antagonistic Entities

Antagonists don’t have to be people. They don’t even have to be living. Instead, consider using one of these antagonistic forces in your book:

  • Nature. That iceberg in the Titanic is quite an opposing force.
  • Disease. In Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, we see a plague has wiped out most of humanity.
  • Animals. Jaws is honestly one of the most terrifying antagonists out there.
  • The supernatural. In Ghostbusters, ghosts are the main antagonist.
  • Groups. Most people don’t consider this one — in Ayn Rand’s novels like Atlas Shrugged, government can be one of the antagonists.
  • Technology. Consider all the Terminator movies, where machines are the threat.

I hope all these options expand your notion of what an antagonist is. It’s any opposing force.

4. The Plural Antagonist

Usually, when you have more than one antagonist, they’re in different categories. For instance, in The Revenant, a bear is the antagonist when he mauls Leo DiCaprio, and then John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, is the other antagonist.

But what about having multiple people who are antagonists? This is clearly more difficult to pull off than a single antagonist. So if this is your first book, I just say be wary of biting off more than you can chew. Your goal should be to create a book that works, which means you prioritize simplicity.

But if you’re dead set on having multiple antagonists, then your book should meet these qualifications:

  1. You’re writing a big series or a long book. You need a lot of space to develop multiple antagonists. Harry Potter, for example, has a main antagonist, Voldemort, but then multiple minor antagonists — the Dursley family, Draco Malfoy, Snape. Plus, then J.K. Rowling adds an additional antagonist for each one of the books, like Dolores Umbridge. But just remember, this is a seven-book series, the longest of which is 870 pages. Pro advice here: do not make your first book 870 pages.
  2. You have a huge cast of characters. For instance, in Game of Thrones, it wouldn’t make sense to have just a single antagonist because you have characters all over the landscape and lots of different storylines. We need the Night King at the end, we need Ramsay Bolton torturing somebody in some little prison, and we need Joffrey Baratheon acting bratty on the Iron Throne.
  3. You use one antagonist for the subplot and a different antagonist for the main plot. Your goal should be not to have antagonists overlap in any way. Each antagonist should be opposing the protagonist in different ways, or else you should cut one from the book.

A little sidebar here, but the desire of every single one of your antagonists needs to be opposed directly to the desire of your protagonist. For instance, in the television show 1923, we see the Harrison Ford character. He wants to keep his Yellowstone Ranch while the antagonist wants to seize it for himself. They both can’t get what they want, and that creates narrative tension.

5. The Good Antagonist

Antagonists aren’t necessarily evil. In fact, if you have an anti-hero, the antagonist might be the most moral person in your story.

But there’s a danger in writing a good antagonist: you don’t want your reader cheering for your antagonist rather than for your main character. So most of the time, your antagonist is gonna tend toward evil because most of the time the protagonist is going to be a decent person.

The question then is how evil or good do you make your antagonist? Thankfully for you, I have an easy metric to figure this out. It’s basically about time on the page. The more intimacy we have with the antagonist — meaning the more time we spend seeing things from their point of view or spending time in their brain — the more the antagonist will need to be likable. On the other hand, if the antagonist is kept at arm’s length, we see them occasionally, then make them as evil as you want to. Evil antagonists are perfectly entertaining. It’s just that most readers don’t want to spend an entire book in the brain of a very evil character.

6. Partial Antagonists

This is probably the trickiest one to pull off for your novel. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Partial antagonists are friends with the antagonist, but they have different goals. For example, look at Professor X and Magneto in X-Men. They’re friends, and they both love and seek to protect the mutant community, but they have radically different ways of protecting mutants, and this sets them at odds. Professor X seeks peaceful coexistence with humans while Magneto often resorts to violence to achieve mutant domination. Because of this ideological difference, Professor X often has mutants fighting Magneto, making Magneto into a kind of partial antagonist.

You might be saying, “Wait, John, this sounds a lot like ally antagonist.” With ally antagonist, there’s a character arc — they change from friends all the way over to enemies. With partial antagonists, they are uneasy friends the whole time, but they’re simultaneously fighting each other because of their different goals and values.

7. The Villain

This is the one you’ve all been waiting for: the villain.

So aren’t villains and antagonists basically synonyms? Well, no. The difference is that an antagonist can be a relatively decent human being who just opposes the protagonist in some way. Villains, on the other hand, are outright evil. This is a good rule of thumb to remember: all villains are antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains.

Here are the three most common mistakes that writers make when writing villains:

1. They forget to give their villains admirable or sympathetic qualities. The reason that the Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix works so well is that we sympathize with him.

  • A backstory makes your villain sympathetic.
  • Giving your villain motivation for their action also helps us to sympathize with them.
  • Showing them suffering helps the reader to empathize with them.

And here’s a little secret technique: make your villain smart. Even if we don’t like your villain, we will admire their ingenuity and intelligence.

2. They often forget the details. So many writers concentrate on the big, world-ending, disastrous things that villains do, and they forget the tiny little details — but it is details which make villains so memorable. One of my favorite villains of all time is the Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. He is a huge and hairless pedophile who murders indiscriminately, but my favorite little detail about him is wherever he goes, he collects artifacts and plants, sketches them in his notebook, and then destroys the object. He wants power through knowledge, and so he wants to destroy everything so no one else can observe it, and in the end, he destroys the sketchbook as well. He’s just this anarchist that wants to destroy, destroy, destroy. So your goal should be to give your villain a little habit that shows us the true extent of their depravity.

3. They often make their villain completely unlike their protagonist. The most memorable villains reflect some darker nature of the protagonist. For instance, they embody the path that the hero could have taken under different circumstances. For example, Moriarty is an inverse mirror image of Sherlock Holmes. He is just as smart, but he has chosen to use his intelligence for evil rather than good. So you don’t just want your villain to be the opposite of your protagonist — you want them to reflect or resemble your protagonist in some sick or twisted way.

Good luck writing your antagonist, and don’t forget to subscribe for more great writing advice.

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