7 Tips on How to Write A Great Antagonist

We’re talking great stories, not good ones.

Conflict is the crutch of every story. A story without conflict is a hotdog without a bun. The perpetuator of that conflict is the antagonist, and how you write the antagonist can make or break your story.

For conflict to work it has to accomplish three things:

• It must be relatable
• It must be threatening
• It must be constant

Given the antagonist is the source of most conflict in a story, the same rules apply to them.

There are right ways and wrong ways to develop the antagonist. For instance, the worst way is not developing them. Two-dimensional antagonists add nothing to the story, yet they detract everything from the protagonist’s cause. To create a compelling antagonist, and compelling conflict as a consequence, you must:

1. Give them attention
2. Write in their voice
3. Portray them as the hero in their story
4. Humanize them
5. Make them dangerous
6. Make them unique
7. Fit them into the story

Give them attention

The first rule in developing a great antagonist is to give them as much attention as you give the protagonist. The antagonist is half the story. Prioritizing the protagonist over the antagonist reduces whatever cause the main character is fighting for. An underdeveloped antagonist leaves you with a story that’s scrambling to figure out what’s happening. Intentional confusion in a story is awesome. Unintentional confusion is obvious.

Write in their voice

Stephen King is great at writing in the different voices of his characters, even if the narrator isn’t part of the story. I’ll describe an antagonist as if I’m writing a story in third person, with and without their voice.

Without the antagonist’s voice:

Berry Barnes wasn’t an unusual man — he put his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He liked his bread toasted light. His wife meant the world to him, and because they never had kids, his legacy did too.

With the antagonist’s voice:

Berry Barnes wasn’t an unusual man — not the way the media always portrayed him. He put his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He liked his bread toasted lightly; anymore and it was like eating stale cardboard. His wife meant the world to him, and because they never had kids, his legacy did too.

There are subtle differences between these two paragraphs. The latter brings the antagonist closer to the reader. The sentences, “…not the way the media always portrayed him,” and, “He liked his bread toasted lightly…was like eating stale cardboard,” both appear as direct quotes from Berry Barnes. The narrator referencing things Barnes has said brings him closer to the narrator and protagonist, and therefore, the reader. Whether your antagonist is horrifying or perfectly human, bringing them closer to your audience puts more pressure on the protagonist.

Portray them as the hero in their story

Few people are evil for the sake of being evil — maybe even none. Even people like Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) believe they’re the hero in their own story. Kaczynski thought mail bombing would destroy the modernizing world, just how Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer) thought he was saving the world by taking prostitutes off the streets. They obviously aren’t heroes, but they think they are.

Your antagonist shouldn’t have an agenda just to have agenda; they should believe in what they’re doing. (All the better if their agenda is one we can understand!)

Humanize them

As well as having a motive and agenda they believe in, your antagonist should be a human. If they literally aren’t a human, they should have human characteristics — ambition, lust, fear, ignorance, etc. When you humanize your antagonist, you give your audience the opportunity to sympathize with them.

We’re moving away from the culture of “loving to hate people” and veering into the realm of “hating to love people.” The best antagonist is one your readers can love, because the more they sympathize with your antagonist regardless of how evil they are, the more conflict you breed within the reader.

Spiderman’s enemy, Sandman, is an incredibly likeable villain. He harnesses his power for nefarious purposes, yet he tries his best not to hurt people and does everything he can to be the version of a good father he thinks his kids deserve. Or Marvel’s Thanos, who — despite being abhorrently evil — still has a cause that isn’t born from hatred and he believes to be the right thing. His whole gig is that people only see him as evil because they don’t have the strength to make as challenging of a decision as he does.

Make them dangerous

Okay, you’ve worked hard to create an antagonist we can like or understand, an antagonist that reminds us of ourselves — what next?

You have to make them dangerous.

They don’t necessarily have to be end-of-the-world dangerous, but whatever they’re doing should impede on the protagonist’s world. They should be threatening enough to propel the protagonist into action.

Fit them into the story

Even though the antagonist should propel the protagonist into action, the antagonist doesn’t have to be evil. They should fit whatever narrative you’re spinning within the context of your story. A son who’s keen on running away to go back to his hometown to be with his friends because his mother moved them away for a new job, per se. The mother isn’t evil, rather misunderstood by her son. The antagonist doesn’t need a scary mask, copper sword, and pipe bombs on their belt. However they present themselves as an obstacle to the protagonist, they should be doing it for a reason that makes sense.

Make them unique

Lastly, the key to a great antagonist is making them unique. Villain tropes riddle modern literature and they overwhelmingly suck. The cop-gone-bad, aliens-invading-the-Earth, vampire-can’t-go-hungry-anymore stories aren’t contributing to the literary canon in any meaningful way. Unique protagonists provide the opportunity to see the world through a fresh pair of eyes, and they’re interesting purely because they’re story has never been told before. For a list of tropes you should always avoid, check out this article I published last week!

As I said before, our cultural society is losing the mob-mentality of detesting the antagonist. The role they once filled of being the antithesis to all that is good has been replaced with a new role, a role that forces us to look inward. The best antagonists are the ones we see ourselves in, the ones we can relate to.

Understanding the antagonist makes us love them; their opposition to the protagonist (who we also see ourselves in) makes us hate them; and we as readers are left with an internal conflict that continues even after the final page is flipped. Your stories conflict isn’t confined to the pages it’s written on, it should stay in our hearts and minds. That’s what makes your story memorable.