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"You'll Never Change" - or you might, but not your villain 3/4/2013 9:11:07 PM
In the previous post we said, "Readers engage characters waiting for them to change and antagonists engage characters hoping they won't." Some people wondered about the latter part of this statement so I'll address that.
The antagonist usually has his/her goal in mind and singularly acts toward it. It's his/her nature to be singularly focused. Incidentally, an antagonist doesn't have to be what we normally think of as a "villain." It doesn't even have to be person. In some stories, the antagonist can be an inanimate entity - something the protagonist or "hero" can't directly communicate with. Examples of this would be if the protagonist is up against a force of nature, like a storm, or a mountain that must be conquered. Could we make an event or time itself the antagonist? When the antagonist is something other than a person, it poses some of the most formidable challenges in writing to keep the story fresh and the plot points turning. But getting back to the issue, if our protagonist is static, the antagonist soon knows what is needed to complete his/her goal and doesn't have to worry about much conflict with the protagonist. Thus, the "villain" will be happy, but the reader won't be, because this also leads the protagonist to be predictable and therefore boring - one of the biggest writing sins an author can commit.
