What is an antagonist? Or "How to Outline via Villains"
Originally sold to Writer's Digest as "An Outline for Pantsers."
Teasing out the logic of an antagonist helps me understand how to outline both works I’m writing and works I’m trying to research or remember. We’re focusing on narrative works today, to be clear. Fiction, narrative poetry, memoir, film, etc. Though I hate outlining, I force myself to outline because a sandbox only has staying power —power to provide potential sand castles — to the degree that it has a border. If the border is weak or nonexistent, eventually the sand will run away from me and I’ll have nothing but rocks and grass and kitty litter with which to build my Camelot.
But for a mind like mine — and maybe yours — not all outlines help. Some hinder. They can hinder readers, researchers, and writers alike. Outlines based on set pieces and dramatic scenes, for instance, can over restrict and cause the book to hopscotch through mandatory moments. What if we tried an outline of antagonism?
An outline of antagonism is really an outline of progressive character revelation. Spontaneous writers, generally, focus on characters. But what is character? Character is the inner truth about the virtues and vices within a person as they move towards permanent change.
Like the blood in your veins and the sewage in the sewer lines in your backyard, character surfaces when put under stress — when an opposing force meets it head-on, it must find somewhere else to go. Goals in opposition are that force.
Antagonism.
THE GOAL drives your main character. You've heard this before, I'm sure, but let me stress this: only in a farce will a character want something insignificant. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is a farce because who really cares about whether or not they make it to the worst fast food burger joint on Earth?
Yes, I will fight you in the comments. White Castle is garbage, CHALLENGE ME.
Forgot myself, sorry. Anyways:
If your characters want something insignificant, I sure hope you're composing a humor piece. Otherwise your audience will laugh not with you but at you. That doesn’t mean huge. The motive for wanting a specific burger can be huge and the burger rather small by comparison. But internally or externally, the goal must matter.
We come to know the protagonist’s goal through its collision with other goals.
Such as the antagonist’s or antagonists’s.
Antagonism is the series of goals that oppose your protagonist's goal with deeper, finer, and more direct intensity as the story unfolds.
That antagonism reveals true character because the character, when opposed, has nowhere else to go. It must surface, blood from skin; sewage from backyard.
In Story, Robert McKee teaches us that you need multiple forms of antagonism in your narrative. Here, I suggest you use this principle as the very outline of your story.
Now before we get to the principles in Story, the more jaded among you will have already cast McKee aside. I can hear you already, “But the genius Charlie Kaufman subverted McKee in Adaptation!”
No.
No he didn’t, actually.
What Kaufman did was adapt both The Orchid Thief and Story by McKee, specifically the section on adaptation. It’s a brilliant way to both uphold and critique McKee with McKee by using the very struggle of the section “on adaptation” in Story as the narrative thrust for Adaptation, the movie that was supposed to be about the unadaptable book The Orchid Thief. Kaufman affirms McKee and anyone who has read Story closely — including the sections on microplots and antiplots — understands this.
That said, we’ll move onto Story’s section on antagonism, which Adaptation itself used as its outline: the war of the two screenwriting brothers; the war of one who cared about the film and one who cared about the source material.
Let's say you have a character — a monk similar to Dostoevsky's Alyosha — whose goal is orthodoxy. You will need to create forms of antagonism that first distinguish your protagonist, then directly oppose your protagonist, and finally masquerade as helping yet still directly opposing your protagonist. We might call these forces of antagonism The Irritant, The Assailant, and The Recreant. Each can involve single or multiple parties – single or multiple persons, places, or things. The titles are simply names for these forces of antagonism.
This will look complicated at first with the diagrams below, so take them or leave them, but hang with me here. It'll make sense briefly.
These forms of antagonism exist in all stories at some point or another because it’s really just teasing out theme. “Goal” is a reification of “theme.” You’re basically creating an Aristotelian square of opposition:
…in order to tease out the meaning of the desire in the piece through the course of time. That’s what stories do: they focus on desire and therefore, indirectly, truth. But the fulfillment of desire — the beautiful bliss of the good, fulfilled — is the point of stories.
Paxon in Poetics of Personification refers to Greimas’s Semiotic Square, but that’s just a semantic structuring for Aristotle’s logic:
Structure Relationship Type Relationship Elements
Complex Contrary S1 + S2
Neutral Contrary ~S2 + ~S1
Schema 1 Contradiction S1 + ~S1
Schema 2 Contradiction S2 + ~S2
Deixes 1 Implication ~S2 + S1
Deixes 2 Implication ~S1 + S2S1 = the Protagonist
S2 = The Irritant
~S1 = The Assailant
~S2 = The Recreant
Again, S2, ~S1, ~S2 could all be the same person, different people, one could be nature, one could be a group or an institution, but all of them are antagonistic forces as they bring about contraries, contradictories, and double antinomy (double contradiction) by implication.
So.
If the hope of your protagonist is Orthodoxy, then:
The Irritant Antagonist
…will practice Nonconformity by either ignorance or mild rebellion. Nonconformity is not directly opposed to orthodoxy. In fact, nonconformity is often what preserves orthodoxy in times of great social upheaval. In Brothers Karamazov, it’s Zossima’s backstory (from the side of the monastery) and the girl who has her heart set on him (from the side of the world) that help him make this distinction, this contrast. St. Francis, for instance, protested the crusades and was proved right by history. Ghandi, for instance, refused to conform to the current laws of India for the sake of an Indian justice. As did Martin Luther King who said, "An unjust law is no law at all." So The Irritant will help your protagonist distinguish between Orthodoxy and mere Status Quo. Again, the irritant may be nature, a person, a group of people, a society, and so on.
The Assailant Antagonist
…will directly attack your protagonist's Orthodoxy with Unbelief. Whether it's Ivan who debated Alyosha, the policemen who beat Ghandi in Ghandi, the other black ladies who got in the way of the revelation of truth in The Help, the forces of nature in Forces of Nature, or Severus Snape in almost every early Harry Potter book -- The Assailant makes known its attack because it comes directly at the protagonist and so will help solidify your character’s goal. In the case of Orthodoxy, this force of antagonism will make your character sure about what is belief and what is not belief.
The Recreant Antagonist
…will surrender the deepest goal at the last moment. He/She/It/They will pose as a friend, an ally, a benevolent force and will cow at the last second either to a deeper desire or to a lack of personal stamina. There’s a character in Brothers Karamazov who does this, but exposing him is a massive spoiler. Yet it's the revelation of the superhero who turns out to be a supervillain at the end of Captain America: Civil War, the mentor who turns out to be a dictator in Equilibrium, the human ally who turns out to be more machine than man in The Matrix, the friendly dog that turns out to be rabid in Cujo, the Judas who turns out to be more a part of the system than a part of the revolution in the Jesus narrative. The Recreant will purge past every remaining façade and reveal what's truly in the heart of your character by showing them how deep their goal really goes. In the case of Orthodoxy, this force of antagonism is Heresy: Unbelief posing as Orthodoxy.
Said in another way, every character, every force, every goal in opposition is an antagonist for some other character. Consider how, from Zossima’s perspective, Alyosha is pushing him towards his humanity. Or from Ivan’s, how Zossima operates like a recreate scourge on his demonic convictions. Or from that one betrayer how Ivan is a bit of a nag. Arrange the contact of their relationships in emphatic order and you have your outline, whomever whatever becomes S1, there’s your protagonist and therefore your theme.
Any outline of any great story will reveal this. True character will make true decisions to first distinguish itself from, then defend itself against, and finally to deny itself to embrace those goals it does not seek. It's a simple outline, but it will order the characters, environments, and obstacles your protagonist will encounter in order to form a progression that goes deeper and deeper into their real motivation. Shown simply, it looks like this:
A Character seeking Orthodoxy
...encounters an Irritant seeking Nonconformity,
...then an Assailant seeking Unbelief,
...and finally a Recreant seeking Heresy.
Or, as McKee had it in Story:
A Character seeking Justice
...encounters an Irritant seeking Indifference,
...then an Assailant seeking Injustice,
...and finally a Recreant seeking Tyranny.
You could do it any number of ways, for instance for a morally deplorable person:
A character seeking Greed,
...encounters an Irritant seeking To Squander,
...then an Assailant seeking Generosity through a Vow of Poverty,
...and finally a Recreant seeking Philanthropy.
Those plots tend to be about the Sauls of the world -- great men who fall from such great heights like in There Will Be Blood. Or perhaps Wolf of Wall Street.
Or:
Love is stronger than death
Meets acquaintance who lingers on
Death tries to conquer love
And the beloved of many tries to outrun death
…is basically the outline of Harry Potter.
Or:
Humility
Addiction
Powermongering
Powermongering Disguised as Humility
…is arguably Frodo’s journey, both internally and externally.
In the comments, make a quick outline of the forces of antagonism that progressively oppose the protagonist of your story.