Reblog: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses

I had some time today because I didn't have any homework, so I thought that I would take the opportunity to work on my novel. In doing so I decided to look up a favorite article of mine, and realized that I should probably share it with all of you! I love some of the ideas that it proposes.

Darcy Pattison's "The Incredible Shrunken Manuscript: How to Diagnose Your Novel's Strengths and Weaknesses". http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/31-FE3-NovelRevision.html

"Without reading a single word of your novel, I can tell you some of its strengths and weaknesses by using the “Shrunken Manuscript” technique. The technique was born accidentally several years ago, when a friend asked me to critique her manuscript. We were a bit short on money at the time and I didn’t want to print out a couple hundred pages to read. Instead, I single-spaced the manuscript, reduced the font and then printed it out.

What I saw amazed me. Chapters that covered ten pages were now encapsulated on just three pages. It was easier to see how Act I led into Act II. Instead of flipping through hundreds of pages to check a fact, I had only a couple dozen pages to go through.

I decided to be really radical. I eliminated all white space at the ends of chapters and reduced the font to only 6-point, or even 5-point, until I had an entire 50-60,000 word novel in less than 30 pages.

I’ve heard the complaints: you can’t read a manuscript at that font size. You don’t need to. .

How to Use the Shrunken Manuscript Technique

Here’s how the process works. Identify something you want to visualize about your manuscript. I often ask students to identify their five strongest chapters, with strongest defined in any way they think is helpful for their manuscript. Then, take a bright marker and put an X over the strongest chapters. Yellow markers don’t tend to work as well as blue or pink. Finally, lay the manuscript on the floor in three rows with about ten pages in each row.

Now, step back and observe.

For example, if you have two strong chapters at the beginning and three strong chapters at the end, you have the dreaded sagging middle problem. If you have two strong chapters in the middle and three at the end, then you must question the opening: perhaps you started the story too early. An absence of X-ed chapters toward the end means you need a better climax.

At first, students were skeptical that this Shrunken Manuscript technique worked. But they were working in groups, and within each group, writers had exchanged and read manuscripts. When I identified one story as having a sagging middle, I asked the writer’s group if that was true of the manuscript. They said yes.

So, what are the rules of the Shrunken Manuscript? Actually, everything is arbitrary, based on rules I made up as I worked with the technique.

1. 30 pages. For me, 30 pages are about all I can take in visually at a time. Manuscripts up to 60,000 words can be shrunken to 30 pages; sometimes you need to put the story into two columns, which shrinks it even more. For manuscripts over 60,000 words, divide the manuscript in half and repeat the exercise for each half.

2. Mark 5-6 items. In 30 pages, it works well to mark 5-6 successful chapters. You could do more or less, but then you start to fudge on your criteria for a strong chapter.

3. Make your own key. While I like to mark chapters with a marker, others use stickers, glitter, beads and more.

4. Mark anything you want. The technique is flexible and can be used to consider anything in your story. Here are some suggestions, but feel free to adapt as needed:

• How often do the protagonist and antagonist go head to head? The conflicts should be spread out consistently through the novel and it must definitely happen in the climax scene. 
• Where does a certain character appear and how much space is devoted to that character? Here, you wouldn’t mark entire chapters, but scenes in which the character appears. What’s useful here is that you can easily see proportions. If Character A only appears in short scenes, so only 10% of the story (or 3 pages total) features Character A, then A shouldn’t be the main character.
• Dialogue versus prose. Because dialogue is often short, it tends to leave open space on the shrunken manuscript, making it easy to gauge if you are prose heavy or dialogue heavy.
• Does your setting vary across the story? Use different colors to mark the different settings. Often, writers want a setting to recur, with the subsequent events in that setting contrasting or supporting the previous events. This allows you to pinpoint exactly when the settings occur in the story.

In other words, this technique is good at evaluating the big picture of a novel, the overall structure, pacing, interactions. (See complete instructions on Shrunken Manuscripts here.)

I wondered if there were other useful techniques for seeing the big picture, and this is what I found.

Spreadsheet Plotting

Scott Westerfield and Justine Larbalestier use an adaptation of a spreadsheet to track a novel’s plot. Larbalestier says, “A novel is a large document containing a whole world with a population that can range from one (boring navel-gazing novel about a man trapped inside a unicycle) to billions or more (space opera where the Empress of the universe destroys a whole planet and the reader follows the last day of each inhabitant of said planet). Keeping track of all of that is tricky.”

Basically, you can decide to track chapters or scenes. Then for each scene/chapter, you fill in columns that ask Characters Present, Goal of Scene/Chapter, Setting, Timeline, Action v. Sitting Around, Word Count, and virtually anything else you want to chart. Depending on how obsessive you are, you can play with the spreadsheet software and do things such as highlight character names in different colors. Be sure to use consistent terminology, such as always calling a place “the picnic area,” and not changing it to “the park.” If you stay consistent, then you can use the spreadsheets sorting capability, letting you see at a glance how many scenes/chapters take place at the picnic area.

Both the spreadsheet plotting and the Shrunken Manuscript Technique are useful for revising a long novel because you can see different items at a glance. But they aren’t the same.

Shrunken Manuscripts can show you proportions at a glance, for example, how much space is devoted to Character A. You can find out the same information in spreadsheet plotting, but you must add up numbers: it’s not visual. With Shrunken Manuscripts, it’s also easy to mark multiple issues at one time by using different colors or other keys.

Spreadsheet plotting allows you to scan the actual content of chapters just by glancing down a column.  If you have one column for the emotional impact of a scene/chapter—perhaps assigning a 1-5 for emotional content—you can easily identify how the emotional arc is progressing. So, either content or progressions (plot, narrative arc, character arc, or emotional arc) are easier with spreadsheets.

From Shrinking to Exploding

On the other hand, when Kirby Larson, winner of the Newberry Honor medal (given to the most distinguished book published in children’s literature that year) for Hattie Big Sky, hit a wall in her writing, she took it to heart.

With the help of her friend and co-author, Mary Nethery, she taped large sheets of paper around the walls of her office. Then around the room, she wrote the major plot lines and started working with them. After two days of working BIG, she had her plot and working outline for revision done.

Working big or small, changing the manuscript’s size helps an author see the story better.

Characters

We’ve talked about techniques for seeing the overall shape of a story. What about techniques for seeing different aspects of the story? Here’s one for characters. Everyone knows that characters should run a story and that interesting characters make for interesting stories. But did you put an interesting character in your novel right from the start?

Read the first five pages of your story. Done? Stop!

Turn over page five and write down everything you know about the main character from those first five pages.

Does your list look something like this?

• 20 years old
• secretary
• likes red nail polish

If that’s all you know after five pages, you’re in trouble! By the end of five pages, readers should know much more about your main character, or they are likely to abandon the story. By page five, I like to be able to list at least a dozen unique characteristics, bits of trivia about the character, likes or dislikes, life issues, fears, etc. Do you give the reader a hint about the character’s inner life, not just a physical description? Do you give the reader a view of the setting through your character’s eyes?

By the end of page five, the reader should be hooked—by your characters.

Suggestion: Repeat the evaluation for a section near the middle of the book. Maybe you need to throw out the first couple chapters because you were learning who your characters are. If the results are just as dry and sterile though, you’ll definitely want to study characterization.

Dialogue

The difficult thing about dialogue is that it simulates speech, it begs for the ear. One way to test your dialogue is to pick a section of your novel with lots of dialogue. Remove the actions, thoughts, and speech tags, rewriting it as a play or script. Then, ask a couple friends to read it aloud. If you have the capability, either audiotape or videotape this reading.

Here’s an example from The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, Chapter 9, with all speech tags and actions removed:

Grace: Oh, there you are. Come, dear, let’s go to your room and I’ll fix your hair.
Grace: Have you eaten?
Turtle: Mrs. Baumbach made me a dinner.
Grace: Your poor father’s probably starving; he’s been so busy on the phone, changing appointments and all.
Turtle: Daddy’s eating in the coffee shop; I just saw him there.
Grace: I think you should wear your party dress tonight; you look so pretty in pink.
Grace: You know, sweetheart, I’m rather hurt that you won’t tell your own mother about your clues.
Turtle: My lips are sealed.
Grace: Just one eensy-beensy clue?
Turtle: N-n-n.

Notice first, that Turtle doesn’t answer each time Grace, her mother, speaks. Dialogue isn’t just about the words used, but about the interchange between characters and that can involve silences.

Listen to the recording and evaluate the dialogue: Are the intonations natural, not forced? We don’t need explicit transitions like repetitions or explanations; instead, the intonation provides the coherence needed. Grace sounds overly cheerful as she tries to placate her daughter and worm the clues to the story’s mystery from her. Turtle sounds straightforward, until she realizes her mother’s intention and then resorts to monosyllables. Grace is characterized as a person who will flatter and be kind to get what she wants. Turtle is characterized as a perceptive person who sees under the surface to her mother’s intent. Short sentences are fine. Though none are used in this selection, even sentence fragments can be used effectively in dialogue, if the intonation patterns are right.

Another quick exercise is to cut-and-paste one character’s dialogue into a separate file. Read through it for consistency, making sure the character sounds like the same character throughout. You can tell this is Character X, not Character A. Or, without identifying the character, ask someone who has read your novel to identify the character who is speaking. If they guess the wrong character, you’ll want to look at that character’s dialogue closely in the next revision.

Scenes

Finally, a quick check of your scenes is a good place to start evaluating your novel’s strengths and weaknesses. Scenes are contained units of action with a beginning, a middle and end. Sometimes, one scene takes up a chapter and other times, several scenes combine to create a chapter. Scenes open with some sort of conflict, which gives characters a goal for the scene. The middle complications intensify the conflict and the ending usually features a disaster, somehow making the situation worse for the character. Scenes usually include four elements: action, dialogue, narrative and interior thoughts.

Did you write in scenes? To find out take out a chapter of your novel and put a box around the scenes. Yes, take out a bright marker or pen and mark up the chapter, boxing every scene.

For example, in Lizzie Bright and Buckminster’s Boy, by Gary D. Schmidt, Chapter 3 has these scenes:

• Turner’s father, the minister, punishes him for several misdeeds. (2 pages)
• Turner suffers in his room from the summer heat. (Half page)
• Turner survives supper without a misstep. (One page)
• Turner watches the sunset and almost likes Maine. (Half page)
• Turner seeks a place where he “can breathe”; he goes to the seashore. (2 pages)
• Turner meets Lizzie Bright, who teaches him how to bat Maine-style. (6 pages)
• At supper, Turner is lectured by his father, until his mother steps in and stops it. (2 pages)
• Turner heads to the hay meadow to play baseball, but a rainstorm stops the game. (1 page)

Several short scenes build up to the longest scene in which Turner meets Lizzie Bright, a black girl, and they become instant friends, something that will cause trouble throughout the rest of the story. Notice that Turner is at the center of each scene and each scene contains conflict, both big and small. For example, when Turner meets Lizzie Bright, he is throwing stones. She calls to him and in his surprise, his last stone is thrown overhead and comes down and hits his nose. It bleeds and his bloody shirt will get him in more trouble with the minister. In his pain, Turner refuses to answer Lizzie Bright’s questions, so she thinks he is an idiot. Besides the overall problem of not liking Maine and befriending the wrong person, Turner has smaller conflicts within the scene itself.

Could you divide your manuscript into scenes? If not, don’t panic. You’ve just discovered something about your style of writing. Many writers take a more meandering route toward a novel; however, those who write in scenes tend to write stories that are more focused, more tension-filled, more emotional. I’d recommend you at least try writing in scenes and see if it fits your style and your story. A good place to begin is Sandra Scofield’s, The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer.

The point of these exercises is to change the context for the story, from large to small, something that will make you, the author, see the story differently. Writers are too close to their own work to see the shape, to understand when and where to revise. But these methods of looking at your novel’s strengths and weaknesses will give you a starting place for your revisions."

Word to the Wise on Wit

Today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things.

Witty comebacks!

Let us strive to be honest with each other. It’s not just me. We all love witty comebacks.

Main characters, side characters, bad guys, it doesn’t matter. We love them. Readers love them.

There’s a reoccurring theme on this blog though, that I’m going to bring up, and that is that writing is an art. And so are most of its aspects. And just like writing itself, there is an art to witty retorts. They have to be used with discretion by the appropriate characters. Snappy dialogue is great, but it can be overwhelming.

In real life, the number of times that you are actually able to come up with a witty retort in the moment are typically, unless you’re a thespian that’s really good at improv, rather rare. Even though a few minutes later you think of that perfect golden response that would have made the whole room go “Ohhhhhhhh.”

Which is one of the nice things about writing witty dialogue. YOU don’t have to come up with the comeback right off the bat, because YOU have time to think about an awesome response and it’s your character that’s coming up with it without missing a beat. It’s severely tempting. Like I said though, most people can’t come up with responses like that all the time. So is it really that likely that your characters will be able to?

I already admitted that I love witty comeback and dialogue, and I will confess that in my first draft, probably 80% of the dialogue between my two main characters was nothing but sarcasm and wit. Which was a lot of fun to write. Writing sarcasm is fun. No denying that.

However one of the things that I had to take a hard look at was the fact that pretty much anytime my character were doing something plot moving they were exchanging witty banter. And so one of the many things I’ve had to do as I work on my second draft is work on removing a lot of that and making it resembled more like a conversation two human beings would have.

I’m not getting rid of all of it by a longshot though. It’s way too much fun. And we all love the sarcastic witty characters. And it’s perfectly alright for your sarcastic witty character to be able to come up with sarcastic witty responses if that’s their character.

But there is a threshold for it. That threshold being reality.

Save Everything

Confession: I am a packrat.

Not bad enough that I need to see a specialist or anything, I promise. But I have problems throwing things away. I really do. I have written copies of stuff I wrote when I was 12 and typed copies of stuff when I wrote when I was 7. And don’t get me started on creative supplies. I have shoeboxes upon shoeboxes full of fabric and ribbon and string and beads and other random artsy stuff.

But the one thing that I packrat the most is files.

I save everything.

Don’t confuse that with I save all the time, no, I have had more than my share of not having saved and then your battery getting knocked out and losing everything. But I save almost everything I’ve ever written, even if I don’t like it. I’ve saved pretty much every piece of writing that Margaret’s shared with me.

I save scraps, ideas, projects that I want to work on, stuff I intend on never looking at again, first drafts, second drafts, diagrams that I’ve made of family trees and appearances, timelines… I save a lot of files. And I’m also slightly OCD about keeping them organized. I have lots of folders. As opposed to Margaret who just saves everything in one folder and Searches for a file when she wants it.

However, despite the fact that her computer is a mess file wise, our organization in terms of our novels and its various drafts are quite similar.

Moral of the story is save every draft you make.

One of the interesting things that you’ll find when you look at enough articles and books about editing/revising your novel, is that almost every one of them will say something about saving your drafts as you go along. The one that I have on hand is an excerpt from Gail Carson Lavine’s, author of one of my absolute favorite children’s books of all time Ella Enchanted among other children’s books, Writing Magic:

“I, too, save everything I write, so in the computer file for each of my books or short stories I keep a document titled “Extra” and I park my peerless but useless prose there. Extra is my treasure lode. I can mind it, and so can biographers!

Here’s a strategy I use in writing a first draft or in revising when I take my story down a path I’m not sure of and I don’t want to lose what I already have.

On my computer I save my story in its old version. Say I save it as “elves 1”. Then I save it again as “elves 2”. I go to the spot where my alteration begins and start writing. If all goes well, I won’t need the old version but if my new idea fizzles I haven’t lost anything. By the time I’ve finished writing and revising a book, I may be up to “elves 50”!”

I do something similar, though I just have everything to do with my book under the folder “Beguiled” and my successive drafts are Master, Master 2, Master 3. That’s the one I’m working on right now.

Every time I need to make a major change, and I’m going to continue working on the vein for a while, I create a new draft. That way I can organize my drafts by the major changes. Master was the first draft. Master 2 was just general edits (editing, not revising () Shame on me.) Master 3 I removed the entire first eight chapters of my novel because it was more or less all backstory. Once I feel comfortable enough with the beginning without those chapters and how the backstory is spread throughout the chapter I plan on making a Master 4 and giving my antagonist a serious revamp.

Separating drafts by tasks helps me to just keep things straight in my head. It also helps me focus on one task at a hand, which no matter how good you might be at multi-tasking, has been scientifically proven to be the best way to do work.

That doesn’t have to be the way you do it. Like just about everything on this blog, what’s important is figuring out what works for you. That works for me. But you really should save different drafts. It helps you to see how you’re progressing. Sometimes you’ll do something to change it and not like it and if you saved over the original or earlier drafts you can’t go back. Or sometimes you find ideas in your earlier drafts. That’s happened to me more than enough times.

Or if there’s something you liked that you had to get rid of later because it just didn’t work, if you have it saved you can use it for later.

And while we’re on the topic I would also tell you to not just save drafts, but get in the habit of saving everything. Those random scraps that you think of can be seriously useful one day. They can turn into a lot more than you think they might. And the great thing about computers is that it’s not that big of a deal to save them.

When it turns into a three inch thick pile of paper in the drawer of your bedside table and you’re supposed to be moving though…

Developing Your Characters

Yes I’m going to try to make excuses for not having updated, so you can just skip down past this if you want.

It has just been a really busy month. It has been insane. March this year has honestly been one of, if not the, busiest months of my life.  I’ve just taken on a ridiculous amount of stuff. Ask Margaret. She thinks I’m crazy.

But I’m also an author. And those two are hardly mutually exclusive.

I know the last post was about characters, specifically How to Make a Non-Cliché Antagonist, but I was working on this recently so I thought I might as well write about it for you guys.

I think we can all recognize the fact that characters are really important to a story. Depending on the story/book itself, they can be more important than others, but since they are what is moving the story forward through the plot and setting, characters are rather important.

There are a lot of different ways that you can develop characters once you have them. We’ve talked before in other posts about picking character traits and balancing good and bad traits and such, but we’ve never really talked about how to develop them.

There are a lot of different ways to do it. Sometimes it depends on the characters themselves. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but Margaret’s characters, as she calls it, are jealous girlfriends. They don’t leave her mind alone. Some are harder to think about, or don't quite capture your mind like that. But she hasn’t had much trouble with one of the methods, which is just constant obsessing.

Constant Obsessing

Now, take my word for it, Margaret's characters as they started are pretty drastically different from where they are now. By a long shot. Unrecognizable. It has also been… goodness it’s been close to four years or something. They were created when we were 12-13ish and now we’re 16-17ish. Crazy.

The point is they’ve had a lot of work done. Constant obsessing. That’s one of the first methods you can use. Just thinking about them nonstop in pretty much everything you do. Whenever you do something, especially if your characters are in the real world, and wonder about how your character would do or if they would do it. Margaret used to ask herself about who would keep their desk more organized of her two main characters or what kind of coffee they would drink. She could probably tell you which finger they use to pick their nose (though the image of either of her main characters picking their nose seems really wrong.)

Character Profiles

Another way you could develop them is filling out profiles for your characters. That’s what I was doing which prompted me to write about this. It forces you to think about things you normally wouldn’t, especially if it has minimum requirements. It’ll force you to think about your characters’ heights and weights if you’ve only ever thought of them as “blond, blue eyed, short”. Good profiles will also force you to think about his/her pros, cons, strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, goals, worldviews, funfacts ect.

They can be extremely useful. This is probably not a method that you want to use entirely and call your development done, but it’s is something that can be very helpful if you don’t know where to start. You can find no end of them online.

Personality Tests

Personality tests are also a great way to try to develop your characters, especially if you have a few traits picked out you really like that you want to keep, but not a lot more to fill in the blanks. There are a ton of personality tests out there, you can pick any one of them. The first one that comes to mind for me is the Myers-Briggs Personality test, but that’s probably because Margaret practically swears by them. She’ll be writing a post on them one of these days.

If you haven’t picked any traits out, they can still be pretty useful if you want to go searching for personality profiles and picking one for your character. You’ll want to change them up and take a few traits from other personality types because no one really fits perfectly in one category, but you can certainly use them as a help to developing you characters.

Writing About Them

Perhaps this seems obvious, but maybe not. Sometimes simply the best way to develop your character is to write them. It doesn’t have to be in the actual novel that you’re writing though. You can write other stuff with them in it. Perhaps past situations with them, moments that influenced them or changed them into who they are in the books, maybe your characters interacting after the book (unless everyone dies…). Just get used to writing them. It’s amazing the things you come up with and think about while you’re actually sitting down writing them. And writing scenes like that can be a major asset while you’re writing the actual book.

Now, the trick that everyone I know who uses this method has yet to master is... actually working on their novel.

Okay so that’s not fair. Margaret did finish her novel. She’s just rewriting it… and as of now hasn’t rewritten it.

So it’s a tricky one.

Of course these are only four methods. I’m sure there a lot of other ways there are to try to develop you characters. I know I read an article once about making an Excel sheet and a chart listing all the major traits of all the main characters and comparing them to each other to make sure there was a good balance (not a cast full of all stubborn, easily angered people). There’s a ton of other options and methods and tricks you can use.

The most important part is that you actually take the time to develop and flesh your characters out, whatever method you use to do it.

How To Make a Non-Cliche Antagonist

So I’ve been meaning to write a post like this for a while. It’s companion post How To Make  Non-Cliche Protagonist can be found here was one of the few posts on this blog written by Margaret… and also our most popular post. Am I bitter? What? No…

The reason I’m writing this now is because I myself am working on revamping my own antagonist. I like certain aspects of him, but there are also a lot of things that I don’t like about him. So I’m writing this post not only to help all of you, but to also sort of work things out in my own head.

For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that the antagonist is always going to be a person. That’s not always the case. Antagonists is only a force that is working against the main character. It can easily be a circumstance or an event or even the protagonist themselves. Bad guys/villains are the typical antagonists though.

So, without further ado:

What is a Cliché Antagonist (And Why Do I Not Want One?)

Despite what everyone (or what we) may say about main characters and world or the plot… let’s face it the most important part of a book is the conflict of the book. Without conflict or something that the protagonist is supposed to overcome… there isn’t a book. No one wants to read a book about an average high school girl going to school, studying, and getting good grades. They want to read a book about a girl who goes to school and finds out that her best friend committed suicide and has to figure out why her best friend would do that and discovering that someone made her do and then fighting against that person.

As I said before, for the case of this post we’re going to assume that the conflict is/is coming from an actual person. And since this antagonist is the conflict… she/he is the most important part of the book. Without him there wouldn’t BE a book.

That being said, it is vitally important that that antagonists is worthy of being read. That means not cliché. I’m sure everyone’s read a book or watched a movie with a pretty lame villain. That would be just about any villain that wears a long black cloak with a pointy beard and evil eyes and a diabolical laugh. MUWHAHAHAHA.

Yeah no. It’s pretty safe to say that any antagonist that cackles/laughs diabolically is a no go. It will induce large amount of eye rolling.

What makes a Good Antagonist?

Just like everything else in the world, not everyone will like the same things. I could love the villain in one book and not take another seriously while someone else could hate the first one and love the second. There is no perfect recipe for a villain just like there isn’t for anything else in writing.

However, in all my 16 years of reading and story-telling movie watching there are some things that tend to make better villains that others.

In my experiences the best villains are the ones that people can empathize with, to be honest. They’re characters with as much depth as the main character. A deep antagonist is always a good sign for a novel. I’ve read books for no other reason than a rich antagonist.

They have reasons for doing what they’re doing. They have history. They have a goal. We can feel sorry for them. We can understand what they’re trying to do, we might even agree with some of the things that they preach.

When you have a deep antagonist, you have a deep struggle. It makes it more real to us when we’re reading.

Now you don’t have to purposefully make your antagonist someone that you would want to be besties with or anything. And you don’t have to make them someone you can empathize with. There are more than a few successful villains that you can’t really empathize with. Any psychopath or sociopathic villain would fall under that category, the Joker from Batman among them. Or at least I hope none of you can sympathize with a true psychopath.

Step 1: Motivation

I would say that this is probably the most important thing about making a non-cliché antagonist. A cliché antagonist is evil just to be evil. That is almost directly contrary to that whole depth to an antagonist thing we just talked about.

Now this non-cliché antagonist we’re talking about has a reason to be evil, or rather, a reason to be working against our protagonist. You have to be able to actually identify what this motivation is.

Perhaps the most common ones are power, revenge, and because they believe he's trying to do something good. There are a lot of subcategories to these of course.

Power: Wanting to rule the world definitely falls under the category of power. It could also be money. Maybe your villain is trying to take over the protagonist’s company. Of the three I mentioned, power would probably be the most cliché motivation for a villain, but it’s also an acceptable one if you can make it work. Because let’s face it, most people in the real world are motivated by power. A lot of bad things that have happened in the world’s history can be traced back to someone being greedy.

So it’s certainly a viable motivation. But you do have to be able to pull it off right. Taking over the world is usually not a very good motivation unless there’s a better reason behind it.

Revenge: Just like the desire for power, it’s a great motivator because it’s real motivation for awful things. If in the past someone killed the antagonist’s family and now she’s killing the families of everyone involved in their deaths. It’s also a motivation that a lot of people can empathize with. It’s also a great exploration for revenge versus justice and where the line is and such.

Trying to Do Something Good: This is probably one of my favorites. It’s a motivation that’s become a lot more popular recently, so you may want to be careful with it… but I love it. It’s one of my favorites.

It also probably has the most subcategories. You can have the typical type of situation where a boy steals medicine for his ailing mother, if the protagonist is a cop or something. The antagonist is trying to do something good, trying to help someone, but often he’s hurting other people and doing bad things to do it, which is why our protagonist is fighting them.

Or maybe she's doing something that she thinks will benefit others in the long run. That’s the one that’s been popping up a lot recently. The “you have to destroy the world to rebuild it” mindset. To save humanity you have to first destroy it.

Step 2: Background

This goes pretty much hand in hand with motivation. What gave him that motivation? Why does he want revenge? Was his family killed? Was a close friend’s family killed? Was there an attempt on his own life?

Why does she want power? Is she trying to prove something? Was she mistreated in the past and is trying to gain the power so that that will never happen again? Is she trying to get large amounts of money to help her sick mother?  Does she think she just deserve money/power?

Did he serve in a war and want to stop it from ever happening again? Has he been mistreated and wants to eliminate the chances of that happening? Maybe he's trying to purify the world of evil and happens to think that pretty much everyone is evil… There are a lot of way to go with this. The other type of trying to do something good is a lot easier to determine the background. If he's trying to save their mother the background is his mother is in danger.

More than just explaining the background behind your character and where her motivation is coming from, you should probably take the time to figure out more about the character themselves. If you haven’t already, determine how he grew up. Poor family, rich family, mother and father or only one? Raised by a distant family member? Brothers and sisters? Did she have a good relationship with his family? Did he go to school? Did he do well in his classes? Has she ever had a job? How many? What did she do? Does he have a history of unemployment?

If you know it about your protagonist, you should know it about your antagonist.

You don’t have to tell the readers everything you know about him, but just knowing the information gives you the ability to write him in a way that shows that he has depth. Even if you never actually tell the readers her birthday or the grade that she got on her 10^th grade Chemistry Final.

Step 3: Traits

All of this will make it a lot easier to determine what traits he’s going to have. Coming up with some of her traits will make it easier to figure out that information about her past. If he’s smart, he probably got good grades. Or maybe he’s so smart that he hated school and almost failed.

Just like determining your protagonist’s traits, it’s a good idea to look at yourself and the people you’re familiar with. Take some of their traits and take some of your own. Take some of the ones you like and some of the ones you don’t. Because this is an antagonist, it would be appropriate to give your antagonist more negative traits than positive, but you can give them just as many as your protagonists or maybe even less. That’s your playground.

I personally like it when antagonists have the same flaws that the protagonists do. It just creates even more conflict for the protagonist and allows for him/her to do some soul searching that’s great for character development.

I also, personally, really like it when villains are classy. Classy villains are the best.

Step 4: Appearance

There are a lot of things you can do with your antagonist’s appearance. They can look evil or they can look normal or they can be beautiful. My advice is that whatever you do with his appearance, it has some sort of relevance. Don’t make her beautiful just to make her beautiful (the same with terribly ugly). Give it a reason. Give it relevance.

Step 5: Obsess

Here I’m going to quote my dear sister when she gave the same advice with non-cliché protagonists.

“Guys, at this point, you've got the basics. The rest of it is you obsessing and thinking about the character on a fairly consistent basis. Characters will evolve on their own and become their own person - but it takes thought and writing and time.

Lots and lots and lots of time.”

Just keep thinking about. Have fun with it. Villains can be a lot of fun to create.