Day 26: Roadmap into the industry (Breathing life into your antagonist)

"What writers do, taking a blank piece of paper and telling a story: that is something to cherish and respect." ~Frank Wuliger

Last night I struggled to write about breathing life into characters. After several attempts, I decided that that's a fun topic to explore over years, not in one brief post.

When I began writing fiction I had a hard time with my antagonists. "You're too nice!" Irvin Kershner would bellow after reading new pages of a story or screenplay I was working on. "She's too nice," were the first words he'd tell a student worker or colleague I'd bring with me to his home during my visits.

No matter how hard I tried, I knew I was creating characters, both good and bad characters, that were as fulfilling as the emotionless people filling the stands in a computer generated crowd scene.

I'd often heard and read the advice: "No antagonist is fully evil and no protagonist is perfect." This didn't help; so a man pauses to pet a cat before committing a murder and that makes him human? That makes him a more fascinating character? It didn't make sense to me.

Irvin Kershner thought that being nice was hampering my writing. He told me he wanted to make me into a top documentary filmmaker, a place where he knew I could explore truth to my heart's content. I would love to meet with him again and debate this; for I now know that there is truth to the best characters, no matter in which genre they reside.

Last year at work I wrote about kids who cut or self injure. The therapists I interviewed talked about using Dialectic Therapy as they work with the kids, and how their lives are changed as they learn to become self-aware and present. During intense therapy, a child goes back in time, discovering the exact moment when they made the decision to self-injure.

So as I'm working with a new character whose actions I despise I can make them a better opponent. Maybe the antagonist has been given more than he can handle in life; a tragedy. However, the good guy must survive and live his life, and the antagonist must be defeated.

Being too nice; being understanding? Maybe that will help me create a really, really great antagonist.

NOTE: These entries are inspired by the final assignment for The Business of Writing for Screen and Television, a School of Cinematic Arts' course taught by Frank Wuliger. Hoping to help his students become working screenwriters, he asked us to create a personal, five-year road map into the industry.