Hero Work, Part 3

Let’s talk about bad guys.

Bad guys get the ball rolling. They kick things off. They annoy people, tease, bully, bump shoulders, trip someone walking by, stick gum in someone’s hair, and pull out a chair as someone is about to sit down. 

They plot revenge against those who have wronged them. They resort to violence instead of argument. They don’t follow rules and conventions. They’d rather trick and deceive and look for shortcuts. They seize power, abuse others, lie, cheat, steal, and treat people like objects.

They usually have a rationale for what they do, and that rationale is usually just a thinly veiled excuse for lashing out at the world, for indulging their resentment and spite and anger, in whatever way they can, given the society and era in which they are operating.

Typically, the villain acts first. They’re out in the world making a terrible scene. They have grand plans to make even more terrible scenes. And when they show themselves or when the effects of their bad actions become known, that’s when the hero shows up to take them on.

In this way, the antagonist assigns the task to the hero.

The antagonist acts. The hero reacts.

An antagonist can do this directly or indirectly depending on the nature of the story.

In a murder mystery, a dead body shows up, bringing the detective to the scene, and the manhunt begins.

In a spy thriller, a bad global actor makes a move for power, and a superspy is called in to restore order.

In a family drama, a patriarch on his deathbed is visited by a long-lost son, and his arrival sets off a rivalry among the inheritors for the estate.

In a comedy, an impulsive roommate eats a fancy dessert in the fridge, leaving the hero without a way to celebrate his girlfriend’s birthday.

Sometimes the antagonist acts in a more indirect way.

In a rite-of-passage story, in which the hero resists a stage of life, such as becoming a young adult, a spouse, or a parent, the antagonist is more difficult to pinpoint. It’s not typically a monster or a person, although monsters and people can embody the demands of the rite of passage. The antagonist is the rite of passage itself. So how do you show that? 

Well, we all live with other people, in particular circumstances, under the rules and traditions of some kind of society. So the pressures of a rite of passage can bear down upon the hero from many directions: siblings, friends, classmates, rivals, colleagues, parents, bosses, and other authority figures.

In other types of stories, the antagonist is more obvious. An evil mastermind plots to start a war or blow up a city (spy thriller), to kidnap a child for ransom or embark on a killing spree (detective story or police procedural), or to compete for the love of your crush or seduce your lover away from you (romantic comedy or erotic thriller). 

If the antagonist is trying to do something bad, then the hero has to stop the villain from doing that bad thing. If the antagonist wants the same thing the hero does (to win a sporting event, get the big promotion, marry the same person), then the hero has to strive to do better than the rival.

We want the hero to transform by the end of the story—to grow—and so the antagonist, by acting out in the world, invites the hero to accept the challenge of a particular task. You can’t grow if you don’t do stuff, and so the antagonist has a critical dramatic function: to force the hero to do stuff.

The antagonist, in essence, is an embodiment of a reality of life: you have to do something to become someone. 

You can’t sit back in life, be passive, expect to be given what you want, and somehow, without effort, develop into a full personality. Humans aren’t like that. We have to get up and get to work. That work can be an art, a craft, a career, an education, a competition, a race against time, or a journey to outer space. The work can be the work it takes to start and keep a relationship: to be a good friend, sibling, colleague, spouse, parent, or mentor. 

The antagonist is the world sneaking up on you, saying, “Tag! You’re it,” and running away. You have to get in the game if you want to become the person you’re meant to be.

In this entry, I’m going to create antagonists I’ve never thought of before, and I’m going to add some kind of supernatural or futuristic element either to the antagonist directly or to the task set by the antagonist.

Why?

Well, sometimes I like to walk my talk and do what I’m asking you to do. When I write entries like this, there’s a voice in my head saying, “Oh, yeah? If it’s so easy, Mr. Advice Man, why don’t you do it?” 

So sometimes, yeah, I take my own advice and do what I’m suggesting that you do. This is a holdover habit from being a teacher. As a teacher, I always had to model the behavior or do the project before I asked the students to do it.

Also, I feel that some writing teachers resort far too often to the examples of successful movies and novels to show you how it’s done. I think citing Pride and Prejudice and The Godfather for the umpteenth time is a bit unfair and not inspiring. It’s like teaching people how to sketch, and instead of showing them the fun they can have moving the pencil around the paper, the teacher shows them the work of Michelangelo and Da Vinci and says, “Just do that.”

So let’s have some fun moving the pencil around the paper, so to speak, while I brainstorm three cool villains for three different kinds of stories.

DETECTIVE

A serial killer with a grudge against the cops uses AI to get away with murder.

I’m thinking the bad guy can use AI in a variety of ways to mislead the cops. He could use AI to plot the murders, create online avatars to present false leads, and even concoct a fake evil cabal to send the detectives on a false trail. 

What drives the villain? Maybe he’s motivated by a need to humiliate the police for imprisoning an innocent person, like the villain’s spouse. That would mean the hero could be the detective who helped put the innocent spouse in prison and thus would be the main target of the villain’s revenge plot.

MONSTER

Vigilantes release saber-toothed cats at an economic summit of world leaders.

When I was thinking about a possible monster, I immediately thought of melting glaciers revealing long-extinct mammals from the Pleistocene era. I’ve always been fascinated by the large mammals of that era: saber-toothed cats, woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and the giant versions of bears, sloths, horses, armadillos, and rodents.  

For a monster story, you need a confined space. Because there’s an environmental thread running through this concept already, I thought of a summit like Davos occurring somewhere isolated and confined, like a mountaintop, valley, or peninsula.

The bad guys are eco-vigilantes who steal the cats from a compound run by a fringe group of geneticists. The geneticists have been harvesting prehistoric DNA from melted glaciers and combining it with the DNA from related species alive today. So you could have a saber-toothed cat combined with a tiger, lion, or jaguar. 

I also picture other giant creatures being resurrected. I can imagine the hero riding in to save the day on a giant horse.

The hero would be a geneticist who tries to recapture or kill the cats to atone for his or her sin of pride. The motive of the eco-vigilantes would be pretty clear: they release the cats to punish world leaders for their sins of greed. 

ROMANTIC COMEDY

A thief steals a supernatural heirloom owned for generations by a rich family. 

To recapture the heirloom (your basic MacGuffin), a young heiress, the handsome son of a butler, and a cynical private detective have to join forces in the hunt for the treasure. 

I need the private eye as the expert tracker and also as the father figure, the one who keeps the bickering couple together for the sake of the hunt, at the end of which the couple falls in love.

Also, the villain who possesses the treasure has access to this supernatural power, which makes tracking down the villain and recovering the treasure even more difficult (and potentially funny), and also gives an obvious motive for the villain: power.

OBSERVATIONS

So it did not take me as long to do this as I thought it would.

I started with a genre of story: Detective, Monster, Rom Com.

I picked a straightforward bad guy: Serial Killer, Prehistoric Predator, Thief.

And then I added a futuristic or supernatural element: AI, Genetic Engineering, a Supernatural Heirloom. 

Then I considered the motive of the bad guy (revenge, survival, power) and the types of heroes that the bad guy would target and that would be transformed by the task (detective with a dirty secret, arrogant genetics scientist, rich girl and servant boy). 

Finding your hero’s task by starting with the bad guy is wicked fun.

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