A protagonist is only as strong as the wall they're trying to break through. Your antagonist isn't the obstacle to your story — your antagonist IS your story.
Pull up a chair. Before we dive into Workshop 4, Hank Garner and Abby sit down for a relaxed fireside conversation about the most underrated character in fiction: the one standing in your hero's way. We're talking villains, rivals, systems, storms, and the quiet "no" that forces your protagonist to change. If you've ever written a bad guy who felt flat, cartoonish, or too easy to beat, this one's for you.
This is the warm-up. Grab a coffee, settle in, and come to the workshop ready to build an antagonist readers can't look away from.
In this chat, Hank and Abby get into:
- The difference between a villain, an antagonist, and a plain old obstacle
- Why the best antagonists are the protagonist of their own story
- How a villain's "no" drives your plot forward, scene by scene
- Desire, wound, and lie — how the tool that builds heroes builds their enemies too
- Sympathetic vs. hateable: when to make readers understand the villain, and when not to
- The antagonists we can't stop thinking about — and what makes them work
- The most common mistakes that make a bad guy fall flat
- Force-of-nature and internal antagonists (when there's no villain at all)
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
storycraftcafe. Innehållet i podden är skapat av storycraftcafe och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
