Bad guys are not necessarily evil. There is a difference between evil and bad.

Thank you for a very interesting article 🙂

Normal World hints that all is not well. It doesn’t hang us over a cliff or a tank of sharks or have us in a hospital weeping over a lost loved one. That is melodrama.

Impossible to do, since the main point of my trilogy is that we have a young man who is lost in a world he doesn’t understand. He has amnesia. It isn’t until most of the way into the third book that we find out why he has amnesia, and who the actual antagonist that he’s been fighting, through proxies, is.

So I started things off with him staggering along, with a terrible headache, and a goose egg on the side of his head. Hopefully I can keep everyone interested in who and what he is.

Wayne

The 2007 movie with Christian Bale and Russel Crowe was a very good action movie. There was a previous movie version (1957 I think) with Van Heflin as Dan Evans and Glen Ford as Ben Wade. The 1957 one was more character driven. 3:10 To Yuma was originally a short story by Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite authors. You might like to compare the original story with the two movie versions. You can find it in a copy of ‘The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard’ which many libraries carry.

Ben Wade also occurred to me but then I thought of JR Ewing in Dallas.

All antagonists have a proxy. In “Steele Magnolias” diabetes/death is the antagonist manifested by the daughter Shelby. All good fiction has an antagonist. A story is only as strong as its antagonist. Those genres do have antagonists, but maybe not villains. In “Footloose” the antagonist is religious fundamentalism that forbids dancing, represented by the town’s preacher. Internal conflict must manifest externally or it is therapy. It isn’t commercial fiction.

Internal conflict will still have an external representative who is the antagonist. In the movie “28 Days” Sandra Bullock’s character is up against her own addiction to alcohol. BUT her partying boyfriend represents that demon she must conquer. There is an external story driving her change. She doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to get sober. She is arrested for DUI. So the external antagonist (BBT) is the judge with the powert to send her to jail if she doesn’t get clean, and the councelor who is trying to help her get sober even though she is fighting him every step of the way.

I keep having people throw out the idea of weather being an antagonist, but how many books are on the best-seller list where the hero is conquering a storm? Yeah, I want to read a book about someone taking on a hail storm….or not. Weather is usually not the antagonist. Even in books that revolve around a storm, there is another character who is the antagonist. In “The Perfect Storm” the crew split dpown the middle…those who wanted to brave the storm and salvage the catch and those who didn’t feel it was worth it. The crux of the story revolves around which side will win. Oh and everyone dies. Crappy book and crappy movie.

We must understand what real conflict is, and genuine conflict is characer-generated. A bad situation is not conflict. I recommend reading this post and that might help clear things up. Hooking the Reader and Never Letting Go.