Developing an Antagonist: Making Bad Guys in Fiction for Kids
My style is inexorably shaped by writing the Tales from the Lilypad podcast and previewing my stories on my kids when they were wee. They’d be wide-eyed and all in for the story set-up, but tears of frustration and anger would roll down their pretty cheeks as soon as anything bad, distressing, or, even uncomfortable happened to the main character. This wasn’t for all stories, but mine in particular. What was especially upsetting for them was that they knew it was me and not some stranger writing this stuff. So the question they had for me was: How could you?
“You can’t let a teddy bear get lost in the woods. He’ll be too frightened.“
“You can’t let a baby bird fall from a nest. It’s too terrible.”
“You can’t do that to a fairy, Mom. Please. There are little kids listening to your podcast.”
“Listen,” I’d say, “dramatic tension is the engine that makes stories go vroom. If nothing bad ever happens, a story can’t go. It’s like a car without gas or a train without steam.”
But my team of tiny censors was vigilant. They stood their moral high ground. I had to go gently. Things that were verboten in our home included singing Puff the Magic Dragon, reading The Velveteen Rabbit, and me writing anything ever with a whiff of terror or tragedy.
Now that I’m working towards Draft II of a humorous novel for middle grade readers, and my kids are older and really not paying attention, I’m realizing my weakness is creating a bad guy. In my first draft, my antagonist is just adorable. He’s funny, weak, passive, and amorphous. That will not do. If I want my story to zing, he’s got to be scarier. He’s got to be formidable. He’s got to be sharp, awful, and relentless.
I’ve been thinking, reading and learning about developing antagonists for kids lately. What makes them memorable? What makes them scary? What makes their evil good?
There’s a scene in The Power of the Dog where Benedict Cumberbatch’s character beats a tied-up mare. It’s not something a decent person can stomach. Up until that point, I’m unsure who the protagonist in the film is and who is the bad guy. When he beats that horse, though, I know. For the rest of the film, I hate Benedict Cumberdouche. I’m meant to. It helps me want his comeuppance. It makes the hero’s victory sweeter.
It’s the Save the Cat premise in reverse. The titular advice from the famous writing series is that if you want your reader to emotionally invest in a character, show he’s likeable and worthy by having him save a cat, or similar. It’s solid.
Likewise, if you want readers to hate a character, have them kill a helpless animal. Easy enough, but…
I consider writing for kids a sacred task. Stories should help them grow but not frighten or wound them in a way from which they can only shrink. Smart readers (kids are smart readers) will not trust a writer who figuratively harms animals only to manipulate their emotions.
There’s a scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where Harry, Ron and Hermoine find “Mrs Norris, the caretaker’s cat…hanging by her tail from the torch bracket.” She’s not dead, but the reader doesn’t know that yet. “You’ve murdered my cat! You’ve killed her!” screams Filch at the kids. It’s only a couple of pages before Dumbledore assures everyone the cat is only petrified, and yet, I remember reading that book to my kids and feeling my youngest turn away from the entire series during those couple of pages with a hard no. How could she? She had trusted the narrative up until that point.
How do writers develop antagonists?
A good bad guy is physical. We need to know their size, shape, and how they move. Ursula the Sea Witch has tentacles and wide swinging hips. Prince Humperdink is “shaped like a barrel.” He has “a great barrel chest, his thighs mighty barrel thighs.” He weighs 250 pounds, is brick hard, and therefore has to walk sideways, “like a crab.”
Bad guys are mean to animals, mothers, children, and the helpless. Cruella De Vil makes fur coats out of puppies. The White Witch enslaves children and turns them to stone. Prince Humperdink makes it “a practice never to let a day go by without killing something.”
Bad guys are unreliable. They lie. They cheat. They get you in the fine print. They break promises, or worse, they follow through on a promise because there’s a loophole that the little mermaid didn’t think all the way through. Their gifts are poisoned apples and they are masters of disguise.
Good bad guys are smart, witty, charming or stylish. They can’t be too likeable, or they aren’t bad guys, but they need to be capable and appealing in at least one of these ways. I prefer a comically evil bad guy like Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. “Girls were falling all over me in school, and not just because I would extend my leg when they walked by. I was a lone wolf, a mysterious stranger, a member of the drama club.” Not every bad guy needs to be a gorgeous Le Stat or stylish De Vil. Some like Voldemort, are just gross. But he is always on brand and he is wicked smart.
Spoil them. Wealthy, rude and spoiled are good bad guy traits. Think Dudley Dursley w/o the fat shaming. Dudley and Malfoy get everything they want. Harry, Ron and Hermoine get hard work and hand-me-downs.
Hurt them. Antagonists need their own trauma or reason to be evil.
In an April 7 digital workshop by SCBWI, the luminous Roshani Chokshi cautions writers to beware of the formulaic ease of “fridging,” i.e. harming often female supporting characters to provide a compelling emotional arc, or, a reason to evil for often male heroes and villains. The “woman in refrigerators” trope comes from comics.
Heroes and antagonists work, of course, in opposition. They both need pain and outrage to fight. The more real that pain, the bigger the boss fight. Harry is only that good because Voldemort is that evil. Tragically killing off the people the hero or antagonist loves works to fuel the heroism and antogonism of that boss fight. The problem with violently killing off (usually) women and children in comics (or any genre) isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that girl-readers only see themselves figuratively sacrificed and destroyed in fictional worlds.
“Can’t we do this without hurting women and children?” asks bestselling author Chokshi? It’s an interesting problem, because the answer is no, not at all, definitely not. Someone has to suffer in a story. It’s what makes it go vroom. There aren’t any women and children in I Want my Hat Back by Jon Klassen, but the book does contain the arguable violence of a theft and a lie (Rabbit lies about stealing Bear’s hat) and the implied (though certainly not gory or lingering) violence to the rabbit at the end of the book when Bear takes his hat back. According to Commonsense Media, parents rate I Want My Hat Back book for 4+ but kids say 2+.
Beat a horse, kill a cat, eat a lying thieving little rabbit. This is simply the stuff of story.
A storyteller is always finding their way between thrills and kindness. Like a rollercoaster, you want to make your readers scream, but not fly out of their seats.
What make Chokshi’s argument insightful and compelling is that she asks writers to think about the kind of violence they are figuratively making and who gets to grow and recover from it. Protagonists grow, but antagonists and supporting characters don’t usually.
How-to rules are nearly useless in writing, because it’s 99% not what you write but the way you write it.*
If there is a rule of thumb about using violence to develop fictional characters, I’d say think through who gets hurt in fiction and why. Pay attention and go gently. Are you punching up or punching down? IMO writers are for punching up. Only. And in entertaining ways.
As I toil and moil over the fictional world I’m building, I know I need to make everything much worse for the characters in my book. The bad guy has to better. And to the cherubs floating over my shoulder as I write, asking me how could you? Look. I’m not the bad guy here.