Mark Twain on Heroes

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.” 

Heroes and Villains

Part 6: Resolution with Redemption

It doesn’t always have to end badly for villains. Some great stories conclude with redemption. This doesn’t mean the protagonist doesn’t still have a fight. Stories without a struggle don’t attract readers or viewers. This is why redemption usually comes at the very end of the story. The most well-known example is Darth Vader. Up to the very last moment the audience believes Vader will kill Luke Skywalker. The outlaw Ben Wade in the movie versions of 3:10 to Yuma is another example of an action story where a villain finds redemption.

Antagonist redemption is tricky to pull off because the protagonist needs a bitter foe right up to the climax of the story. This is why redemption is used more in literary fiction. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe is an example of redemption in a literary work, except it would be more correct to say that Flanders was an antihero rather than an antagonist. Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is another antihero who is really a bad guy until he fesses up to his misdeeds. Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear is rotten almost to the very end. In my mind, these are really stories where the antagonist has the leading role and the protagonist is the inner self constantly being pushed down until it finally struggles to the surface to award redemption to our antihero.

Heroes and Villains

Part V: Stories of Gut-Wrenching Endurance

Antagonists don’t have to be alive, or even a machine. Many good stories have been written where the protagonist is challenged by a place. In Last of the Breed, Louis L'Amour pits his protagonist against the Siberia wasteland. Although humans made appearances, Daniel Defoe primarily challenged Robinson Caruso with a deserted island. There are many stories of a single person fighting against the elements, but the antagonist as a place does not need to threaten only individuals. The true antagonist in Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic is the depths of the frigid Atlantic. Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm pits weather against the fishing crew of the Andrea Gail. Although nonfiction, in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Piers Paul Read tells the story of how a rugby team won a battle against a mountain.

 

Place can also take on a secondary antagonist role. To a great extent, Dorothy is attempting to escape Kansas and Tara is Scarlett O'Hara’s nemesis.

When the antagonist is a place, then the story is often one of gut-wrenching endurance. The narrative almost always starts with a set-up that shows the protagonist as completely unprepared for a test of stamina and courage. These are stressful stories that examine human limits. 

Most of the time, the protagonist wins, but sometimes not, as in The Perfect Storm.

The Most Divisive Characters in Literary History

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Emily Temple has written an interesting piece about divisive characters in literary history. These are not your run-of-the-mill heroes--or even antiheroes. These characters are a small breed set apart from normal and abnormal protagonists. Divisive characters agitate the rest of the cast, and elicit a strong reaction from readers. For example, Temple calls Scarlett O'Hara, "selfish, vain, spoiled, and sometimes manipulative to the point of sheer cruelty." Scarlett may have been a handful, but Gone With the Wind would be a boring story without her. 

To read the entire article, follow this link.

Heroes and Villains

Part IV: Depraved Villains

In a previous post, I wrote about villainous animals and machines, but most villains are human. In my mind, villains are a subset of antagonists, and the very worst villains are yet a further sub-division. In this article, I’ll look at the most depraved villains in modern storytelling. These are really bad guys and gals who have no socially redeeming value. They have three overwhelming characteristics:

1.      they mean the protagonist the worst imaginable harm,

2.      they are smart or brutally forceful—or both,

3.      there is no redemption at the end of the story.

These are the most memorable villains in all of fiction. I have a Pinterest Board titled “Bad to the Bone” that displays pinups of extreme villains that meet the above criteria. It only looks like a crowded field. In fact, bad to the bone antagonists are the exception. Most villains are portrayed with far more subtlety or empathy. The most obvious reason for painting antagonists in gray-tones is that humans are not all good or all bad, but when a villain is expertly portrayed as pure evil, it raises the story to a level that can transcend generations and cultures.

As an example, look at Martin Vanger, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He is not only a second generation serial killer of young girls, he enjoys assaulting and torturing them over an extended period of time. He has no remorse, he shows no mercy, and he neither seeks nor finds redemption. Another example is Elliot Marston in Quigley Down Under, who under false pretenses lures Quigley to Australia to kill aborigines. Other examples include the Wicked Witch of the West, Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, Salieri in Amadeus, Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker, and the front-runner for worst fictional father of all time, Jack Torrance in The Shining. There is only one answer for these extreme villains … death.

Most stories are about a flawed hero pitted against a villain that harbors some sort of rationalization for his less than pristine behavior. You might call this the decent against the bad, rather than good versus evil. Nuanced characters are more like real life. But sociopaths exist in real life as well. Amon Goeth in Schindler's List is perhaps the most disturbing of my gallery of rogues because he is based on a real person. As in all storytelling, we are meant to take away lessons from tales of good versus evil.

Heroes, Villains, and Things that go Bump in the Night

Part III: Machines That Want to Kill

I’m not generally a fan of mechanized villains. For the most part, they seem like an easy device to turn excessive violence into bloodless mayhem. An example would be the battle droids in Star Wars. Mow hundreds of them down and still receive a PG rating. It’s the same with Megatron in Transformers.

There have been some terrific machine villains: machines that were scary, clever, and tough as tempered steel. The irony is that all of the great bad-guy-machines were humanized—which meant they couldn’t be indiscriminately killed by the dozens. My favorite is Roy Batty, the leader of renegade replicants in Blade Runner. Batty was humanized to the extent that he cried, found redemption, and bid our hero a great life.

Spielberg invented a vile machine in Duel, his first full-length movie. The rusted-out semi chased our common-man hero over hill and dale. Granted, there must have been a driver, but we never saw him and the truck itself was portrayed as malevolent. Christine was another wheeled vehicle that seemed more human-like than some of the cast. The Terminator is an obvious example, but the T-800 stayed a mindless robot for the entire first story. It wasn’t until Arnold Schwarzenegger went over to the light-side that later incarnations were humanized. West World’s gunslinger, Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey are other great examples.

Machines can make great villains, but if you want the audience to care if they are defeated, then you need to give them a personality.

Heroes and Villains

Part II: Bad Guys Don't Need to be Human

Stories pit an antagonist against a protagonist. The conflict can be anything from an everyday struggle against life’s travails to a battle to the death. Whatever the scale of the clash, there is always tension in a good story. Edge-of-your-seat page-turners are often about a heroic figure fighting against a ruthless and capable villain.  Villains come in limitless varieties, but they must always be formidable. If you write an action/adventure story, you need an intimidating antagonist who can fill your hero with self-doubt. Whatever the physical or mental capabilities of your hero, the villain must present an insurmountable challenge. Superheroes need super villains. That’s why Lex Luthor always has a handy stash of Kryptonite.

A great villain can have unnatural powers, a gang of allies, or simply be crazed, but they do not need to be human. In fact, some of the most interesting villains have been animals. Herman Melville set a whale up as the supposed antagonist in Moby Dick, a good dog gone rabid made Stephen King’s Cujo a terrifying story, and Daphne du Maurier choose seagulls in his short story The Birds, which Alfred Hitchcock made into an iconic movie. King Kong, Godzilla, the Alien in the Sigourney Weaver thrillers, and the raptors in Jurassic Park are on the other side of the scale from commonplace seagulls. Personally, the lions in The Ghost and the Darkness were the most nerve racking protagonists I ever encounter in a darkened theater.

So when you plot out your next story and you need a really scary bad guy, don’t forget it doesn’t need to be a guy … and it doesn’t need to be human. Or even alive in a biological sense. Next post we’ll look at some ornery machines that scared the bejesus out of breathing characters.

Heroes and Villains

Part 1: Heroes Need an Antagonist

Protagonists come in three basic groupings—the wholesome hero, the flawed hero, and the anti-hero. The level of heroics may be all over the map—from resolving an inner conflict to saving the galaxy—but the three types remain relatively constant. Examples of wholesome heroes include; Roy Rogers, Frodo Baggins, and Atticus Finch. John Wayne often played a flawed hero, as did Clint Eastwood. Other examples of flawed heroes include Sherlock Holmes, Oskar Schindler, and Huckleberry Finn. 

Nowadays, the anti-hero has risen to prominence in storytelling. For pure nastiness, Chigurh in No Country for Old Men gives Alex DeLarge in Clockwork Orange a run for the money. (Cormac McCarthy and Anthony Burgess certainly knew how to carve out a sympathetic sociopath.) Victor Frankenstein, Macbeth, and Hannibal Lecter provide additional examples of antiheroes.

Whether our protagonist comes from a background as common as dirt, or is a cerebral solver of Einsteinian puzzles, or a bigger-than-life champion of the downtrodden; the hero of our story must eventually overcome a tougher-than-nails antagonist. Protagonists may fight with wits or brawn, but win they must. And they can’t win easily—otherwise it’s not much of a story. After all, a hero cannot be heroic without a scary antagonist. The great news for writers is that unlike protagonists, the varieties and variations in antagonists are beyond imagination. Antagonists can be an inner conflict, an animal, time, a place, a villain, a machine, or even a child. Antagonists make writing fun. And it’s the antagonist that keeps our readers turning the page. More on this in another blog post. Stay tuned.

Characters Matter

Characterization is a crucial aspect of fiction. We know this because it's drilled into us at school, in workshops, and in all the how-to books and journals we read. The protagonist must come across as real and interesting enough to pull the reader through to the end of the story. A common mistake, however, is to focus too much attention on the protagonist. When you read a great book or watch an outstanding film, it's usually the antagonist that lifts the story above the ordinary.

Chigurh From No Country for Old Men

Protagonists, especially those of the heroic breed, are bound by rules and common perceptions that somewhat inhibit creativity. Antagonists, on the other hand, are wide open for manipulation. They can be bad to the bone like Hannibal Lector or Chigurh. They can be nasty or evil, but mend their wayward ways like Ebenezer Scrooge or Darth Vader. The reader may be misdirected to believe the antagonist is bad and then everything is turned around like with Boo Radley and Mr. Darcy. Antagonists can make a story memorable, even when the antagonist isn't even human— like Moby Dick or Christine. The one thing these antagonists all have in common is great character development.

Your concentration on character development shouldn't even stop with the protagonist and antagonist. Nobody willingly hangs around boring people and nobody wants to read about characters with cornmeal personalities, not even bit players. Everybody inside the covers of your book has to be interesting. Give each of them a distinct personality. If you have a character like a postman or waitress that only appears for a couple pages, don't describe their personality, show it. You need to do it with dress, movement, or dialogue. Show, don't tell, is more difficult with the brevity of a minor player, but you only need to spice the character enough to make him or her three dimensional.

Here's an example from my novel, The Shopkeeper. 

I asked the hotel clerk for the best lawyer in town. He directed me to a man named Jansen who had an office across from the Capital building. I then asked to see the chambermaid in my room so I could give her some special instruction. After a brief wait, an exceptionally skinny girl arrived whose cheap dress fell straight down from her narrow shoulders.

“You sent for me?” she asked.

“I would like you to do me a favor. I’ll pay handsomely.”

“All right.”

“I haven’t told you what I want yet.”

“Tell me … and then I'll tell you what handsomely means.”

That took me aback, but I plunged ahead. “I want you to write a letter and sign it with another woman’s name. Can you write?”

“You mean can I forge?”
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