Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Protagonist versus antagonist
Plot/story, struggle, and connections
Character, setting, and types of stories
Narratives, whether they’re journeys or not, contain their own substructures. In ancient times, Greek philosopher Aristotle identified the portions as a beginning, a middle, and an end. More recently, creative writers have begun looking at story structure in terms of conflict, crisis, and resolution.
Think about your day-to-day existence. Life offers periods of comfortable communication, peaceful pleasure, and productive work, all of which are extremely interesting to those involved. But in a narrative, passages about such times make for dull reading; they cannot be used as plot. In life, people seek peace and posterity. In creative writing, only trouble is interesting.
That “trouble” often takes the form of a power struggle between two nearly equal forces: a protagonist and antagonist.
DEFINITION
The protagonist is the central character of a narrative. The antagonist is a representation of the obstacles to the protagonist’s desires. It may be another human being or some other force.
If the antagonist is some abstract force, like the character’s desire, it will also have a very specific manifestation: not “nature” but “seven miles of water rapids in northeast Georgia”; not “the supernatural” but “a mutant reptile embryo capable of hatching in a mammal’s ear.”
Narratives typically begin with a situation in which the power is with the protagonist or the antagonist. Something happens and the power shifts to the other—think of the Trojan War in which power switches back and forth repeatedly, depending on which side the gods favor. Ideally, each time the power shifts, the stakes are raised and the tension increases. Each conflict is bigger and more intense than the last, until—at last—one of the two opposing forces manifests its power in a way the other cannot match.
The following visceral example from the novel Confederado pits two characters—who are more or less physically equal but possess very different backgrounds and motives—against each other:
The better part of half an hour passed and then, as if answering some cue of fortune, Emilio appeared from around the curve of the hill, guiding Heliodoro carefully over the rocks. As man and horse approached, Alvis discerned the animal was nearly lame, his legs working unevenly as he stumbled on the broken terrain. When they drew closer still, he observed Heliodoro’s swaying gait and noted the whip marks, resembling crimson brush strokes, about his flanks and rear.
“You are a fool, foreign trash,” said Emilio by way of greeting, coming to a halt not twenty feet from his nemesis, “to have come back here. But this beaten old nag deserves a beaten rider, though I promise you that when we are finished today you will never ride again.”
Alvis eyed Emilio’s contemptuous countenance for a moment before gazing beyond it, letting his eyes wander up and down the barren hillside and then farther, across the span of lonely hills. A light breeze filtered through the draw, raising miniature dust devils out of the earth as if some sorcerer were seeking to summon his demons. When Alvis’s glance at last returned to Emilio he slowly shook his head.
“No, Ferreira bastard,” he replied at last. “I fear it is you who are the fool for having come here with those poor outlaws, bearing your customary words but aided no longer by the customary allies you depend upon to realize their intent. There is an old saying in Paraguay: that when two devils come together, hell is to pay. Yet I have grown weary of killing and will spare you even now if you give me my horse and walk back down that draw.”
Emilio spat at Alvis in contempt and, with a curse, drew out his knife and dismounted.
“Get down off that horse!” he yelled, voice hoarse with malice, “or I’ll cut its neck open and drag you from it!”
Alvis stared at the raving bastard as he shouted anew and brandished his knife.
When at last Alvis dismounted and loosed his gun belt, wrapping it about the pommel of the saddle, Emilio let loose a string of filth, punctuated with a sneer. Yet for all the bastard’s high bravado, Alvis noted that his knife hand trembled.
Then the Confederado drew out his own knife—a jewel-hilted razor of a blade lifted from the headless corpse of a Paraguayan brigadier in the wake of Piribebuy. It was a cruel looking, curved weapon, the nicks of which boasted it had drunk the blood of many men before finding its way into the possession of this North American whom so many had sought to kill.
Slowly Alvis walked toward Emilio, eyes locked on the wild orbs of his nemesis.
“Let these few moments,” he said, raising the knife familiarly, “decide our fates forever.”
Emilio’s trembling increased but he gritted his teeth and spat. Alvis’s mind was cool. It harkened back to days of his youth when he and Silvanus Stenson had stabbed at each other with harmless wooden sticks, the little woodsman teaching him the Monocan way of handling a knife mixed in with the rough tutelage he had received from the mountain men who had reared him. The instruction had proven useful on occasions in both wars when, while fighting at close quarters, both pistols spent, he had stabbed and hacked his way out of danger with the foot-long blade he carried in his waistband.
Alvis had possessed no knife on the last occasion the Ferreira bastard had attacked him. He knew Emilio’s knifesmanship to be considerable, but he believed he had the advantage in that the bastard knew nothing of his own foreign skill.
He recalled from the last confrontation that Emilio’s reach was greater than his, so that when his nemesis sprang forward with a shout and a sweeping right to left cut, Alvis sidestepped to the left. Emilio’s wicked slash cut only air where Alvis had been, while the Confederado’s backward cut tore cloth, scratching the skin above Emilio’s hip bone, drawing blood.
Howling, the bastard turned and slashed empty air again before the two lapsed into circling each other warily, stones crunching beneath their feet. Emilio struck suddenly at Alvis’s face, lunging with the agility of a cat, and the Confederado’s head shifted only just in time. His knife hand out of position to strike, Alvis delivered a jab to the bastard’s stomach with his left fist. Emilio stumbled back, gasping, nearly falling, dropping a hand to the ground to steady himself.
When the hand came up, Alvis failed to assess what was in it until the dirt and rocks were hurled into his face. A stone rolled under his foot as he retreated, blinking to regain his vision, and he tumbled to the ground.
When Emilio charged forward Alvis thrust upward with a leg, catching him in the pit of his stomach. Growling in rage as he recovered himself, Emilio lunged again and their knives clashed, but Alvis let his slide off to the side and, gripping the wrist of the bastard’s knife hand, plunged the curved Paraguayan blade deep into the bastard’s torso.
Emilio staggered back, inspecting the wound incredulously, unable to accept it, as Alvis rolled to his feet. Then he came on anew like a wild man, cutting and slashing. Though he gasped for air like a drowning man, in his fury he did not even seem to feel his wound. Bleeding as badly as he was, he seemed as intent as ever on killing the hated foreigner.
Emilio lunged, but this time slower, his breath ragged, and Alvis, holding his knife low, sidestepped the blow, then brought his blade up hard, driving with all the force in his powerful legs and thighs. It drove in to the hilt and for a moment the combatants were eye to eye.
“You could have walked away,” Alvis said quietly before withdrawing his knife with a sudden jerk.
Emilio tottered to one side like a drunken man before falling to his knees. Dull eyes fixed on Alvis; he struggled to rise but instead fell flat on his face and moved no more.
Let’s contemplate a few questions in the wake of this example. Why do you think the author chose to relate this fight in this manner? Does the back and forth of the battle complement the back and forth of the dialogue, or vice versa?
What does the protagonist want? He seems reluctant to fight, so why do you think he does it?
Is the victory worth it? You know the protagonist is a reluctant combatant, so do you think killing the adversary will gnaw at him and undermine him in the future?
With regard to the last question, it’s not unusual in twenty-first-century creative writing that the more powerful crisis is depicted as occurring in the mind of the narrator and that the resolution does not offer a solution. The completion of the action changes the characters not by a dramatic reversal, but by moving them deeper into their personal struggles. After all, in “real life,” closure never quite happens unless death occurs. Think of all the happy endings you can recall from books that involve developments such as marriage and birth. The book might conclude with these events, but in “real life,” domesticity, childrearing, and the cooling of romance have to be dealt with.
On the other hand, tragic endings, such as separation and death, leave trauma and bereavement in their wake. Narratives absolve us of these variables because whether or not the lives of the characters end, the narrative does, and we are left with a sense of completion and the freedom to cheerfully move on to our next book. We know in advance that all narratives are going to be over eventually.
WRITING PROMPT
Write an entry in your journal that places two characters in a dangerous setting. Each has half of something that’s no good without the other half. Neither wants to give up his or her half. What happens?