by Scott Rhoades
It's fun to make your bad guy an evil villain, wicked through and through. The kind of guy who ties young maidens to railroad tracks for the fun of it, and throws the hero on to the slow-moving conveyor belt at the saw mill, just because he can. You know: the kind of bad guy who spends his time laughing maniacally while he twirls his 'stache.
This kind of villain is motivated solely by the fun of being e-vile. Yeah, he might want something. Maybe he wants the hero's girl. Or the gigantic diamond. But he only wants it for the sake of being wicked. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids. But this kind of villain is one dimensional, and doesn't work well in most books.
All an antagonist is, really, is somebody who either wants the same thing your protagonist wants, or who has a good reason to stand in the way and keep the good guy from achieving his goal. The antagonist could be a good person, but we're rooting for the other guy, so we don't like him. The antagonist could even be a better person than the protagonist.
The important thing when you're writing is to keep the motivations of both the protagonist and antagonist in mind. Chances are good that your bad guy wants to stop the good guy from winning for reasons that he thinks are good. He might be right, or he might be misguided, but he's convinced.
The bad guy almost always sees himself as the good guy. That means he sees the good guy as the bad guy.
I'm sure Sauron thought he was doing Middle Earth a favor by taking dominion, while Saruman thought he was doing good by trying to stop the Black Lord and taking the power himself. Darth Vadar probably saw the Jedi as nefarious rascals, upstarts who wanted to thwart his plan to make the universe a better place.
My favorite example is politics. Whatever your political position, you believe your candidate is right and the others are wrong. The others see their side as right and the others wrong. For the most part, all sides believe they are going to make the world a better place if they win. If you are interested in politics, you no doubt see a good side and a bad side, and think of people on the other side as misguided at best, but most likely as people who are out to intentionally destroy the country. Guess what. The other side sees you the same way.
That's how it is with your antagonist. He believes he is right, that's why he is so determined to stop your protagonist from succeeding. During the course of the story, your reader might even start to wonder if the antagonist is right, because he clearly means well and is not such a bad guy. Meanwhile, your protagonist's flaws cast doubt on just how good a guy he is.
When two people want the same thing and both believe they are right, you have interesting conflict. As a writer, you can play with that. Maybe your narrator is unreliable. Maybe you play your reader so he thinks the bad guy might actually be the better man. Maybe your good guy does something that's easy to interpret as evil, even if his motivations seem honorable.
In other words, your antagonist is the good guy, at least in his own mind. His wants are every bit as valid as the protagonist's. It's just that he wants the same thing.
If you keep that in mind, you are sure to have an interesting story.
There are many things we say and do to make the world fit our shoe.
We form, we twist, we grab and hold, all this done to fit our mold.
No matter what the deal, we do it so the better we feel.
Lighting so many votives though many think them fishy motives.
But I know honest wishes for good are made even when basking in the shade.
Still the good wishes left undone may leave us to spoil in the noon-day sun!
So let the goodwill toward the masses begin by getting off your asses.
The Defrag conference, which took place over two days in December (!) November, featured speakers and panelists such as David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Esther Dyson, Marti Hearst, and a constellation of other digirati and hopefuls. There were a few interesting exhibits — Yahoo, AOL, and Siderean were there, among others.
I have the usual core dump available, but here are my highlights.
Bibliocommons
Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons was at defrag, and last night she spent a luxurious amount of time walking me through her rather amazing product: the first truly social online catalog. After you see Bibliocommons, you realize that products such as WorldCat Local and Primo are at essence 1.0 technologies, and no, tacking the ability to tag onto an OPAC doesn’t fix that problem.
I won’t issue any spoilers, but think about this: we keep trying to connect libraries with users. But why don’t we get out of the way and connect users with users? Is the goal of Facebook to get us better connected with its founders — or with one another? Does the president of AOL appear every time we IM someone?
(Also, why does so much library software have to be so damn ugly? Well — part of the answer is that we let librarians “design” it, reconfiguring what was right to begin with into some librarian’s fantasy of how people think and search. Ironically, library staff have the least control over the side of the software where it matters most to them: the backend, where local workflow matters.)
David Weinberger
But anyhoo. David Weinberger set the stage with a numinous, searching, petal-unfurling keynote, the notes for which make for excellent reading but do not do justice to how well he gave it. It isn’t often that we spend the beginning of a conference exploring the implications of technology through a poem by Rilke. His speech resonated through the remainder of the conference (even as he high-tailed it for Italy to give another talk) and hence forward I will be seeking evidence of the implicit in all I examine.
Esther Dyson
The core of Dyson’s speech (which she shared the previous day with the FTC) was this question:
Over the years, marketers have become better and better at collecting data on individuals, recognizing them, classifying them and sending them personalized (you’re a segment) and even personal messages (you are member 582930, with 56,784 miles). So why can’t they use those same talents and show them personal disclosure statements?
Looking for a good LibraryLand speaker? I’d think she’d trump Colin Powell any day, but then so would David Weinberger.
On how the Grownups really do it
Of late in LibraryLand I’ve heard complaints that librarians give boring presentations in PowerPoint, and why don’t we use amazing networked applications, etcetera, like They do.
Actually, most talks at defrag were done with PowerPoint (or like Esther Dyson, they used no slides at all). The difference was how it was used. Dick Hardt of blame.ca gave his “defragging identity” talk with over 400 PowerPoint slides — and it was absolutely astonishing, funny, and memorable (many slides had one word or one small image). David Weinberger’s slides had a minimalist loveliness to them and a unique font; he would tease out a phrase and put it in the upper left corner of an otherwise blank slide. Only a small handful of vendor talks followed the model of a slide with a canned template replicating the words coming out of a speaker’s mouth.
I emulated the big boys and used no background; I also switched to a font (Georgia) that felt a bit elegant and bookish; and as I have increasingly done in my slides, I spoke mostly to images. I had a few live links in my talk, and they were my only logistical hiccups, because the wifi network was crowded and there were times when I held my breath while a page sllllloooowwwwwly displayed. (Very presenters tried to go online. Their audience was online, so it wasn’t really necessary.) If I had to do it over, I’d use recordings or find some other way around not having to wait on crucial information painting a slow screen or (in the case of LibraryFind) learn minutes before my talk that the site was down.
Lesson? Wheel: invented. Just make sure yours isn’t square.
Doc Searls
Doc Searls pointed out that the business model for Facebook is no different than NBC, and he emphasized that we are not the customers; we are the consumers. He railed against the machine quite well and amusingly, and at a conference where everyone bemoaned “silos,” he puckishly observed that the free market is silo-based (a thought that kept crossing my mind as I heard competing companies complain about other products not opening their data).
Conference Logistics
This was a small, single-hotel conference. We had a good negotiated room-rate, free room broadband, free conference room wifi, delicious breakfasts and lunches, and painless guidance through our activities.
The hotel is exquisite, and everyone, including Doc Searls, commented on the video art installations in the elevators. I had several good sessions in the hotel fitness center, where I watched TV or read while pounding a treadmill facing a gorgeous cityscape view. My room even had a clock-radio with an iPod dock, and for once, more than enough electrical outlets. The hotel food was good enough that Beth and I just hung here and had good noshes for dinner.
The conference was excruciatingly well-organized and yet relaxed and fun; when the first morning slipped its schedule, everyone adjusted a little. Meals were buffet-style with a little something for everyone (I am still hallucinating about the tiramisu I walked past fifteen times, but I was brave) . We wore business casual. Everyone had laptops, and each room was set up with tables and powerstrips.
(So, how does your last library conference compare with this?)
Cautionary comments
At some point on Day 1 I realized most people at this conference assumed I had put down my rubber stamp, snapped off my shirt garters, and turned the big key in the lock of some imaginary small-town library before coming to the Big City. I knew I needed to rev up my talk with library data (and indeed, during the talk I said I wished my presentation had simply been “45 minutes of random things you didn’t know about libraries”). I didn’t say anything particularly new about taxonomies and folksonomies (although I got a few laughs here and there, plus a good poke at the way we do business), but I did get some people to rethink libraries.
To boost my talk, I went to ALA’s “I Love Libraries” website, but it crapped out on me with PHP errors. I’m glad that happened, actually, because I would have been depressed by what I find there. Looking at it today, I go to “take action” and read some confusing information about school libraries. Huh? I look at the “news”: mostly negative. The section “about” libraries has turgid long paragraphs without any punch, narrative, or take-aways. It looks written by committee. I don’t really know who this site is for, or why it’s there.
I then went to ALA’s slow, disorganized website, and though for once it wasn’t down when I needed it, after digging and digging I only found some press releases with some dated library statistics wedged in among a lot of stuff about librarian salaries. I then went to MPOW’s website hoping for something like a ten-point FAQ (perhaps pointing out that 49% of all undergraduates attend community college, that eBooks and other digital resources have been a resounding success, and that we have more searches in LINCCWeb than… well, I don’t know, many places), and instead struggled to glean a little information from a hefty PDF. My best data was stuff I had previously spent a week scrounging from various sources.
No wonder sharp, interested people asked in my talk asked if libraries were thinking about becoming community centers, etc. — in other words, what our existence will be like post-book. (Note: of the audience, exactly one regularly used libraries.) It’s a valid question (sorry: it IS a valid question, get over it) and we have valid answers… just not anywhere people like these will encounter them, or people like me can get at them easily.
Well said, Julie.
When I think about conflict, whether it arises from characters or plot, I imagine the parties to the conflict as forces of nature.
Picture what happens when a surge of the restless sea meets the immovable cliff. Or when the speeding car meets the brick wall.
The most compelling conflict has a feeling of inevitability: the collision occurs notwithstanding everyone's best efforts (which should include the five-minute conversation to tell the main character what the others know).
Conflict also arises because two people--or talking bunny rabbits, or whatever--want the same thing. This is my favorite kind of conflict because it opens up all kinds of character possibilities, including those that stem from the fact that neither character is good or bad. We might identify with the protagonist as the good guy because we see the conflict from his POV but if seen from the antagonist's POV, the good guy/bad guy tables are turned. That's so much more fun than the predestined hero struggling against the pure evil villain in the hope that Good will prevail in the universe.