A Story Is Only as Good as Its Bad Guy

How to Create Captivating Conflict and Antagonists

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to develop your story’s ordinary world, inciting incident, and antagonist to create compelling conflict.

A story is only as good as its bad guy.

This is an adage I deeply believe in as a Marvel fan. The best superhero stories have compelling villains with concrete goals that are in direct opposition with the protagonist’s goals. This is why I loved WandaVision. The stakes feel so high as the S.W.O.R.D. agents attempt to dismantle Wanda’s alternate reality to save the residents of Westview.

This adage is also why I hated The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Every scene with Karli, the main antagonist, annoyed me because I didn’t fully understand the four elements of her character goals or how her goals were directly in opposition with Sam and Bucky’s. Since the antagonist’s goals and motivations were vague and abstract, I wasn’t invested in the show in the same way that I was invested in WandaVision.

Now, I’m not trying to start any beef with diehard Falcon and Winter Soldier fans. All I’m saying is that these two shows are examples—for me—of how a story is only as good as its bad guy.

While I deeply believe in this saying as a Marvel fan, it took a long time for me to embody it in my writing practice as a literary fiction writer. Until I read The Story Solution by Eric Edson, I didn’t believe that a literary novel had to have person vs. person conflict to be effective, and there are, of course, plenty of examples of quiet novels that do not make use of this western storytelling convention.

But if your ultimate goal is to sell a book to a western publisher, adding a strong person vs. person conflict will always make a story more effective and more marketable.

When I was a new literary fiction writer, I was resistant to person vs. person conflict because I associated the word “antagonist” too much with genre fiction. I’d hear the word and think “bad guy” or “supervillain,” both things I love in Marvel movies but wasn’t interested in exploring in my own writing. 

My outlook changed when I read The Story Solution because Edson framed antagonism in a new way. In his book, he says that conflict is king, and an “opposing force character” is necessary to create conflict.

Before reading this book, I had a misconception that an antagonist was an artificial force added to rotely drive a story forward. But Edson’s book frames the antagonist as an adversary—not a character that exists for the sole purpose of foiling the protagonist’s efforts, but a character who exists and has their own goals and desires independent of the protagonist. The adversary is just unlucky because their goals happen to interfere with the protagonist’s.

Now that you’ve fleshed out your protagonist’s goals with our last lesson, it’s time to create your conflict by developing three key aspects of your story:

1. Ordinary World

2. Inciting Incident

3. Antagonist

This week, we’ll be looking at Black Panther (2018) and “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah as examples. Spoilers ahead for both of these stories. As always, take what’s useful, and don’t fret over anything that’s not. There’s no right or wrong here. Story is art.

Developing Conflict

1. Ordinary World

The ordinary world is what the protagonist’s life looked like before the start of the story. Stories are most effective when the protagonist begins in a Broken Place, which consists of the problems that the protagonist has before the story even starts. Some stories will have two broken places: one that’s specific and personal to the character and another that’s universal to everyone in the story world.

Guiding Questions: