Power Multiplied

The Characters We Love to Hate

I saw these beautiful black swans in Australia. Today they make me think of Tchaikovsky´s moving "Swan Lake," where the Black Swan is the antagonist, the character who causes the heroine, the White Swan, such heartache. Writers typically give their antagonists a back story, so that the writers understand their characters and can make them more three dimensional. Some of that back story may come out in a novel, or it may never be known, except to the writer. In the book I have just written, I had some fun making the antagonist, a woman, a pretty melodramatic villain. But she had her reasons (in addition to a generally rotten personality at the core). You have probably read stories with villains you felt sorry for, or even rather liked. Kudos to the author, who made the character three dimensional with positive and negative traits. I think of a Dean Koontz book I read a long time ago where the horror of the novel came from a creature created in vile experiments that escaped a laboratory. I felt very bad for this creature, even though it killed people, so it would have to be eliminated in the end. Then there are those villains that you just really really really hope "get theirs" in the end. Yes, villains are quite fun to write. (I took the other photo down at the Washington coast near Ocean Shores)