Thursday, 9 July 2009

Making the antagonist's case

I'm still on Step Five of the Snowflake outlines. I'm currently writing the antagonist's outline and should be ready to start Step Six by sometime tomorrow. Since I have another long weekend off work this weekend I can hopefully get a good chunk of it done this weekend.

But writing a one page outline of the storyline from the antagonist's perspective is an interesting exercise. It forces you to think about why they are opposing the protagonist. People don't - in general - do things for no reason. Outlining for the antagonist can make any holes in their motives become obvious to you. This antagonist has a far more interesting motive for his actions than in my original idea now. In fact from a certain perspective he's not even wrong - it's what he does as a result of his conclusions that's the problem. It's proving fun as well.

I think that if you are worrying about the possibility that your antagonist might be two-dimensional doing an outline from their perspective which makes their case would be an excellent exercise.

If you do try it don't forget to comment and tell me.

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