Why your psychopath bad guy is a cop-out

A call to action for writers everywhere

When I ask most successful writers who is their favorite character to write, you’d be surprised how often they say it’s the antagonist.

The antagonist? Wouldn’t they prefer to write the protagonist? That’s who the damn story is about!

Here’s my take: if you don’t love writing your antagonist, your story will be severely lacking.

To enjoy putting words in your antagonist’s mouth isn’t the same as thinking she would make a great friend. It just means you find that character’s point of view interesting to explore, and that bodes well for the dimensionality of the second most important character in your story.

The single most important dynamic in your story is that of the protagonist and antagonist. If one of the characters lacks depth, so will your story.

Additionally, I’d take a story with a boring protagonist and an interesting antagonist over the reverse any day. When you oversimplify the force opposing your protagonist, you turn what could be a convincing dialogue about a complex topic into a forgettable surface-level battle that may have high stakes for the characters but has incredibly low stakes for the reader.