Our stories are built on conflicts. To have a conflict, your protagonist needs to want something and face obstacles keeping them from getting it. The obstacles are often personified by another character in your story, the infamous antagonist!

What is an antagonist?

An antagonist is a character in your story whose goals are in opposition to the protagonist. Either they want the same thing, and only one can get it, or they want things that are diametrically opposed to each other. The important thing is they both can’t get what they want. For one to accomplish their goal, the other needs to fail.

This brings them into a direct conflict where neither of them back down. If they back down, they lose something important. (That’s stakes!)

An antagonist isn’t necessarily a villain, but they do create conflict

You can think of all villains as antagonists, but not all antagonists are villains from the audience’s perspective (though your protagonist might disagree).

Just because your antagonist wants something different from the protagonist doesn’t make them evil. If your protagonist is vying for a promotion with their coworker it doesn’t mean the coworker is immoral. The coworker is an antagonist because they also want the promotion, and only one person can have it. This puts their goals in direct conflict.

You could write that coworker as a villain who cheats and tries to sabotage the protagonist forcing them to work twice as hard, or you could write them as a perfect employee whose every perfect action drives the protagonist crazy and drives them to cheat.

Either way, the coworker is creating conflict! And conflict, which, as I’ve said many times on this blog, is where stories come from.

The antagonist forces the protagonist to change

The coworker is also forcing the protagonist to change by either bringing out the best or worst in them. This capability of forcing the protagonist to develop over the course of the story is a classic attribute of an antagonist. They push the protagonist out of their comfort zone by making the protagonist’s goal more difficult to attain. If they’re going to succeed, they cannot be the same person they were at the start of the story.

The antagonist thinks they’re in the right

A good antagonist is convinced that what they’re doing is not only justified, it’s the right thing to do. A great antagonist is actually correct in some ways, though they might be misguided in others. Of course, if they’re right in some ways, that means the protagonist is wrong in some ways. Forcing the protagonist to recognize this is a great way to develop their story.

Is the antagonist always a person?

Classically the antagonist is another character, but you can also include other “antagonistic forces” in your script like the setting, nature, social pressure, technology, fate, or the supernatural.

How to write antagonists in your script

Start out by identifying the antagonist. You can do this by thinking of which character in your script is creating the biggest obstacle between the protagonist and their goal. Ask yourself what the antagonist wants that puts them in conflict with what the protagonist wants. Why does the antagonist think they’re right? In what ways are they right?

Then consider how the actions of the antagonist will force your protagonist to change as they attempt to overcome the antagonist’s opposition. The greater the opposition, the more the protagonist will have to change!