Who Is Your Contagonist?

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine

Every good story that has conflict (and every good story does have conflict!) includes at least one hero and at least one villain. As savvy storytellers ourselves, we look for and easily spot the protagonist and the antagonist in the tales we read and watch.  Among the most obvious:

Protagonist: Harry Potter
Antagonist: Lord Voldemort

Protagonist: Dorothy
Antagonist: The Wicked Witch of the West

Protagonist: Batman
Antagonist: The Joker, countless others

We've come to expect that these two archetypes won't come in full head-to-head combat with each other until the final confrontation. The story has to build up to that exciting climax through a variety of complications.  And that's where the contagonist comes in.

So who is the contagonist?  First, let's affirm that the protagonist is "for" something (like achieving the main goal) and that the antagonist is "against" it.  The contagonist plays a role that is "contrary" to the hero's pursuit.  That is, standing in the way of it, or being a distraction from it, though not necessarily with the evil intent of an enemy.

For example, Professor Snape could be considered a contagonist for Harry Potter.  He's not the villain of the story, but he provides tension and conflict along the way.

You could even look at the Wizard of Oz himself as something of a contagonist, because he impedes Dorothy's quest to go home by first giving her a major assignment.

Silence of the Lambs' Hannibal Lector is both an ally and a complication for Detective Starling.  In a buddy comedy like Dumb and Dumber, the heroes are often each other's biggest hurdle.

As in the above examples, the line can be blurred between contagonist and mentor or any other archetype. That alone can add an extra layer of depth to the story.  And yes, the contagonist is sometimes an ally of the antagonist, as in the case of a henchman, or perhaps someone in competition with the adversary.

As you might suspect, the contagonist doesn't have to be human.  Just as the main antagonist can be an asteroid hurling toward Earth or a drought that threatens the farm, any person, thing or circumstance that stands between the hero and the achievement of his/her goal can be considered a contagonist.

A winter storm that keeps someone from getting home in time to stop a wedding. A job change. A lost wallet. A surprise visitor. Any of these can throw a curve ball into the mix.  None intend to thwart the hero, but they do the trick.  The Out of Towners (1970) and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) are examples of non-malevolent roadblocks to simply getting from one place to another.

Since conflict is at the heart of story, could you add some characters or circumstances that will further delay your hero's progress?  A series of complications that aren't traced to the antagonist will provide added surprises for your audience. And, by some clever coincidence, conquering one of these very complications just might provide the exact skill or know-how that comes in handy during the final confrontation.

Five Ways to Get Into Your Character's Head

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine

"If you could read my mind," Gordon Lightfoot once sang, "what a tale my thoughts would tell."  We may approach a story that we write as one single story, but it has more layers for readers to enjoy when we take advantage of the fact that each of our main characters has his or her own hidden history.

How do we unlock those secrets deep inside our fictional friends?  I offer these five easy pathways to perception.

FEEL THE FEAR
Knowing your characters' primary goal for the story (finding the right mate, conquering an enemy, winning a case), imagine the worst that can happen to them.  What will be the consequences if they fail?  What obstacles can you put in place to make it all but impossible to succeed?

Not feeling their pain yet?  Up the stakes by giving them an internal struggle in direct conflict with their goal.  Claustrophobia could be a roadblock for a race car driver.  A med student with a queasy stomach also has demons to contend with.  There's wonderful irony afoot when someone is their own biggest obstacle.

GRILL THEM
One by one, sit your heroes, villains and other significant characters across from you in a virtual chair and play doctor.  Dr Sigmund Freud, that is.  Or Dr Joyce Brothers.  (Or Dr Ruth, if you dare.)  Ask your character probing questions about their life, their background, their goals, etc.  But don't stop there.  Get really personal and ask why they became a brain surgeon, why they want to be a rock star, why they promised themselves to see the world before they're 30.

But don't stop there either.  Keep digging deeper until you uncover the real reason why it's a matter of life and death to them that they succeed in their goals.  Persist, because they'll be as evasive about revealing their true selves as you are. Be Barbara Walters and make them cry if you have to. Don't worry, they'll forgive you.

CONSULT AN EXPERT
Your circle of friends and acquaintances is an extravaganza of information and personal experience to help with your character development. Is your hero a policeman? A mailman? A dental hygienist? Someone you know or someone they know would be glad to help you flesh out the inner workings of your character.

In the name of full disclosure, you may want to tell them ahead of time that it's for literary accuracy. They'll be more open and inclined to tell all.  I once pummeled a nurse friend with an inquisition about hospital procedure until she accused, "You're doing research for your book, aren't you?"

IMMERSE YOURSELF
Walk a mile in your character's shoes.  If he or she has a penchant for gambling, spend a day at a casino. If they have a green thumb, get your fingers dirty in the garden or hang out at a nursery.  If they are a beach bum, I can think of worse things than sipping piña coladas in a hammock for the sake of research.

LISTEN THROUGH THEIR EARS
Just like you, your character has very individual taste in music. Would he/she listen to pop tunes, oldies, heavy metal, country, soul, hip-hop, classical? Who are his or her favorite artists? While you're pondering your character, tune into that type of station or call up the genre on AccuRadio.com. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino says he'll go so far as to make a mix tape to the tune of his characters.

Or maybe your story takes place in a different time period. Someone in the 1940s was hearing big band music.  Two decades earlier, ragtime was the bee's knees.  If your story takes place in a foreign setting, music from that region makes an ideal soundtrack for your writing.

Any of these activities can help a writer hone in on the protagonist, antagonist, and anyone else in the cast. Of course, being the brilliant and imaginative wordsmiths we are, we can simply create our characters to be whomever we want them to be.  But how much more fun is it when they instead reveal themselves to us?

The Covenant of the Arc

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine

For many writers, the character arc is a vague concept that feels like an imposition.  When we already have an interesting plot that's fun to write, why must we burden ourselves with the laborious task of transforming our protagonist into a new and better person?

First of all, because the reader wants it.  Secondly, it's not as difficult or nebulous as it sounds.

The plot may be the driving force behind the story, but as good as it may be, that only covers the external. It is through the internal struggle of the hero that the reader will invest themselves and feel the real heart of the story.

Perhaps you've noticed how many famous tales feature an orphan.  From Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, it's a popular device.  Before the plot even develops, the protagonist is a sympathetic character lacking the stability of a true home.  An Oliver Twist will experience his emotional arc by looking for love in all the wrong places but ending up finding a family.  A Harry Potter will go from being an neglected child to claiming his rightful place in the world.

Similarly, in many a classic Western as well as modern-day action flick, the hero's family dies early on.  These lost souls who have had life as they know it taken away from them can experience their arc in a variety of ways: revenge, restitution, redemption, etc. A Jason Bourne, who loses both his memory and his identity, can regain his footing by discovering who he really is.

How many romances feature a selfish, stuck-up protagonist who finds the meaning of love and is transformed into happily-ever-after material?  Yes, it's a cliché, but the audience eats it up when the character recognizes that their ego is their own worst enemy.

One of my favorite comedies, Shallow Hal, centers around a man who judges everyone by their looks.  When Tony Robbins hypnotizes Hal and causes him to see people for who they really are, he finds true love with someone he would have totally ignored. Something as simple as a lesson learned is a sturdy arc.

In a lengthy series, only minor protagonist arcs are advised, because the audience wants the hero to stay comfortably familiar from book to book. Even when the womanizing James Bond got married at one point, his wife was out of the picture before the next book.

In literature you will see no lack of Scrooges who discover there is more to life than money, and adventurers who leave the safety of their world to go find themselves only to realize that there's no place like home.

And here's a tip: arcs aren't just for the main character.  A story wins extra points for depth when secondary characters get in on the action.  Someone who is an antagonist early on could well become an advocate for the hero when we least expect it.  This can be doubly satisfying because they not only help save the day for the protagonist, but demonstrate a change of heart themselves.

Each of us experience arcs of many kinds on a regular basis.  In the course of a lifetime, we couldn't count them all. Luckily, we only have to build one arc for our hero to give him or her (and the reader) the emotional anchor they're hoping for.

Silence is Golden

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine



One good turn deserves another, they say.  But in fiction, a good plot turn deserves a pause that lets the impact of what just happened sink in before anything else happens.

A particularly good example of the power of the pause is seen in 2011's The Descendants with George Clooney. Frequently, in the midst of a storyline filled with twists and turns, director Alexander Payne follows each big revelation with lingering shots of Hawaiian scenery. This gives the audience time to absorb the latest implications, as well as offering an ironic contrast of beauty in the midst of tragedy. The combination allows for rich moments of deep thought.

In a movie or TV show, that kind of timing is easily dictated in the editing booth.  When writing fiction, how are we to control the timing of our story so the audience feels that same moment of silence? Inserting a pause into a novel can be as simple as closing a scene or a chapter at the moment of impact:

          "I don't think she'll be coming in today."
          "Why not?"
          "She's dead."

          ***

If more dialogue or exposition is necessary before ending the scene, another technique is to stop the dialogue momentarily and allow the characters some reaction time:

          "I don't think she'll be coming in today."
          "Why not?"
          "She's dead."

          The blood drained out of Larry's face, and he thought he might pass out. He fumbled behind him for a chair, and slid into it. 

          "How did she die?"

If dialogue simply barrels along without acknowledging the shock of the moment, the reader is equally unlikely to feel its impact.  By pausing to provide a fitting visual, the character's reaction suggests what we hope will be the reader's own to each revelation.

Heavy-handed though they can be, soap operas know the value of zooming in on the stunned faces of the characters after any big announcement, giving the audience ample time to absorb the implications before cutting away to a commercial.  We can take a cue from  these masters of melodrama to effectively create pregnant pauses of our own.

Good Gossip

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine

Oscar Wilde once said, "If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you."

I suppose that depends on what they're saying, of course.

But nowhere does gossip serve a higher purpose than in fiction.  If our characters are lucky (and so are we), there are plenty of other characters talking about them behind their backs.

In fiction, there is much to gain from hearsay, and I'm here to say it. Among the benefits:

BACKSTORY

Ebenezer Scrooge (and we) learn why he grew to be a loner old miser as various ghosts show him pivotal moments from his life, in which characters reveal their opinions of him to one another.  This is much more dramatic than if the ghosts had simply told him why no one likes him.

When we first saw Forrest Gump, we wondered what his deal was.  It was enlightening to hear conversations about his medical history, such as those between his mother and his doctor.

EXPOSITION

At the beginning of a story, we are just getting to know the main character.  But his/her companions and associates have known them for a long time, and have a strong sense of who they are. We are brought up to speed in short order by parents who worry about their son's choice of friends or teachers complaining about the new principal's track record.

Glimpses of trouble ahead are well served by coworkers spreading rumors, or for the evil adversary to spell out to accomplices how the hero's vulnerabilities will be exploited.

REACTION

When a bride-to-be tells a friend of her engagement, she may receive an enthusiastic congratulations, and we assume everyone's happy. But we become privy to the spinster friend's real reaction when she spews a jealous diatribe to a mutual acquaintance.

Perhaps the groom-to-be didn't propose at all, and a misunderstanding grew too big to get out of. The behind-the-scenes conversations between him and his best man tell the real story of what he's going through. The truth comes out, and it can provide an interesting turn of events when it does.

In The Invention of Lying, we saw how brutal honesty can hurt when it's told face to face. In a perfect world, apparently, a little subterfuge can actually be a good thing.  

In the all-knowing, all-seeing eyes of fiction, there are no secrets.  Enjoy exposing your characters' underlying mysteries and exploiting the salacious scuttlebutt.

But you didn't hear it from me.

What Do Your Characters Want?

by Gary Fearon, Creative Director, Southern Writers Magazine

Whether Mick Jagger knew it or not, he immortalized one of the great secrets of fiction writing when he came up with "You can't always get what you want." If our characters don't have difficulty getting what they deeply desire, there isn't much to write about.

Oliver Twist and Little Orphan Annie wanted a family.  The Little Mermaid wanted to discover the world beyond her sea.  The writer in Stephen King's Misery wanted to escape the crazy lady with the sledgehammer.

Conflict being at the heart of good storytelling, the bigger the hero's dream, the bigger the obstacle should be. If we can put enough impediments in their way that it seems impossible to reach the goal, the reader will have no choice but to stick around to find out how this miracle will take place.

Occasionally we have a hero with no immediate needs, for whom everything is smooth sailing.  In those cases it's time to rock the boat by throwing them a curveball.  Giving them a problem forces them to want to fix things. 

To up the stakes we include an antagonist whose wants are in direct opposition to the hero's goals.  Sometimes they are enemies from the start, sometime they don't even know each other or the fact that they're competing until well into the story.  In both cases, we often keep them separated physically as much as possible, building up to a climactic final confrontation. 

While it's tempting to focus on the two characters in this primary conflict, we open up additional levels of interest if we remember that everybody wants something, including all of the minor characters.  Even those who appear for only one scene have motivations all their own.  The receptionist who is inconvenienced by the hero's pursuit of her boss, the night watchman who wants to know why the hero is loitering after hours, and the TV reporter who spins the story to suit their agenda are all opportunities for meaningful interaction that will move the story along with microconflicts.

While keeping the conflicts coming, a good rhythm of ebb and flow teases the audience with one step forward, two steps back, and creates an atmosphere of "Will they make it or not?" 

As in real life, the main "want" is only one of countless others happening simultaneously. The Hunger Games' Katniss Everdeen doesn't just want to survive, she wants to protect her family, be with her true love, punish the oppressor, achieve world peace, etc.  Multi-layered motivation makes for a well-rounded, believable character, and the compounded problems heighten the drama.

We all want a happy ending.  But in fiction, the real joy is in the journey and the conflicts along the way.

The First Cut is the Deepest

by Tamera Alexander

“If you love reading novels, don’t try to learn how to write them. It’ll take away some of the joy.” That’s what an author told me years ago, and while I’ve discovered that to be partially true, in order to learn how to write novels well you must love to read them.

In The Wizard of Oz the wizard tells Dorothy, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” But as writers, that’s precisely what we should do. Pay attention. In order to see how a novel works, we can’t merely look at the surface (read the story and enjoy it), we must dig deeper, down to the individual parts of the story that make it so enjoyable, so “unputdownable.”

One way I do that is through dissecting novels, separating them into pieces, or as Webster’s defines it, “exposing the several parts for scientific examination; to analyze and interpret minutely.”

Why should we dissect another writer’s book? Because we learn from others; we learn through imitation. As babies, we learn how to walk and talk from others. Then as we’re learning, repetition is key. We also dissect novels to improve the quality of our writing. Reading great writing only enhances your own voice. You’ve heard the phrase “iron sharpens iron.” And it’s true. The more we learn, the better writers we become.

Six factors to look for when dissecting a novel:

1.      Powerful openings
Roger Ailes in You Are the Message says, “We start to make up our minds about other people within seven seconds of first meeting them.” And it’s no different with novels. An average reader gives a novelist five minutes (or less) to hook them. Gripping first sentences and scenes are a must.

Consider these examples of great first sentences that complement their genre:

Sidda is a girl again in the hot heart of Louisiana, the bayou world of Catholic saints and voodoo queens. —Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996)

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. —Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003)

Powerful first sentences and openings are a must.

2.      Distinctive Dialogue

As Anne Lamott shares in Bird by Bird, “One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can’t.”

Authentic dialogue jumps off the page, not only in content, but in style and voice, and compels us to keep reading. Distinctive dialogue advances the story, provides insight into characters, and isn’t weighed down with unnecessary speaker attributions.

3. Balance of Narration
   In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein says, “Recognizing an individual author’s voice is like recognizing a voice on the telephone. Many authors first find their “voice” when they learn to examine each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity.”
   
   Voice is seen in the narration of a novel, certainly, and we can learn from that, but within that voice, how does the author use narration? Do they start chapters with narration? Do they mix it with dialogue? Do they slip in “dreaded” backstory? Which actually, when done well, can be a great tool.
   
   
4. Believable Story world
   “…so you build your story world––a moody, subjective bailiwick, brought to life so vividly with sensory images that each and every reader automatically finds himself transported there, no matter how limited his experience,” says Dwight Swain, in Techniques of the Selling Writer.
   
   How three-dimensional is the story you’re reading? Can you see everything in the setting? Is the author historically accurate? How do they use description?
   
   
5. Compelling Characterization
   “Great characters are the key to great fiction. A high-octane plot is nothing without credible, larger-than-life, highly developed enactors to make it meaningful,” says Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel.
   
   Are the characters memorable? Unique? Do they grow? Do they have believable flaws and virtues, and emotions? Do secondary characters add to the story without stealing the spotlight? Are characters’ motives clear and powerful enough to create and sustain conflict? 

6. Layering
   “…the main task of fiction is to give the reader a continuing emotional experience,” says Sol Stein in How to Grow a Novel.
   
   How big is the story? How many layers does it have? How many different POVs? Deep POV is often what separates a ‘good book’ from a story that impacts your life forever.

Now to grab a book––and a scalpel!

Tamera Alexander is the best-selling author of Rekindled, Revealed and Remembered, the critically acclaimed Fountain Creek Chronicles historical series with Bethany House Publishers, along withFrom a Distance, Beyond This Moment, and Within My Heart (Timber Ridge Reflections series). Her historical romances—including The Inheritance with Thomas Nelson—penned in her style with deeply drawn characters, thought-provoking plots, and poignant prose have earned her devoted readers—and multiple industry awards.

After living in Colorado for seventeen years, Tamera has returned to her Southern roots. She and her husband now make their home in Nashville with Tamera's father, Doug. They enjoy life there with Joe and Tamera's two adult children, and Jack, a precious—and precocious—silky terrier.

Connect with Tamera online at her website, blog, on Facebook and on Twitter.