my baddy is stealing the show, again

My antagonist has been known to steal some hearts, if not the show. I feel your pain.

This is definitely something to keep in mind. You don't want the first chapter to peg your protagonist as boring and your antagonist as "OMFG I love him!" That's not to say your antagonist can't be interesting, in fact he/she definitely should be (in my opinion). You have to make sure it is known that he is in fact the antagonist, that what he is doing is repulsive/wrong, no matter how justified he thinks it might be. I don't know what to do about the protag in the rocking chair bit. I'd suggest reevaluating if that is really needed at all. I had some protag Zzzz scenes in my first draft, and while they were needed for me, in the 2nd draft it was a highlight+delete party when it came to the beginning of the novel. Good luck figuring things out!

Go with it. Good = boring Evil = facinating. I guess good has to triumph in the end but let the bad guy have fun.

Why not make your baddy the MC? You know you want to

Bad guys tend to steal the show. Ask Voyager

I solved the problem by making my MC evil. The forces of destruction, on the other hand, are very nice people.

Being a baddie is much more fun.

Jerry, if your baddie's "stealing the show," that just means it's gonna be more difficult for your goodie to succeed, which is a very good thing for your reader because easy victories are boring. Hero needs a real challenge, or else he's not a hero.

Plus, as I said before, being a baddie is so much fun. Go with it. Let him steal the show, and then let your hero steal it right back. Write on!

P.S. In a rocking chair? What a wuss. Just kidding! I love the contrast. And I wish I had a rocking chair. I left mine in North Carolina.

jerrymouse said:

i have finished chapter one of my new fantasy tale. i have set up the protagonist and the antagonist. the protag is well within his confort zone with only slight hints at danger over the horizon. my antagonist is up to his knees in blood and guts - there is just so much going on for the baddy.

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It sounds a bit like the beginning of Star Wars. Darth Vader is out in space, attacking ships and capturing princesses. Luke is safe on Tatooine, gazing at the sunset and dreaming of something bigger.

It's only chapter one, and there will be many rewrites once you've finished the first draft. Keep plugging away. Looks like solutions are already presenting themselves.

the plan (ohh how i plan) is that the protagonist has his confort zone shattered by the antagonist

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So start the story when the comfort zone is shattered instead of before. Why are you starting it before it starts?

J. R. Tomlin said:

So start the story when the comfort zone is shattered instead of before. Why are you starting it before it starts?

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Thanks. That was my thought too.

My other thought is--Baddies usually tend to steal the show because they have goals they are actively pursuing whereas many heroes are purely reactionary and boring. Maybe that's something you can look at in your notes too.

Reverse the polarity--hey, it worked on Star Trek!

Freeze the scene. Have your players swap places.

Baddie is in the good comfy place and goodie is in the baaaad place up to his wedding tackle with hungry 'gators and nary an Animal Planet employee in sight.

See what happens.

jerrymouse said:

but i am worried the reader (think big, readerS) will be more interested in the guy up to his knees in blood and guts.

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Just to be clear here, is this a problem because you think the baddie is upstanging Mr. White Hat, or because you think that your readers (thinking big for your here!) will find Baddie more interesting? Personally, I am not the kind of person to root for a baddie, especially one up to his knees in blood and guts (please tell me that you didn't mean that literally .)

Also, if your good guy is too good, then he might be pretty boring. Other than Superman, I like my heroes to be flawed, tortured creatures who do good as a desperate attempt to shed a little light in their own dark souls.

Gillhoughly said:

Reverse the polarity--hey, it worked on Star Trek!

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OffTopic: Actually, Dr. Who (Jon Pertwee) did it first.

OnTopic: I generally enjoy the villain's scenes in the beginning of the book. They're doing things. They're generally not restricted by morals or laws or whatever in their pursuit of their goal. It's always really good fun and easy to fall into.

But that doesn't mean they're actually stealing the book, just means they're more fun to write. *shrug*

At least your antagonist doesn't have a mind of his own and haunts your dreams at night, trying to persuade you to write the book about him. Seriously, it's creepy when the villain gets to a point when he's a nearly sentient creation.

Bahamutchild said:

Why not make your baddy the MC? You know you want to

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Yup. One of my original villains became the MC's "love interest." He was such a bad SOB, he was begging to be rehabilitated. Turned out he was a descent guy under all that misbehavior.

Azraelsbane said:

My antagonist has been known to steal some hearts, if not the show. I feel your pain.

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Several novels ago, I had a minor evil functionary (lets call him Liz) who assassinated his
evil commander and started some interesting manoeuvers in the realm of complex treacheries...all was well until he changed sex two novels back and now she is worse than ever, but much more enticing and is running things for better or worse in the current novel. The theoretical (though very relaxed) "good guy" seems to admire Liz's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to wiping out evil as a way of adding to her power. I've noticed that Liz is coming to resemble in some ways the Good Guy of several novels back who narrowly avoided being wiped out by Liz. Maybe its an accident. Maybe Liz is a complex enough character now to get the novel an agent.

I <3 the Big Bads. Seriously. Both MCs in my current WIP are 'evil'. I do have 'good' characters in my head, but I absolutely LOVE to toe the line. MC#2, who's a clinical sociopath, has gotten more love from my readers than MC#1, who's just ruthless, amoral, and pragmatic.

So, dude... WRITE the villains. We (readers) love the villains, especially if they're smart. Big Bads express the hidden desires in all of us that we can't act upon because we want to be a part of society, and society rejects villains. I mean honestly, how often have you said to yourself "Dammit... I wish I could just... hang the rules and TAKE what I want"?

If you don't want to change your story, obviously you don't have to, but it might be worth considering writing something about one of your villains in the future.

A couple passing thoughts:

First, narrative and plot breaks down in a way that can almost be described in physics terms. The bad guys are simply a dynamic, a delta of change... the status quo basically describes the world's resting state while the bad guys are introducing change. Usually extreme change. Meanwhile, the "good guys" most often are there as shepherds of inertia, keeping damaging change to a minimum. That change, when looked at through a narrative lens, is dramatic.

More often than not, the storyteller has enough material to keep an audience just looking at that very shallow POV. Change = interesting. In fact, it really romanticizes the "bad guys" in a way that likely influences the young and dumb in ways they don't even realize (nobody wants to be Batman, everybody wants to party with the Joker).

Note when we watch the mayhem unfold – and maybe even get a voyeuristic thrill out of it – we don't stick around long enough to see the consequences. All of the bullets, none of the paperwork. Personally, that kind of detachment from reality takes me out of the story (but I'm an aberration).

Second thought: it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of who the "good guys" are and what they're made of... Unless it's a plastic superhero held in narrative stasis to stomp the bad guy when he creeps out of his hole.

Whether it's a cop, a special agent, a soldier – all typical good guys – there's an assumption that the guy that stops the bad guy is also the antithesis of the bad guy. To a great degree, the "dark hero" movement (flawed hero) was a reaction against this white-hat vision of perfection, the nauseatingly self-righteous Knight in Shining Armor.

A great deal of solid, contemporary drama has come to embrace the humanization of the heroes... and the appropriate monster-ization of villains. In genre fiction, though, only the best factor these things into the plot and character development from the very beginning.

IMHO, of course.

Ordinary_Guy said:

A couple passing thoughts:

First, narrative and plot breaks down in a way that can almost be described in physics terms. The bad guys are simply a dynamic, a delta of change... the status quo basically describes the world's resting state while the bad guys are introducing change. Usually extreme change. Meanwhile, the "good guys" most often are there as shepherds of inertia, keeping damaging change to a minimum. That change, when looked at through a narrative lens, is dramatic.

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I reversed this convention that change is bad. In my universe, the bad guys are the ones who preserve things. The good guys just want to relax and occasionally violate the cosmic rules that keep things totally, absolutely stable.