How Is Our Protagonist Challenged to Improve? (& a Worksheet!)
In our story, something makes our protagonist change and progress in their internal journey. But what’s that something? What triggers them to grow?
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Thursday Thoughts: The Antagonist Role in Romance
A recent post by Diana Hurwitz explored the nature of antagonists in romance novels. Today, we’re taking a deeper look at our options for antagonists, especially in the romance genre, and how we can avoid creating unhealthy relationships.
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Antagonists: How to Avoid Boring Villains — Guest: Kristen Lamb
In Kristen Lamb’s guest post series on antagonists, we’ve talked a lot about the non-evil, non-villain style of antagonists. Today we’re finally(!) focusing on the villain and how we can avoid mustache-twirling by giving them depth.
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Antagonists: What’s Driving Our Story? — Guest: Kristen Lamb
We’ve explored how antagonists act as the conflict-engine for our story, but our Big Boss Troublemaker isn’t in every scene. What keeps the rest of our story going? Kristen’s going to teach us today about scene antagonists.
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Conflict: Why It Isn’t Just about Fighting — Guest: Janice Hardy
We’ve been talking about antagonists lately, and how some writers minimize the conflict in their stories, even though “good fiction is the path of greatest resistance.” In a perfect bit of serendipity, a guest post by Janice Hardy today addresses the most common myth about conflict.
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Antagonists: The End-All-Be-All of Our Story — Guest: Kristen Lamb
Over the past couple of weeks, Kristen Lamb has been kind enough to let me share her insights on antagonists: what they are, why they help define our story, how to strengthen them, etc. Today, we’re exploring how antagonists create our story from beginning to end.
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Antagonists: Inner & Outer Demons — Guest: Kristen Lamb
In a “man vs. self” story, we can’t just show a character arguing with themselves. Instead, Kristen shows us how to use a technique like in the movie Black Swan—where the outward antagonists represent the protagonist’s own issues.
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Antagonists: “He’s His Own Worst Enemy” — Guest: Kristen Lamb
Sometimes, we’ll say that a character is their own worst enemy, such as the “man versus himself” story premise. However, those stories use proxies to provide a face for the opposition. Today, we’re going to dig deeper into this idea of man versus self to better understand the concept.
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Antagonists: What Is an Antagonist? — Guest: Kristen Lamb
All great stories are about one thing and one thing only—problems. More specifically? Every good story has one core problem in need of being resolved. Today, Kristen Lamb shares her insights into how problems, conflicts, and antagonists drive our story.
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Should We Work for Free?
Kristen Lamb wrote last week about how the “culture of free” is killing creatives. Too often, we’re expected to work “for exposure.” At the same time, I recently posted about how we can use free content as a pricing strategy. So which is it? Should we work for free or not?
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