Crafting a Story : Antagonist

The antagonist’s random word is:

Last week, I made the protagonist. This week, it’s time for the antagonist. Faint has a number of different definitions, but it generally means either losing consciousness or not being strong or clear. I’m going with the latter.

So that leaves me with a weak person or a transparent person. Since I love me some supernatural, I’m going to pick the second one. Offhandedly, I’d say this person is a ghost. That means that someone’s ghost is going to cause problems for our protagonist, at this point named Henry.

I know nothing about this ghost, except that he is dead and Henry or his shop has something to do with it. Since the setting will have its own random word, let’s say this ghost is attached to Henry himself. Something had to make him emerge, but we’ll get to that later. For now, we know that this ghost is dead because of Henry and now haunts him.

How did he die? From what we know of Henry – patient, methodical and a perfectionist – I would say that the chances are pretty slim that the death happened by accident (in a way that it would be Henry’s fault). So instead we are left with two choices: Henry murdered him, or killed him in defence. I think we’ll put aside the notion of a villain protagonist and stick with a hero for now. So Henry killed someone in defence some time ago and now his ghost is coming back to haunt him.

Since he was killed in defence, chances are that the ghost was a criminal of some kind in his life. Also, he was a violent criminal. A serial killer maybe? A basic robber? Bank robber? Maybe. Rather a smaller operation that would only require one guy. A store robbery then. Let’s say there was a robbery and Henry was in the store. In an act of bravery, he grabbed the gun and shot the robber before he could shoot the cashier. Henry was not charged.

So the ghost haunts Henry because he killed him. Revenge? Maybe. Or perhaps not. We’ll have to wait for the rest of the story to flesh this part out.

Taking all this into consideration, let’s call the antagonist Irwin Wiles.

That’s all for now. Next week is the setting.

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