Protagonist tries to achieve the goal.

Antagonist tries to stop him.

That’s the simple answer, and it is true enough.  But there is a lot more to know about these two essential characters, and the more you learn, the more powerful and effective your Protagonists and Antagonists will be.

To begin with, a Protagonist is not a Hero.  A Hero is a compound character who, in addition to being a Protagonist is ALSO the Main Character (the one we identify with).

When these two elements are combined, you get a typical Hero.  But these elements don’t have to be in the same single character.  The Protagonist might be one character who is driving the quest forward, but the reader/audience identifies with a different character (sees the story through their eyes).

In fact, that is exactly how it is done in To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch, is an open-minded lawyer in a racially biased Southern town in the 1930s, trying to get a fair trial for a black man wrongly accused of raping a white girl.  But we don’t see the story through his eyes, but through those of his young daughter, Scout.  Scout is the Main Character and Atticus is the Protagonist.

In a similar manner, an Antagonist is not a Villain.  A Villain is another compound character who is both an Antagonist and ALSO the Influence Character.   (The Influence Character is the one who’s point of activities and attitudes bring the Main Character to the point of considering changing or violating his own beliefs, morals, or standards.

When these two elements are combined, you get a typical Villain.  But, as with the Hero, they don’t have to be in the character.  So, the Antagonist might be pushing to stop the Protagonist, but another character is the one pressuring the Main Character to abandon his or her beliefs.

Again, we can see this at work in To Kill A Mockingbird.  Bob Ewell is the father of the white girl who the black man is accused of raping.  He wants to have the man lynched, so clearly he is out to stop Atticus, the Protagonist, and that makes Ewell the Antagonist.

But, it isn’t Mr. Ewell who puts any pressure on Scout (the Main Character) to change her beliefs.  That role goes to Boo Radley, the mysterious boogeyman who lives down the street.  Since Scout is the Main Character we see prejudice through her eyes – through the eyes of a child.  And because we identify with her, we are as fearful as she is of Boo.  All the kids are sure he is a monster that does terrible things to children, and Scout believes it to.

But in the end, it turns out Boo has been protecting Scout and the other children all along from Bob Ewell who wanted to harm them to get back at Atticus.  And Boo even left little toys for the kids to find.  Scout must now realize she herself was prejudice against Boo without ever having any direct information about him.  And it was Boo’s actions and attitudes that eventually caused her to change her beliefs.

So in summary, the Protagonist is the Prime Mover of the effort to achieve the Story’s Goal – that and nothing more. The Antagonist is the Chief Obstacle to that effort and that’s all he is, functionally.  In a sense, Protagonist is the irresistible force and Antagonist is the immovable object.

Because they have specific dramatic functions not based on personality or perspective, the Protagonist and Antagonist are archetypal characters, simple as that.

Having refined our definition of what a Protagonist and Antagonist truly are, we’re going to put aside compound characters and focus solely on the archetypal functions.

To begin our exploration we might ask, “Where do the Protagonist and Antagonist come from?”  Simple answer is they come from us – from the roles we play when we form a group or team for a common purpose.

When we gather in groups to solve common problems, we get a lot more done if we specialize so that one person becomes the voice of reason and another the resident skeptic.  This way, each of the specialists can give his or her full attention to the problem from his perspective, and as a whole, the group gets a deeper dive into the issues that if we all tried to do all the jobs ourselves.

So, in a sense, the functions that emerge in a group, represent the same traits we have in our own minds as individuals.  For example, in our own minds, we have reason and skepticism, and as a group organizes, one member will emerge as the voice of reason, and another as the resident skeptic.

And, of course, every group has a Protagonist who wants to set and achieve a goal, and an Antagonist wants to stop him.  So, in a word, the Protagonist represents elements of ourselves.  Protagonist is our Initiative, the motivation to change the status quo. The Antagonist embodies our Reticence to change the status quo. These are perhaps our two most obvious human traits – the drive to alter our environment and the drive to keep things the way they are. That is likely why the Archetypes that represent them are usually the two most visible in a story.

Functionally, the character you choose as your Protagonist will exhibit unswerving drive. No matter what the obstacles, no matter what the price, the Protagonist will charge forward and try to convince everyone else to follow.

Without a Protagonist, your story would have no directed drive. It would likely meander through a series of events without any sense of compelling inevitability. When the climax arrives, it would likely be weak, not seen as the culmination and moment of truth so much as simply the end.

This is not to say that the Protagonist won’t be misled or even temporarily convinced to stop trying, but like a smoldering fire the Protagonist is a self-starter. Eventually, he or she will ignite again and once more resume the drive toward the goal.

What, now, of the Antagonist? We have all heard the idioms, Let sleeping dogs lie, Leave well enough alone, and If it works – don’t fix it. All of these express that very same human quality embodied by the Antagonist: Reticence.

To be clear, Reticence does not mean that the Antagonist is afraid of change. While that may be true, it may instead be that the Antagonist is simply comfortable with the way things are or may even be ecstatic about them. Or, he or she may not care about the way things are but hate the way they would become if the goal were achieved.

Functionally, your Antagonist will try anything and everything to prevent the goal from being achieved. No matter what the cost, any price would not seem as bad to this character as the conditions he or she would endure if the goal comes to be. The Antagonist will never cease in its efforts, and will marshal every resource (human and material) to see that the Protagonist fails in his efforts.

Without an Antagonist, your story would have no concerted force directed against the Protagonist. Obstacles would seem arbitrary and inconsequential. When the climax arrives, it would likely seem insignificant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

As with the Protagonist, don’t be trapped into building an Antagonist with a mean personality. There are many stories with Antagonist’s who are actually right in trying to stop the goal.

Think of James Bond for a moment.  The “Bond Villain” is almost always the Protagonist – starting some new scheme with a goal to change the world.  Bond himself is the Antagonist, as strange as it may seem, for his job is to prevent the change and/or put things back the way they were.  So, as described earlier, it may well be that the Protagonist is the Bad Guy and the Antagonist is the Good Guy. Or, in fact both may be Good or both Bad, as often happens in more sophisticated stories.

The important thing is that the Antagonist must be in a position in the plot to place obstacles in the path of the Protagonist, not just to make the quest more difficult (another archetype does that), but to actually try to prevent the Protagonist from succeeding.

Now that you know a bit more about who the Protagonist and Antagonist really are, see if you can’t refine their dramatic functions in your next story or even the one you may currently have in development

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Learn more about Archetypal Characters

One of the most powerful opportunities of the novel format is the ability to describe what a character is thinking. In movies or stage plays (with exceptions) you must show what the character is thinking through action and/or dialog. But in a novel, you can just come out and say it.

For example, in a movie, you might say:

John walks slowly to the window and looks out at the park bench where he last saw Sally. His eyes fill with tears, yet he manages a half-smile. He bows his head and slowly closes the blinds.

But in a novel you might write:

John walked slowly to the window, letting his gaze drift toward the park bench where he last saw Sally. Why did I let her go, he thought. I wanted so much to ask her to stay. Though saddened, he reflected on happier times with her – days of more contentment than he ever imagined he could feel.  And slowly, his mood brightened ever so slightly.

The previous paragraph uses two forms of expressing a character’s thoughts. One, is the direct quote of the thought, as if it were dialog spoken internally to oneself. The other is a summary and paraphrase of what was going on in the character’s head.

Most novels are greatly enhanced by stepping away from a purely objective narrative perspective, and drawing the reader into the minds of the character’s themselves.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Learn more about developing characters

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Over the course of the story, your reader/audience has come to know your characters and to feel for them. The story doesn’t end when your characters and their relationships reach a climax. Rather, the reader/audience will want to know the aftermath – how it turned out for each character and each relationship. In addition, the audience needs a little time to say goodbye – to let the character walk off into the sunset or to mourn for them before the story ends.

This is in effect the conclusion, the wrap-up. After everything has happened to your characters, after the final showdown with their respective demons, what are they like? How have they changed? If a character began the story as a skeptic, does it now have faith? If they began the story full of hatred for a mother that abandoned them, have they now made revelations to the effect that she was forced to do this, and now they no longer hate? This is what you have to tell the audience, how their journeys changed them, have the resolved their problems, or not?

And in the end, this constitutes a large part of your story’s message. It is not enough to know if a story ends in success or failure, but also if the characters are better off emotionally or plagued with even greater demons, regardless of whether or not the goal was achieved.

You can show what happens to your characters directly, through a conversation by others about them, or even in a post-script on each that appears after the story is over or in the ending credits of a movie.

How you do this is limited only by your creative inspiration, but make sure you review each character and each relationship and provide at least a minimal dismissal for each.

*******

For complete story development help, consider trying my
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By Melanie Anne Phillips

When your reader/audience first meets your characters in a story, it has the same effects as when you are introduced to someone in real life. First impressions have a tremendous impact that you can use either to establish or mislead your reader/audience as to the true nature of each character.

You might tell your reader/audience all there is to know about a particular character right up front. But for another character, you may drop little bits of information over the whole course of the story. And, of course, you want to note how a character’s outlook and feelings change as the story unfolds.

Then there is the question of who shows up first? Joe, Tom, Sally, or the Monster? Characters introduced early on become more important to the reader/audience at a personal level, even though their roles may not be as significant in the story at large.

To elevate an interesting character who is not a major player, you may wish to introduce and follow him or until he or she latches up with a major character down the line. Or, you might reveal several characters together in a group activity to give them equal footing at that point in the story.

Who is your Main Character? Do you want to involve your audience immediately by bringing that character in first, or would you rather have them look more objectively at the characters and plot, introducing the Main Character later?

You know all about your characters while your audience knows nothing. It’s okay to reveal more about your characters later in the story, but you must lay the groundwork and reveal personality so that your audience can sympathize with them and feel for them as the story progresses. For complex characters, it may take the entire story before all their subtleties are revealed.

Sometimes an author may want to have a character with a dark side, or a hidden side that will be revealed only later in the story.  Try to introduce such a character’s facade as a complete persona, making it that much more shocking when you finally reveal their other face.

*******

For complete story development help, consider trying my
StoryWeaver Step By Step Story Development Software risk-free for 90 days.

And for even more personalized help,
contact me about my story consultation services.

If you are writing with only Heroes and Villains, you are limiting yourself. A Hero is a Main Character who is also a Protagonist. A Villain is an Obstacle Character who is also an Antagonist.

What’s the difference between a Main Character and a Protagonist? The Main Character represents the audience position in the story: It is the character the audience most cares about, most empathizes with. The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward.

These two functions don’t have to be placed in the same character as they are in a Hero. In real life, we are not always running the show. Similarly in stories, the Main Character doesn’t have to always be the guy leading the charge. Separating the two functions opens up a wide variety of new audience experiences and creates characters that are less archetypal and formulaic.

Similarly, when we split a Villain into an Obstacle Character and an Antagonist, we open up opportunities, some of which bear directly on the nature and function of a Love Interest and the structure of a “Buddy Picture.”

First, what is the difference between the Obstacle Character and the Antagonist? The Obstacle Character represents a point of view opposite that of the Main Character. Every Main Character will be driven by some central belief system around which the story’s philosophic argument revolves. This belief system might be an attitude, a way of doing things, or something as extensive as a specific “world view.” The Obstacle Character represents the view that is diametrically opposed.

Over the course of the story, the Obstacle Character’s impact will bring the Main Character to a point of decision at which he or she must choose to stick with the old “tried and true” philosophy/approach or to adopt the alternative put forth by the Obstacle Character. In many stories, this moment results in a “Leap of Faith” in which the Main Character is forced to make a conscious decision to go with one view or the other at the critical moment. In other stories, the Main Character may gradually warm to the Obstacle Character’s view, but the audience is not sure if that warmth will hold when the chips are down. Only at the critical moment will the story demonstrate on which side of the fence the Main Character drops, not by conscious choice but by responding from the heart.

When a Hero battles a Villain, both the functional relationship of the Protagonist/Antagonist battle for supremacy in the plot and the personal relationship of the Main Character/Obstacle Character occur between the same two characters at the same time. In a sense, working with Heroes and Villains flattens these two relationships into a single relationship. This often confuses an audience, as they are often not sure which of the two relationships is being described by a particular moment between the two characters.

What’s more, it is easy for an author to leave holes in each kind of relationship because if something happens in one of the two, its dramatic momentum can carry the attention past a gap in the other. In fact, it is the foundation of a Melodrama for the audience to accept as a style that gaps in both relationships are acceptable, as long as the combined momentum of them both carries the attention on to the next point in either.

To avoid audience confusion and prevent your drama from disintegrating into a Melodrama, you may wish to split up either the Hero, the Villain, or both. When both are split, it allows for a complete separation of the functional relationship and the personal relationship, allowing for each to be fully developed by the author and experienced by the audience.

When only one character is split, the two relationships converge on the remaining character. So, we might have a story with a Hero (Main Character/Protagonist) who has a functional relationship with the Antagonist and a personal relationship with the Obstacle Character. This forms a “V” shaped pattern which is referred to as a Dramatic Triangle.

Learn how to use the Dramatic Triangle for your story in my follow-up article.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator, StoryWeaver
Co-creator, Dramatica

Consider the Main Character and the Influence Character who, it would seem at first blush, are as opposite as they can be in regard to  some underlying philosophical perspective, world view, belief system or moral code.

But in fact, they are not 180 degrees apart but 90 degrees from the point of view of one, and 270 from the point of view of the other.  If you haven’t seen it recently, check out the following video clip called “You and I are both alike” that explores the relationship between Main and Influence characters.  Here’s the link:

http://storymind.com/video/examples/you-and-i.mp4

These two “opposing” viewpoints are not about arguing “apples and oranges” but about one arguing they are nothing alike because one is an apple and the other an orange, and the other saying no, we are both alike because we are both fruit.  You see, duality is misunderstood when it assumed to be “black or white,” “hot or cold,” “good or evil.”  It is really a matter of how we classify ourselves – as different people on the same team or as members of different teams.

Are you familiar with the four kinds of character relationships – Dynamic, Companion, Dependent, and Associative?  That part of the Dramatica theory has much to inform a new way of looking at duality.  Here is a link on that concept, and then some more commentary:

http://storymind.com/content/79.htm

The relationship between the Main and Influence Characters is really that of the fourth kind of relationship – the Associative, in which its members are either seen as Components – Independent agents (apples and oranges), or as a Collective in which they are all part of the same family (fruit).

So duality does exist, but it is not as simple as saying for every ounce of good energy there must be an equal and opposite bad energy somewhere to balance it out.  Nothing is good or evil in and of itself.  It is all context dependent, but the sticking point is that conflicts occur because people don’t agree on which context to use in a given situation.  And that issue, in fact, is the core of what every story ever written is about: the author telling the audience that they have some special information or experience in regard to a particular kind of problem, and then promoting a particular context as the best one to use with that specific problem to have the best chance of solving, or at least lessening the effect of it.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

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From my “classic” 1999 video series on story structure:

Part 20: The 8 Archetypes

By Melanie Anne Phillips

For just about any story you read, you get a sense of who it revolves around – who is it really about? Who is the character whose shoes we stand in, through whose eyes and heart do we see and feel the story at the most passionate personal level?

In Gone with the Wind, for example, the two most prominent characters are Rhett and Scarlet. We like Rhett, but it is clearly Scarlet’s story – the whole thing revolves around her, what she thinks, what he feels, the plans she makes, her attitudes, and so on. Rhett, as charismatic as he is, does a lot of things, but he even disappears for quite a while at one point in the picture, but that’s okay because Scarlet is the core of the story. So, she’s the Main Character.

In both the book and movie of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus (the Gregory Peck part) is the protagonist. The Story Goal is to try and save the black man wrongly accused of raping a white girl in the 1930s south. By definition, the Protagonist is the one pushing forward the effort to achieve the goal. So, that is clearly Atticus. And his opponent, the Antagonist, is the father of the offended girl who wants the man lynched. That’s the plot and Protagonist and Antagonist fight for it. But, neither of them is the Main Character, and we can tell this because we don’t stand in either of their shoes – we don’t see the story though either of their sets of eyes. Rather the Main Character is Atticus’ young daughter Scout. She is also the narrator of both the book and movie, but that is not what makes her the Main Character. Rather, it is that we see the story through her eyes – a child’s view of prejudice.

And there is one more character – the one I want you to focus on creating next for your story – the Influence Character! In TKAM, it is Boo Radley – the Boogeyman who lives next door. While the logistic argument of the story is between Atticus and Bob Ewell over the trial and the fate of the defendant, the passionate or philosophic argument is all about Scout’s prejudice against Boo without ever having seen him. And in fact, he turns out to be the one who has been protecting her from Bob Ewell all along. In other words, any time we make judgements about someone without knowing them, that’s what prejudice is all about. That’s the message of the story. And that’s why Atticus is NOT the Main Character. If he was, we’d stand in his shoes, be all righteous defending a black man, and nothing would be learned. But by standing in Scout’s innocent shoes and still finding ourselves to be prejudiced (because we buy into her fear of Boo) the message is made.

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As writers, we all know that characters need drive or their actions will come across as unmotivated.  But what is drive, and where does it come from?

At a minimum, every character needs a reason to explain the choices they make or to do the things they do.  For example, the ex-con who has made a new life going straight takes on one more job because his daughter needs a surgery he can’t afford.  Or, a mother of three who is belittled and abused by her husband falls deeply in love with a man she met in a chance encounter but can’t bring herself to run away with him because she was abandoned by her own mother as a child.

These motivations are enough to satisfy the basic need to understand what drives each character, yet the reasons given still seem unrealistically simple, superficial, or just too pat.

So how do you design drives for your characters that ring true to the complex web of conflicting feelings that form the motive forces each of us grapple with in everyday life?  For that, you need to dig down beneath the reasons a character responds and acts as they do in order to discover their justifications.

Justifications are the tangled up knots of experience that determine both our emotional responses to life situations as well as the courses of actions we think are best.  Like a ball of snarled rubber bands, justification creates a lot of potential, and if something starts to cut into it, sometimes it slowly unravels, and other times it snaps explosively.

The creation of Justification in characters is the purpose of and reason for Backstory. The dismantling of Justification is the purpose and function of the story itself. The gathering of information necessary to dismantle Justification is the purpose and function of the Scenes, with every Act completing a major new epiphany.  It is the nature of the specific Justifications explored in a particular story that determines the story’s message.

Understanding justification is essential to understanding the dynamics that drive story structure.  Fortunately this is not as hard as it might sound as we do this intuitively every day.  We all justify, for better or worse, and then subconsciously add the results of our latest use of the process into our experience base, slightly changing our view of the world every time we do it.

So my purpose here is not to tell you something you don’t already know, but to elevate that process from automatic to intentional.  In this way, you can more accurately and powerfully sculpt your characters, what drives them, and how that leads to the behaviors they exhibit.

Technically speaking, Justification is a state of mind wherein the Subjective view differs from the Objective view. Okay, fine. But how about in plain English!!!! Very well…  When someone sees things differently than they are, they are Justifying. This can happen either because the mind draws a wrong conclusion or assumes, or because things have actually changed in a way that is no longer consistent with a held view.

All of this comes down to cause and effect. For example, suppose you have a family with a husband, wife and young son. Here is a sample backstory of how a particular little boy might develop a particular justification that could plague him in later life….

The husband works at a produce stand. Every Friday he gets paid. Also every Friday a new shipment of fresh beets comes in. So, every Friday night, he comes home with the beets and the paycheck. The paycheck is never quite enough to cover the bills and this is weighing heavily on his wife. Still, she knows her husband works hard, so she tries to keep her feelings to herself and devotes her attention to cooking the beets for her husband and her son.

Nevertheless, she cannot hold out forever, and every Friday evening at some point while they eat, she and her husband get in an argument. Of course, like most people who are trying to hold back the REAL cause of her feelings, she picks on other issues, so the arguments are all different.  Their son, therefore, cannot see an immediate cause for the problem so he desperately looks for one so he can anticipate the problem and either avoid it or at least be prepared – something we all do called “problem-solving.”

Now the child might come to feel that Friday nights are gonna be bad or that dinner is a horrible time, but in our story, he casts his eyes down at his plate of beets so as to shut out the arguing, and this becomes the common factor he fixates on as his canary in the mine – a harbinger of a fight to come.  And, of course, all of this is going on in his heart subconsciously, below the level of his conscious awareness.

With this backstory, we have laid out a series of cause and effect relationships that lead to the child establishing a justification – a connection between the way his parents fighting makes him feel and the serving of beets. With this potential we have wound up the spring of the dramatic mechanism for our story, and now we are ready to begin the fore story to see how that tension creates problems.

The Story Begins: The young boy, now a grown adult with a wife and child of his own, sits down to dinner with his family. He begins to get belligerent and antagonistic. His wife does not know why he is suddenly acting this way or  what she may have inadvertently done to trigger his behavior. In fact, later, he himself cannot say why he was so upset. But we, the readers or audience, know it is because his wife served beets.

Looking toward the backstory, it is easy to see that from the young boy’s knowledge of the situation when he was a child, the common element that he fixated on whenever his parents argued was the serving of beets. They never argued about the money directly, and that would probably have been beyond his ken anyway.  And so, he established a subconscious correlation- a justification – that associated angry interchanges with the presence of beets.  And if there is no argument, he starts one, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Certainly, this makes no sense to the conscious mind – one would never accept nor act upon such a ridiculous association.  But the subconscious does not reason, it just associates.  And therefore, connections made in such a way are simply accepted as being truisms.

Obviously, it is not stupidity that leads to such misconceptions, but lack of accurate information. The problem is, we have no way of knowing if we have the proper information or not, for we can never determine how much we do not know or what we may have unintentionally misconstrued.  Justification is nothing more than a human trait by which we see a repetitive proximity between two items or between an item and a process and assume a causal relationship, as in “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” or “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”

But why is this so important to writing stories?  In fact, the purpose of stories is to shine a light on these erroneous connections that can get stuck in our motivations, just as Scrooge is shown that his world view is in error by having the ghosts expose the roots of his justifications and their ramifications on others.  Stories show us a greater Objective truth that is beyond our limited Subjective view. They exist to convince us that if we feel something is a certain way, even based on extensive experience, it is possible that it really is not that way at all, at least in this particular kind of situation.  And the more we consume stories, as readers or audience members, the more skillful we become at questioning our most strongly held assumptions and beliefs, leading to a more clear understanding of our lives, and therefore to a better ability to navigate them.

But not all assumptions of cause and effect are wrong.  In fact, most of the time we get it right, seeing repeated connections over and over again and accurately accepting that there is a direct connection between one set of circumstances and what happens next.

Characters, whether their assumptions are right or wrong, will be tested by a new set of circumstances that make it appear as if a given earlier assumption is actually wrong.  But are they truly wrong or do they just appear to be wrong?  That is the dilemma that leads to a character facing a leap of faith – to stick with the tried and true that currently seems to be failing, or to embrace a new understanding that seems to explain more but has never been tried.

The question here is that in our lives, our understanding is not only limited by past misconceptions, but by lack of accurate information about the present as well.  And stories are all about sending a message that in this particular kind of scenario, trust your beliefs OR in this particular scenario, abandon your beliefs.

“Keeping the faith” describes the feeling that drives characters who refuse to change their long-held views., even in the face of major contradiction, holding on to one’s views and dismissing the apparent reality as an illusion or falsehood.

“Seeing the light” describes the feeling that drives characters who ultimately embrace a new view, even in the face of potential disaster, accepting a new reality and recasting the previous belief as either having always been in error, or at least not being accurate right now.

At the climax of a story, the need to make a decision between remaining steadfast in one’s faith or altering it is presented to every main character. Each must make that choice. And as a result of that choice, the character will succeed or fail.

If we decide with the best available evidence and trust our feelings we will succeed, right? Not necessarily. Success or failure is just the author’s way of saying she agrees or disagrees with the choice the character made.  So, just making a leap of faith does not, in and of itself, guarantee success.  Rather, a story leads a character to a point at which that choice – to change or remain steadfast in one’s beliefs – can no longer be put off.  Circumstances are such that failing to make the choice at all leads to certain disaster.  The only way to have a chance to succeed is to choose to either stay the course, or to set off in a new direction.

In the original Star Wars movie, for example, Luke Skywalker is ultimately faced with trusting in the targeting computer or in himself and turning off the computer to rely on his own skills in destroying the Death Star.   He turns off the computer, trusting in himself, and destroys the Death Star.  But that is only one of four possible outcomes.

Imagine if Luke had made the the choice to turn off his targeting computer (trusting in the force), dropped his bombs, and missed the target, Darth blows him up and the Death Star obliterates the rebels… how would we feel? Sure you could write it that way, but would you want to? Perhaps! If you made Star Wars as a government sponsored entertainment in a fascist regime, that might very WELL be the way you would “want” to end it!

But there are still two other options.  Suppose Luke left the targeting computer on and succeeded, or if he turned it off and failed.  Any of these outcomes makes sense, but each sends different kind of message.  And that, as was said in the beginning, is the purpose of stories – to convey a message that a particular believe is a good or bad one to maintain in the given situation that this particular story explores.  And you can do that by showing the steadfast choice succeeds or fails, or that change leads to success or failure, each creating a different kind of message.

In summary then, the point of stories is to provide a message about the best way to respond to a specific given problem – either to stick with one’s long-held beliefs or to adopt a new way of looking at things.  Backstory explains how a belief was formed through the process of justification.  Over the course of the story, circumstances continually build pressure on your main character to change that belief, eventually arriving at a climax that forces a choice because failure is certain if one does not choose at all between the old belief and the new.

By this point, there is equal evidence supporting the original belief as supporting the new one.  And so, the main character must make a leap of faith and choose to stick to remain steadfast in its views or to adopt a new view.  Either way could lead to success or failure, depending on the flavor of message you wish to impart.

In conclusion then, think about the process of justification when you consider where your characters’ drives come from, how that creates problems for them in the here and now, and the message you want to send.  The more you become familiar with how justification works, the more you can take control of the affect your story will have on your readers or audience, and the more adept you may become in making solid choices in your own life as well.

Melanie Anne Phillips

Author’s note:  Most of these concepts come from the Dramatica theory of narrative structure I developed along with my writing partner, Chris Huntley.  They became the basis for our Dramatica Story Structuring Software.  Click the link to try it for free.

Here’s something else I also made for writers…