“Maybe It Won’t Work Out. But Maybe Seeing If It Does Will Be The Best Adventure Ever.”

“You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.”

— Sue Fitzmaurice 

“Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”

— Maggie Kuhn 

“Invest in yourself. You can afford it. Trust me.”

— Rashon Carraway 

“Good books don’t give up all their secrets at once.”

— Stephen King 

“We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”

— Ronald Reagan 

How do you introduce an antagonist into a story? I'm stuck. They are important to the plot.

Introducing the antagonist…

The antagonist should be introduced in a memorable way that is useful to the story. However, first appearances and introductions can be different thing, and introducing them as a character versus introducing them as the antagonist can be two separate events entirely.

When you’re introducing the antagonist, you should keep in mind what the reader knows, and what they have yet to learn. Sure, maybe they know this person is the main character’s roommate, and they’re finding out that this roommate has helped their significant other cheat on them, but they don’t know that the roommate has held a grudge since high school which informed the decision to help them cheat. The antagonist’s introduction should be a strategic disclosure of key information. 

The introduction should also be memorable enough to evoke its own details in future scenes regarding the character. Perhaps what they say or do in their introduction should come up later. Their introduction should act as a bookend to their arc throughout the novel, so keep the ending in mind as you write their beginning. You must also be mindful that this is probably the first (or a new first) impression of that character on the reader, so you want to set the tone for their presence in the story and offer some preliminary character development for the reader to build on as the plot progresses. 

Here are some other resources you may find helpful:

Resources For Describing Characters

How To Fit Character Development Into Your Story

Making Characters Unpredictable

Writing Good Villains

Giving Characters Distinct Voices in Dialogue

Gradually Revealing Character’s Past

Tips on Introducing Characters

Creating Villains

How To Write A Good Plot Twist

How To Foreshadow

Tackling Subplots

Tips On Dialogue

Writing Intense Scenes

Tips on Writing Flashbacks

Describing emotion through action

A Guide To Tension & Suspense

Foreshadowing The Villain

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Masterlist | WIP Blog

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“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The course of true love never did run smooth.

William Shakespeare

“And so it seems I must always write you letters that I can never send.”

— Sylvia Plath