Being a Better Writer: Writing an Anti-Hero · 9:11pm Mar 21st, 2018
Well, it’s Wednesday! And here I am with the promised Being a Better Writerpost! Plus, as you can likely guess, I survived the MRI of my knee! Now I’m just waiting for the doctor to give me a call and let me know what’s up.
In other, closer to BaBW-related news, however, there are changes coming! I won’t specify anything right now (I’d rather tease), but I willsay that the first of them is that Colonyfinally has advertising! That’s right! Not just word of mouth or what I have here on Unusual Things, Colonyis now getting broadcast by Amazon’s Ad service. Which … is actually a lotdifferent from what it was when I first took the time to look at it way back when. It’s changed quite a bit. Anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg on some exciting new developments coming. Check back soon, and you’re sure to see some of them!
Oh, and Shadow of an Empireis close to beta. That is all I’ll give away for now, but if you’d like to get a sneak-peek, keep your eyes posted on this site in the coming weeks. Oryou can support over onPatreonfor an early look at the first seven chapters of the Alpha Reader copy!
Right, enough news! Let’s talk business. Specifically the business of the lasttopic from Topic List Ten! And a request topic:
How to write an anti-hero.
Now, we’ve talked about anti-heroeson here before, and in fact if you have notread that post I’m going to stop you right here and make a very strongly worded “request” thatyou go read it.Sands, even I read it before writing this post, not only to refresh my memory on anti-heroes but to check up against what I’ve written before on the topic. And this post will be written with the fullassumption that you have read said post immediately before reading this one, because it provides a lot of background context on anti-heroes that I’m going to be assuming you’re already aware of in order to tackle today’s topic without spending several thousand extra words on it that I’ve already written.
So, let’s get down to business. You’re going to write an anti-hero. Or, at least, you want to. How do you go about this?
This is definitely an interesting post (and gives me the amusing idea of using a spectacularly disaster prone classical anti-hero as the "big bad" of a comedy), although I feel like it could have used a warning about locking into archetypes. After all, they are a character first and foremost, so it's important to acknowledge that they might slide out of whatever box you first visualized them in during the creative process or you may decide that some pieces of the box don't quite work for what you want to do and that change should be embraced rather than fought to produce a stronger character and story.