“To Burn With Desire And Keep Quiet About It Is The Greatest Punishment We Can Bring On Ourselves.”

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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“Please be stronger than your past. The future may still give you a chance.”

— George Michael 

“Sometimes it’s good to be scared. It means you still have something to lose…”

— Meredith Grey

This, like other quotes by Mark Twain, makes part of the sad reality of today. It's not fair what happens in this world.

If someone wants justice, that person must pay an enormous price and that's why poor people stay silent if something unfair happens to them, even if justice represents one of the most important human rights.

“Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.”

— -Mark Twain

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable…It means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

— Neil Gaiman (via quotemadness)

It drives me crazy when I think that almost all of Mark Twain's quotes are valid in the present. He was so ahead of his time!

Here we are, in 2020, in quarantine, when we're obviously wishing to be somewhere else and suddenly this post appears, which encourages us to read.

““Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.””

— Mark Twain (via teandcats)

I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:

Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin. 

Here is a page of medieval weapons.

Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.

Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.

Here are some gemstones.

Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on. 

Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.

Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised. 

Here is every religion in the world. 

Here is every language in the world.

Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.

Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.

Here are poisonous plants.

Here are plants in general.

Feel free to add more to this!