The antagonist is the character that opposes your protagonist because his agenda opposes your protagonist's agenda. He doesn’t even need to be all that bad, but to make an interesting story he must be as strongly motivated as your hero. He must be an equal match in terms of strength and resources as your protagonist. It’s even more interesting if your antagonist has a bit of an edge.

Think of your antagonist and protagonist as mirror images of one another: each blocking the other’s desire.

Consider Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois is our fragile protagonist and Stanley the brawling antagonist. They compete for Stella’s affections, loyalty, home and respect. It becomes a battle where only one can possibly succeed. Even though Stanley is rough and crude, we can’t help but see his view of Blanche and his right to be the head of his family.

Even if your antagonist is unsympathetic, so long as he has a powerful desire, the reader can’t help but sympathize. This desire becomes the reason behind why the antagonist commits his deeds. Understanding him gives him a spark of humanity.

And what if your antagonist truly is a villain? Well, that’s okay, too. Did you know that a recent study by Dr. David Buss revealed that 91% of men and 84% of women have fantasized about committing murder? How that informs fiction is that many of us readers are lured by the forbidden. Some of us daydream as we read books about “bad guys” and what it would be like not to be burdened by a moral code.

Go ahead, create a villain, just don’t make him a mustache-twirling-shifty-eyed sonofabitch. Your readers have seen that character ad nauseam. The villain must be psychologically complex. By having both a good and bad side, this antagonist can more fully test our hero.

What makes a good villain? The same qualities that make a good hero: larger-than-life strengths, highly motivated and operating at maximum capacity.

My favorite villains are Mr. Blond, Mr. Dark, Nurse Ratched, Evil Stepmother (Snow White), Hannibal Lecter and the Snow Queen. What do they have in common? Every one of them was stronger than the protagonist which upped the tension for me as I worried for the protagonist.

Who are your favorite villains? 

The New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott once said, “Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will.”

You want hubris? Who better than Baz Luhrman to retell The Great Gatsby? Since Romeo + Juliet, I’ve been waiting for Baz to hit another homerun. And he absolutely does with The Great Gatsby for the same reason that Romeo +Juliet was so successful. He has a fabulous story as his launch.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age has many parallels to our current time: unmitigated greed, income inequity, the sense of entitlement the wealthy assume, the hysteria of excess. These are the mileposts of the American Dream, and everyone feels that the dream is within reach. But at the heart of The Great Gatsby is the tragic love affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is almost in reach, just as the green light at the end of her dock beckons to Gatsby from across the bay. And I feel Gatsby’s heartbreak more deeply than I ever did reading the novel, marvelous as it is.

The movie was brilliantly acted with Leo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. The score by Jay-Z adds to the excitement, and then there’s Luhrman’s fabulous spectacle. Just be prepared to have your heart broken.

One more thing: The Wall Street Journal HATES this picture. Now, don’t you want to go see it?

You sit down for a day of novel writing. A paragraph later your character rolls up his sleeve and his forearm is tattooed in Chinese script.  You halt your writing and look up Chinese writing on Wikipedia, and following the source material at the end of the article, you order two books on Chinese calligraphy. The next thing you know it’s time for lunch. Is this a good use of your time? Only you know the answer.

The question is: do you need to research before you write the scene in order to inform the writing, or can you write the scene and add the researched layer in the same way a painter would add another dimension to her painting. It’s a question I still struggle with after writing for more than ten years.

When I decided that I wanted to write a mystery, the only thing I knew about criminal investigation was from novels or television, so I took a series of criminal justice classes at my community college. I learned the difference between interrogation and interview, grid searches, accelerants and blood spatter. To add a sense of place I’ve scoped out dive bars and cart culture, and used my friends’ and families’ houses to shelter my characters. I’ve interviewed two detectives and asked a ton of questions of a friend who worked for years as a prosecuting attorney.

That said, I try to keep writing before I stop and research. My story and many of my characters remain fluid through much of a draft. In  A Bitch Called Hope, I had a completely different murderer until six months before my agent sold the story. Which is why a lot of my research ends up in a file cabinet for some future novel. One of my writer friends researches everything before she puts fingertips to keyboard. Her characters spring from her head fully formed. Another writer friend has her character loading a dishwasher in her 19th century novel. “I’ll do the research later,” she says. It makes for a painful critique session.

What is your take on research?