{"id":2720,"date":"2017-12-13T09:27:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T14:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.graymanwrites.com\/blog\/?p=2720"},"modified":"2017-12-13T09:27:22","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T14:27:22","slug":"the-villain-is-not-always-a-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/the-villain-is-not-always-a-person\/","title":{"rendered":"The Villain is Not Always a Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

This question came up on Facebook the other day, when someone was looking for examples of books without definite antagonists. Many folks said that in stories like The Martian<\/em> (and another recent book you might have heard about<\/a>), the antagonist — the villain, if you will — is Nature. Man against the elements, as it were.<\/p>\n

This morning, in the latest in his\u00a0Writing Wednesdays<\/a>\u00a0series, Steven Pressfield wrote:<\/p>\n

Sometimes the villain is entirely inside the characters\u2019 (almost always the protagonist\u2019s) head.<\/p>\n

The villain can be a fear, an obsession, a desire, a dream, a conception of reality, an idea of what \u201cthe truth\u201d really is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s an interesting thought.<\/p>\n

What this means is that the ultimate antagonist is not a man-eating shark or a monster from space. It is an idea carried in our own heads (we\u2019re the heroes, remember, of our own lives) [and the] turning point for us … comes when we see through the Wizard\u2019s curtain and reject this idea once and for all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Food for thought!<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This question came up on Facebook the other day, when someone was looking for examples of books without definite antagonists. Many folks said that in stories like The Martian (and another recent book you might have heard about), the antagonist — the villain, if you will — is Nature. Man \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}