This is K.M. Loyland and you are listening to the 430th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

Podcast.

I had a bit of an interrupted week this week.

Where I live is usually in a perpetual drought, only a few annual inches away from being a desert actually.

So when we got six inches of rain in 24 hours last week, the whole place the system just kind of went into shock and the result was at my

basement office but thankfully the damage wasn't bad it was wet enough to soak

the back of the carpet but not much more. Still it meant dispossessing my writing zone for a couple

days moving all the furniture, pulling up the carpet and collecting every fan in the house. I'm super thankful it wasn't worse and that it dried up as

easily and quickly as it did, but I'm totally a creature of habit and it was

downright hard trying to keep my regular writing and editing routine going especially since I couldn't get to my desktop computer

and hadn't updated most of my files on my laptop for quite some time.

So that was my slightly writing-related adventure of the week.

And now I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast, The Dews and Don'ts of Storytelling,

according to Marvel, Part 19, four ways to write a better antagonist.

I have to believe Thanos would be a good writer.

Why? Because he totally understands one of the most

important principles of story theory. Pretty, isn't it? Perfectly balanced as all

things should be. Too much to one side or the other, and it doesn't work.

Nowhere is this more critical than in the foundational balance of

protagonist against antagonist. This partnership creates plot,

creates theme, creates conflict, creates balance. We might even go so far as to

argue that the antagonist is the story.

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