There\u2019s a type of good vs evil Hollywood film where the protagonist ends up struggling with the top bad guy on a wet rooftop, or similar. Inevitably, they both have guns but for some reason contrive to lose them, so they end up beating each other up with fists and conveniently-lying-around metal poles instead. Then it looks like the good guy is about to lose. (Oh, no! He\u2019s hanging one handed from the balustrade, dangling over a 200 ft drop! Now he must surely die!) Then the good guy pulls out some good-guy trick, and it\u2019s the bad guy who falls instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If there\u2019s a deputy good-guy (often a woman), then the rules say that the deputy good-guy has to have some deputy-battle with a deputy bad-guy. That battle needs to be a bit less dramatic than the main battle, because we can\u2019t take too much light away from the Big Good Guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All those rules are annoyingly predictable, but they\u2019re also annoyingly essential. You can\u2019t end an action movie without real action; that would just be disappointing. Likewise, that action can\u2019t be tame compared with what\u2019s just gone before. And a show-down with darkness needs to have jeopardy. Bruce Willis needs to have a one-to-one, jeopardy-rich battle with Alan Rickman. He can\u2019t just come in with a troop of armed sharp-shooters and say, \u2018You\u2019re stuffed, mate.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that\u2019s Hollywood. And Hollywood can only do exteriors. Its battles have to be played out on rooftops, because they can\u2019t play out in the mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What about books?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And here \u2013 well, it\u2019s complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One, perfectly fine, model for books follows that Hollywood script exactly. Mounting jeopardy and action. The antagonist personified in one very clear figure. A big biff-wham-bam climax, that\u2019s essentially one vs one. Goody wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That works. If that\u2019s the model for your book, it\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there are alternative models and they work too:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Multiple protagonists<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n My first book had three brothers racing to make a million pounds, as a way to win their dead father\u2019s considerable fortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The brothers included a good guy, a bad guy who sought to reform, and a guy who stayed bad until the epilogue. There was also a good sister who snuck in at the very last minute to scoop the jackpot. There wasn\u2019t really a clear antagonist here. There were moral stakes in play, of course, but never of the rooftop battle sort. The bad brother who lost his money was punished only by returning to do a philosophy degree in Oxford. Throwing him off a rooftop would have been vastly excessive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the end, the book didn\u2019t have a true antagonist at all. It just had actors of different moral weights who secured outcomes in proportion to those weights. Yes, you need some kind of high-intensity climax, but that climax doesn\u2019t have to have violence of any sort. Mine didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antagonist as external but impersonal force<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another one of my books was a romance where the couple met during the Russian revolution, were separated by war and revolution, and found each other again in 1945-era Berlin. There was never truly a single-individual antagonist. Really, the antagonist was the evil of two dark empires in conflict. But obviously that evil needed to act out via incident and character so, yes, there was a crucial intervention made by a Bad Guy that looked set to separate those two lovers forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that Bad Guy wasn\u2019t critical, the way that the Alan Rickman character was. He was simply a mechanical way to deliver an \u2018Oh, no, everything\u2019s ruined\u2019 climax to the story. It\u2019s not just that he personally didn\u2019t need to be thrown off a roof. He shouldn\u2019t be thrown off the roof. He<\/em> wasn\u2019t the problem. The system was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The climax had no violence at all. The release was that the woman, trapped inside the dark Soviet system, found a means of escape. The real evil \u2013 Soviet Russia \u2013 was still alive, still unconquered; it\u2019s just that this one person amongst millions managed to get out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antagonist as personal but unseen force<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With crime novels, it\u2019s obviously commonplace for there to be a bad guy \u2013 but with no one knowing who he is. You can tell there\u2019s darkness at work, because there\u2019s a litter of corpses, but the whole task for the detective is figuring out who that person is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve written novels where the bad guy is firmly identified and arrested at the end of the book. In most cases, that final moment doesn\u2019t involve real violence. In one book, for example, Fiona has figured out that some dodgy monks are at fault, and just waits, peacefully, with her police colleagues outside the monastery\u2019s church, waiting for the service to end before arresting the villains. No drama, not even shouting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019ve also written novels where the bad guy eludes capture: the reader sees a shape fleeing on a hillside, but that shape is never named. Some lower-level villains may have been demolished, but the ultimate bad guy escapes. It\u2019s easier to write that kind of book in a series novel, but you could just about get away with something similar even in a standalone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n