In which I make an extended bread metaphor to talk about villains
Why your hero needs opposition
If you mix flour and water, you get glue.
If you add some salt and yeast to that slurry, your glue suddenly becomes bread dough.
Writing is similar to bread-baking in that way. There are just a few basic ingredients but infinite flavor and texture possibilities. And, also like baking bread, if you miss out on one of those ingredients, or the ingredients aren’t included in just the right ratio, the whole thing can fall apart.
The Basic Story/ Bread Recipe
Flour: The hero
Yeast: What your hero wants
Water: The stakes
Salt: The opposition
Flour: It Doesn’t Need to be King Arthur to be a Hero
Your hero or main character is like the flour in this bread. They are the main ingredient giving form, flavor, and texture to your story. But by themselves, they aren’t very appetizing, nutritious, or exciting. Left to its own devices, flour won’t do anything (except maybe get rancid), and neither will your character. They would just…exist.
Yeast: What Your Hero Wants
Giving your hero something they desperately want is like mixing some granulated yeast into your flour. Now your flour has the potential. It could become bread.
Maybe.
Water: Stakes
Add some water and now we’re in business. Adding water to the yeast-flour mixture will activate the yeast. Now it can start eating the sugars in the flour and creating the carbon dioxide that makes this slurry bread dough and not glue. This is like adding stakes to your story: now your hero has a reason to go after what they want instead of just pining after it forever.
You have a story!
But the three-ingredient bread – just like your three-ingredient story – won’t have much flavor. It needs something else.
Salt: The Opposition
If you have ever watched Paul Hollywood bake bread (a highly therapeutic activity), you’ll notice that he always puts the salt and yeast on opposite sides of the bowl. This is because salt can be deadly to yeast, even though it is necessary to enhance the flavor of the bread. In fact, nearly anything you add to enhance the bread’s flavor or texture – salt, eggs, fats, fruit, nuts – has the potential to inhibit the bread’s rise. (The exception is sugar – which the yeast will gorge on and potentially die too soon if not added in the right balance with other ingredients and timing.)
In this tortured metaphor, the salt is the opposition your hero faces, both internal and external. Yes, the story technically can exist without opposition as long as the hero is actively pursuing something but what would be the point? It would be flat and boring. Throwing something in there to slow your hero down, block their path, and force them to do battle with their inner demons will give your story flavor.
Journal Time!
Write down your hero’s:
deepest desire
most cherished love
and greatest fear.
What can you do (logical for your story) that dangles their desire in front of them, takes away what they love most, or makes them face their fear? Perhaps all three?
Whatever is standing in their way, both internally and externally needs to feel insurmountable to the hero. So, they don’t necessarily have to battle aliens or monsters, but if the main conflict in the story is that your hero has to give a speech in English class, your hero had better be deathly afraid of public speaking.
Want someone to help you bake better bread? Err... I mean, zazz up your story with a force of opposition?
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