A story without a villain can still keep readers turning pages, but it has to give them something else.
A viewer asked me recently, “What if my story doesn’t have a villain?”
I used to teach kindergarten, and when it came time to tell a story, I always reached for those that I knew would keep the kids’ attention. And if there’s one thing that works with five-year-olds, it’s a villain.
There’s actually a brain reason for that. In studies of preschoolers, children remembered mean people and the things they did better than they remembered nice ones.
But here’s the strange part.
One of the books my kids wanted me to read over and over again was one that didn’t have a villain at all.
So why did a story with wonderfully horrible bad guys work and a story with no villain work just as well?
Because you don’t have to have a villain to keep your reader’s attention. But you do need something else.
And once you can see what that is, you can figure out exactly what your own story needs, whether you have a villain or not.
Why a Story Without a Villain Can Still Work
Let’s go back to that book my kindergarteners loved that did not have a villain.
That book was The Monster at the End of This Book, starring lovable, furry Grover from Sesame Street. The whole story is built around something that’s not even there.
Grover somehow discovers that there’s a monster at the end of the book, and he’s terrified of getting there. So every time you turn the page, he tries harder to stop you.
He interacts directly with the reader. He begs you not to turn another page, ties the pages together, and even builds walls. He does everything he can think of to keep the reader from getting to the end of the book.
And of course, if you’ve ever read this to a room of five-year-olds, or even one child, you know exactly what happens.
They can’t wait to turn the page.
The more Grover tells them not to do it, the more desperate they are to find out what’s at the end of the book.
But there’s no villain. There isn’t some bad guy lurking offstage trying to hurt Grover. Nobody’s chasing him or threatening him.
There’s no bad guy at all.
So why does the story work?
What a Story Without a Villain Still Needs
Because Grover wants something really badly.
He has a really clear goal from the start of the book. He wants to keep the reader from reaching the end.
And something gets in the way of that: the reader.
Every time he tries to stop the reader, the reader turns another page.
That’s the piece your story has to have.
Your protagonist wants something, so they try to get it. But that’s only half of the story. The other part is that something or someone has to make it harder for them to get what they want than they expected.
That something is what I’m going to call the opposing force.
It’s also often called the antagonist, but I find that when I use that term, writers sometimes think I mean it has to be a villain.
It doesn’t.
It just has to be something that is opposing your hero and making things harder for them.
How a Story Without a Villain Creates Opposition
Sometimes that opposing force is a villain. Villains are very good at this job, which is one reason we use them so often.
Darth Vader in Star Wars, for example, wants something Luke doesn’t want him to have. Voldemort in Harry Potter wants something Harry has to stop.
Put two people on opposite sides of something important, and you have a very easy way to create a story readers will want to pay attention to.
But the villain isn’t the important part. The opposition is.
Without it, your protagonist can simply go get what they want, and that’s boring. There’s no story there.
Imagine The Monster at the End of This Book if Grover said, “There’s a monster at the end of this book. Let’s go see him. Turn the page. Turn the page. Turn the page. There he is.”
Okay, that’s not the book my kindergarteners were begging me to read again and again.
What made that book fun was that every time we tried to move forward, Grover tried to stop us.
And every time he tried to stop us, we wanted to move forward even more.
What Fills the Space in a Story Without a Villain?
We were the opposing force.
The reader was the opposing force.
And the reader makes Grover work harder and harder to try to stop them, which is what made the book so fun.
That’s what you’re looking for in your own story.
You don’t have to have someone dressed in black standing in the corner uttering a maniacal laugh.
You’re looking for whatever keeps your protagonist from moving straight from I want this to I got it.
Because that space in between is what determines whether your reader is going to keep reading.
So what can fill that space in your story?
This is where it gets interesting, because the answer is a lot bigger than most writers realize.
The thing opposing your protagonist might be someone who loves them. It might be someone we don’t even see for most of the story.
It might not even be a person.
Let’s look at five different ways an opposing force can show up in your story, because you may already have the thing your story needs without realizing it.
When a Story Without a Villain Uses Another Person
Often your opposing force is another person.
And if you’re a new writer writing your first book, I’d highly suggest you make it another person because that’s a much easier story to write than if your opposing force is the world, a system, or society.
You can do that, but it’s harder.
It’s also a lot of fun if the antagonist is another person because then you can spend time getting to know this antagonist and what they want. Put these two people together and all kinds of sparks fly. It’s great writing and fun reading.
But even if your antagonist is another person, they don’t have to be a villain.
The person doesn’t even have to be evil, cruel, or wrong.
They just have to stand in the way of what your hero wants.
Think about Mrs. Doubtfire, one of my favorite movies.
Daniel, played by Robin Williams, wants more time with his kids after the divorce. Miranda, his ex-wife, is the person standing in the way of that.
She has primary custody, and she doesn’t trust Daniel to be responsible with the kids. So when he asks for more time with them, she says no.
Why a Story Without a Villain Can Still Have an Antagonist
From Daniel’s point of view, Miranda is the problem. She’s the antagonist, the opposing force. She’s the one he has to get around to get what he wants, which is why he comes up with the whole Mrs. Doubtfire scheme in the first place.
But Miranda isn’t a villain.
If you step outside Daniel’s point of view for a second, she has some pretty good reasons for not trusting him.
Daniel loves his kids, but he’s also impulsive, irresponsible, and sometimes careless, especially at the beginning of the movie.
The movie lets us sympathize with him because we know how much he misses his children and wants to spend time with them.
That doesn’t mean Miranda is wrong for trying to create some stability for them.
So the person opposing your protagonist doesn’t have to be a bad person. They can even love the protagonist. They can want what’s best for them. They can be completely justified in what they’re doing.
They just have to want something that makes it harder for your protagonist to get what they want, or they have to want something that’s in direct opposition to what your protagonist wants.
That’s why I like the term opposing force.
How Goals Create a Story Without a Villain
Who is opposing your main character?
Who is going to continue opposing them throughout the story until change occurs?
That’s your opposing force. That’s your antagonist.
And that can make for a great antagonist.
In Mrs. Doubtfire, Miranda wants stability for the kids, and that shuts Daniel out until he can get his act together. Daniel wants time with the kids now.
So the two of them are butting heads, which is perfect.
Miranda fits the role of opposing force through most of the movie.
Daniel wins in the end, but not because he manages to win back custody of his kids. If you remember the movie, he doesn’t.
He wins because he finally manages to win Miranda’s trust.
That’s how he defeats the antagonist in this movie.
All that matters is that the person you have as your opposing force has a goal that’s directly opposite what your main character wants, or is working in opposition to your main character for their own reasons.
And those don’t have to be bad reasons.
When the Protagonist Is Their Own Antagonist
Sometimes writers will tell me, “Well, I don’t have anyone like Miranda in my story. My hero is really his own worst enemy. The antagonist is himself.”
Okay. That can work.
But if the thing standing in your protagonist’s way is inside them, we still have to be able to see that manifest in their outside world.
It can’t just be in their thoughts and feelings.
Groundhog Day is a great example.
There really isn’t a villain in this movie. Nobody has trapped Phil Connors in Punxsutawney because they want to punish him. There isn’t some bad guy hiding behind the time loop waiting for Phil to figure out how to defeat him.
Phil’s biggest problem is Phil.
He’s arrogant, cynical, and completely wrapped up in himself.
Then he wakes up one morning and discovers that he’s going to have to live this same day over and over again.
The movie could have kept Phil’s struggle mostly internal. He could have spent the next hour and a half thinking about what an unhappy person he is and eventually deciding that maybe he should change.
But that’s not what happens.
How a Story Without a Villain Makes Internal Conflict Visible
Instead, we watch Phil’s internal problems create problems for him in the outside world.
Phil’s real problem is inside him. He’s selfish, cynical, and used to getting what he wants by manipulating the people around him.
But the movie doesn’t leave that battle inside Phil.
It gives him something in the outside world that keeps pushing back against the way he normally operates.
Rita is one of those opposing forces because Phil wants Rita to fall in love with him.
At first, he approaches her the same way he approaches everything else. He tries to figure out what she likes, what she wants to hear, and what he needs to say to get the response he wants.
He’s manipulating her.
Because he gets to live the same day over and over, he can keep learning more about her and use that information the next time around.
But Rita keeps refusing to give him what he wants.
His manipulation doesn’t work on her.
How Outside Pressure Works in a Story Without a Villain
The more Phil tries to manufacture the perfect version of himself for Rita, the more obvious it becomes that he still isn’t actually interested in Rita as a person.
He’s interested in getting Rita for his own selfish reasons.
So Rita becomes an opposing force because she keeps butting up against Phil’s usual way of operating.
Every time he tries to use manipulation to get what he wants with her, she stops him. At one point, she even tells him exactly what the problem is: he doesn’t really love anyone but himself.
The time loop also becomes an opposing force because it pushes against another part of Phil’s usual way of operating.
Phil begins the movie believing he’s smarter and more important than everyone around him. He wants to get the weather report over with, get out of Punxsutawney, and get back to what he thinks he deserves.
But the time loop takes all of that control away from him.
No matter what Phil does, he can’t leave town and move on with his life.
Why a Story Without a Villain Still Needs Pushback
At first, Phil tries to turn the situation to his advantage.
He realizes there are no lasting consequences, so he uses the day to get whatever he wants.
But that doesn’t solve his problem either.
He’s still trapped in the same place with the same people he has spent the whole movie looking down on.
Just as Rita keeps pushing back against his attempts to manipulate his way into a relationship, the time loop keeps pushing back against his belief that he can control his life and use the people around him to get what he wants.
He can’t make either of these opposing forces give him what he wants by continuing to be the same Phil.
Do you see how that’s working?
There are opposing forces pressing on his usual way of doing things.
If he’s his own antagonist, there has to be outside pressure that presses on that and forces the change if there’s going to be a change at the end.
That’s the part writers often miss when they say their protagonist is their own antagonist.
Internal Struggle in a Story Without a Villain
If the real thing standing in your hero’s way is their own fear, grief, insecurity, pride, or some other internal struggle, that’s fine.
But that struggle still has to show up in the outside world where something can push back against it.
Otherwise, all you really have is a character struggling with themselves inside their own head.
And that’s boring for a reader.
But what if there isn’t another person pushing against your hero at all?
Nobody’s trying to stop them. Nobody’s working against them, and there may not even be anyone they can blame for what’s happening.
Can you still have enough opposition to carry a story?
Yes.
Sometimes the thing opposing your hero isn’t a person or themselves. It’s the situation they’re trapped in or the world they’re trying to move through.
When a Story Without a Villain Uses the World Against the Hero
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a great example.
A father and his young son are traveling through an apocalyptic world trying to survive and make their way south toward the coast.
The father wants desperately to keep his son alive and to get them both somewhere safer.
But almost everything about the world makes that harder.
They’re constantly hungry because there’s almost no food left, so simply finding enough to eat becomes a struggle.
They’re also fighting the cold, the weather, and the physical toll of traveling through this ruined landscape while the father himself becomes increasingly sick.
And they can’t simply find a house somewhere and stay there. Other survivors are one of the greatest dangers in this world. Some will rob, capture, or even kill people for what little they have.
So the father and son have to keep watching for signs that someone else is nearby.
The father isn’t fighting one bad guy who keeps showing up to stop him.
He’s fighting hunger, cold, illness, and a world where almost every resource they need has disappeared.
How the Environment Drives a Story Without a Villain
The opposing force in this book is the dystopian world.
This world and everything in it becomes the opposing force because it keeps interfering with the same thing the father wants more than anything else: to keep his son alive and get him somewhere safe.
The ruined world isn’t just sitting in the background looking bleak.
It’s constantly interfering with what the father is trying to do.
It creates new conflicts. It limits where they can go, what they can eat, how long they can stay somewhere, and which risks they have to take just to survive another day.
That’s the distinction to watch for in your own story.
A snowstorm, for example, isn’t automatically an opposing force just because your story takes place during a snowstorm.
A difficult job isn’t one either just because your protagonist hates going to work.
The situation becomes part of the opposition when it keeps getting between your hero and what your hero is trying to accomplish.
It has to get in the way again and again, in ways that keep making things harder for your main character so that you can increase the pressure.
When the Antagonist Stays Offstage
But what if there actually is a person behind everything that’s going wrong in your story, and your hero doesn’t know who it is yet?
Maybe you don’t want them to know.
Maybe finding out who’s responsible is part of your story.
How do you make that person an opposing force before they ever step out of the shadows?
Sometimes there really is an antagonist behind what’s happening, but for one reason or another, you don’t want that person to show up until close to the end, or even at all.
That’s fine, too, as long as we can still see what they’re doing.
The movie Bambi is a great example.
Bambi follows a young deer growing up in the forest. Much of the story is about Bambi learning how the world works, forming relationships with the other animals, and gradually becoming more independent as he grows up.
There isn’t a direct villain standing in front of him.
Instead, the antagonist is humankind. It’s Man. It’s the hunter.
And we never actually see the hunter.
How a Story Without a Villain Uses an Invisible Antagonist
The hunter doesn’t walk into the story and confront Bambi face to face.
We don’t get scenes from his point of view, and we don’t need them because even though we may never see the hunter, we see the effect he has on Bambi’s world.
That’s the outside evidence we always need.
No matter what kind of opposing force you have, it has to be evident in the outside world.
When the hunter enters the forest, the animals know they’re in danger. They have to hide or run.
We hear the gunshots, and eventually Bambi’s mother is killed.
Later, hunters return to the forest with dogs. Once again, Bambi and the other animals are forced to flee for their lives.
But we don’t see the hunters.
We hear them, and we hear the dogs.
The hunter is never physically standing in front of Bambi saying, “I’m here to stop you.”
He doesn’t need to be.
His presence keeps changing what Bambi can do.
An Offstage Antagonist in a Story Without a Villain
The hunter forces Bambi to run when he’d rather stay safe in his hiding place. He takes away someone Bambi depends on.
He turns the forest itself into a dangerous place where the hunter might always be around the next corner.
That’s what makes mankind an opposing force even though we never see the hunters.
And this is an important distinction if you’re keeping your antagonist offstage.
You can hide that person, but you can’t hide what that person is doing in the story.
Maybe your antagonist sends other people to do the work for them.
Or maybe your protagonist keeps finding evidence of what they’ve done. That often happens in a thriller or mystery where we see evidence of the opposing force’s wrongdoing or efforts without actually seeing them.
In Bambi, we experience the antagonist almost entirely through the danger and consequences he creates.
Whatever you choose, the opposing force still has to reach your protagonist.
If your antagonist never appears and nothing they do affects what your hero wants or makes it harder to get, then they’re not really opposing your hero at all.
When a Story Without a Villain Has Several Opposing Forces
There’s one more possibility, and this is where writers can get especially confused.
What if you look at your story and realize that no single person or situation is doing all of this work?
Instead, your hero keeps running into opposition from several different directions.
Can that work too?
Let’s look at the movie Hidden Figures.
It tells the story of three Black women working at NASA during the space race in the 1960s.
One of them, Katherine Johnson, is a brilliant mathematician who is brought into the team to calculate the flight path that will eventually help send astronaut John Glenn into orbit and bring him safely back home.
Katherine knows she can do the work, and she wants the chance to do it.
But there isn’t one villain standing in her way throughout the movie.
Instead, the opposition comes at her from several different directions.
One of those forces is Paul Stafford, one of the engineers on the team.
How Several Forces Work in a Story Without a Villain
Stafford doesn’t treat Katherine as an equal, and he makes it harder for her to get the information she needs to do her calculations.
He doesn’t want her attending important meetings.
When Katherine contributes to a technical report, he resists putting her name on it.
But even if Stafford disappeared from the movie, Katherine would still have plenty of opposition standing in her way.
She’s also working inside a system that was never designed to give a Black woman the same opportunities as the white men around her.
She has to run across the NASA campus just to use a bathroom because there isn’t one for Black women in the building where she works.
She’s kept out of meetings she needs to attend because women aren’t normally allowed in the room.
Again and again, Katherine runs into rules and expectations that make it harder for her to do the very job NASA needs her to do.
So there isn’t one antagonist Katherine can defeat and suddenly everything becomes easy.
One person creates opposition in one part of the story, while a rule or accepted way of doing things creates it somewhere else.
How a Story Without a Villain Holds Multiple Forces Together
What holds all of this together is Katherine’s goal.
All of those opposing forces keep getting between her and what she’s trying to accomplish.
She needs access to the information so she can do the calculations, but Stafford withholds it.
She needs to be in the room where decisions are being made, but the rules keep her out.
There’s always something between her and what she wants.
That’s how you can make this work in your own story.
You don’t necessarily need one antagonist following your hero from beginning to end.
The opposition can come from different people or different parts of the same world your hero lives in.
It’s best if they’re in the same world, though. They can’t just be a collection of unrelated problems you’re throwing at your character to make the story harder.
In Hidden Figures, everything that stands in Katherine’s way is standing in the way of her goal of doing her job at NASA.
It’s all part of the same situation.
Is the Opposing Force Interfering with Your Protagonist’s Goal?
A bad weather day, for example, isn’t appropriate opposition just because the weather is bad.
If it stops Katherine from getting to work on a really important day, that’s different.
Now it’s interfering with her goal.
Whatever you choose as opposition has to get in the way of that goal and has to be part of that same situation.
That’s what makes all those different forces in Hidden Figures feel like they’re part of the same story.
So if your story doesn’t have a villain, you don’t have to go invent one just because you think a story is supposed to have one.
Instead, look at what your hero wants and ask what is making it harder and harder for them to get it.
What’s standing in their way?
The form of the opposition doesn’t necessarily matter as long as it fits the goal in the story.
What matters is that your hero can’t simply decide what they want and go get it.
Something has to keep getting in the way because that’s what creates the conflict that gives us a story.
Check Your Opposing Force
Take the story you’re working on and write down what your protagonist really wants most right now.
Then look at what’s standing between them and that goal.
You want to see whether your opposing force is actually showing up again and again and making it harder and harder for your hero to get what they want.
If it is, you may already have all the antagonist your story needs.
If it isn’t, now you know what to look for.
And if looking at your story this way makes you realize that you’re not quite sure what’s working, what’s missing, or what needs to happen next, that’s exactly what I created Map to Storyland to help you figure out.
Map a Story Without a Villain More Clearly
Map to Storyland is a story-mapping kit that helps you take all the pieces of your story out of your head and put them in front of you so you can actually see how they’re working together.
It’s a system I created after years of banging my head against the wall with other types of story structure that I just couldn’t work with.
This system gives you a lot of flexibility. You can play with different parts of your story, put them out in the four maps in front of you, and get a bird’s-eye view of how the story is playing out.
The game board also gives you a visual way to see how the pieces fit together and track your main character’s progress through the story.
LEARN MORE ABOUT MAP TO STORYLAND.
If you’d like ongoing help while you’re actually working through your book, I’d also love to have you join us inside Writer’s Brain Studio, my community for writers who want support as they work through a manuscript.
Featured image by Magnific.