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- Provide a Motive. All revenge stories hinge on the motive behind the vengeance. It must be strong enough to take the reader with you on the protagonist’s journey.
- Justify Even Morally Gray Actions. If you are going to have one of your characters do something unspeakable in the name of revenge, you must make very sure the antagonist is guilty before they’re punished.
- Make the Reader Root for the Protagonist. This isn’t just a rule for revenge stories; it holds true for almost all thrillers. This isn’t about making sure your characters are “likable,” but rather about making sure the reader cares enough about them to want them to succeed.
- Give Them Some Challenges Along the Way. The crux of this rule is not to make it too easy for your protagonist to get their revenge. There need to be setbacks, times where things don’t go entirely as hoped, and your protagonist must regroup and come up with a new plan.
- A Dish Best Served Cold
- Assemble Your Cast
- Behold, A Heinous Crime
- Phase One
- Phase Two
- Phase Three
- A Twist Ending to Die For, Or Not
- The Lighter Side of Revenge
One of the oldest story patterns is the revenge story. Revenge is visceral—it grabs us by the gut, sending feelers deep into the bed of our emotions. We hate to see a grave injustice go unpunished and most of us, as law-abiding as we may be, can get behind a little vigilante action in our fiction. We itch to see the scales balanced, the savagely ma...
You’ll need a hero. Make your protagonist a basically good person who’s forced to take justice into his own hands when the law fails to provide satisfaction. Take care to round your character and make him real and likeable because you’ll want the reader firmly in his corner. You’ll need a villain. The antagonist is the character who committed the u...
The more monstrous the central act—murder, rape, torture, and so on—the more justified your hero is in seeking out and dispensing revenge. And it strikes a nice balance if the punishment fits the crime: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The desire to overstep those bounds may eat at your hero, may comprise his inner struggle, but if he can ex...
Typically, you want to start by firing up your audience with a portrayal of the crime. You present happy people, going about their own business, whose lives are interrupted and forever changed by the commission of a shocking crime that goes unpunished. In some cases, the crime occurs before the story begins. Done right (as Shakespeare did in Hamlet...
This is the planning and preparing stage of the story. The hero researches, trains, tracks down the antagonist, or whatever needs to be done to put his plan into action. If your story involves multiple villains who need to be dealt with, as in The Ghosts of Belfastby Stuart Neville, your hero may start dishing out revenge during this phase. To add ...
This is where the confrontation happens, when your hero and the villain go head to head. If your protagonist has been dealing out serial revenge to a list of offenders, this is the final confrontation and involves the most important villain. This is your hero’s moment of triumph! Or his ultimate failure. Readers will be most satisfied, of course, i...
Sometimes it’s possible and fitting to build right up to the point of revenge, that culminating moment the protagonist and reader has anxiously been waiting for, and then let your hero reach an epiphany that drives home an aching truth: vengeance will not call back the original crime, undo the damage, or restore the hero’s world. It will only serve...
Most often, revenge stories involve horrific crimes and violent reprisals, but the patterns of revenge can also be used to write comedy or other types of lighter fare. The same basic tenets apply, but violence doesn’t usually rear its ugly head. For instance, The Sting, where con men are beaten at their own game, is a revenge story. Other examples ...
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- Genre. Genre and target audience will impact how you approach any plot. Revenge stories have a well-established formula, but that doesn’t mean you have to rigidly follow typical conventions.
- Plot. Probably the most commonly recognized tale of revenge is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Revenge stories almost always begin with a disruption to the natural balance – a shocking, tragic crime or injustice that throws the protagonist’s life into disarray.
- Protagonist. The protagonists in revenge stories help drive the narrative. But when you’re writing a character hell-bent on seeking revenge, it can’t be their only storyline.
- Victim. The victims in revenge stories typically elicit sympathy from the audience. It usually means that, if they are not the protagonist themselves, they are close to the character in some way.
How do you write a revenge story that will thrill and hook readers? Learn everything here including the right structure to use and examples to follow.
Feb 28, 2014 · Your protagonist should be morally justified to seek revenge. They should have tried traditional, lawful channels before they resorts to vigilante tactics. Show how the antagonist has destroyed the protagonist’s life in emotional and physical ways.
Mar 5, 2022 · Debut novelist Kit Mayquist lays out 5 tips for writing a revenge story that slowly puts the pieces together for a final, satisfying climax.
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Oct 5, 2021 · To assert, maintain, or defend (a right, cause, etc.) against opposition. To claim for oneself or another. * My fiction is rife with vengeful stories, scene after scene fueled by slights intimate or else secondhand.
