Novels based around a community

[Dragonlady]

So, having just discovered a whacking great plot hole in my wip (I'll hopefully return to it when I've done some more research ) I'm going back to another story idea . The only novel I've got to the end of a draft with so far was fairly traditional in that it had some good guys, some bad guys, a journey and a victory. My new idea, though, I was thinking of treating differently, by not having an antagonist as such, but tensions within a community, if that makes any sense. It's an idea that grew out of a short story, and it has themes, a few characters, but not a lot of plot yet.

Does anyone have examples of stories that work like that that I can add to my reading list, whether fantasy or not? I'm thinking Joanne Harris, some Discworld books like perhaps Unseen Academicals.

The planning seems a bit daunting at this stage, as it's such a different type of story. I want the story to be about the village itself, if that makes sense!? I'm simultaneously needing to do a lot of research, and wanting to get stuck in with writing at the moment....

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The "antagonist" in a story need not be an actual individual. There are many well-known stories were there is no character who is The Antagonist. (One classic plot is "man versus nature" for instance, another is "man versus society" and so on.) So instead of a character playing the antagonist, you could, for example, have a set of circumstances that the community as a whole needs to overcome, and the conflicts would naturally arise out of their different ideas about how to best do that, as well as who they trust, who they don't trust, what they each hope to gain from the situation, etc. In the course of writing about those conflicts, one individual might emerge as antagonist to the others, or at least to the main characters, and if that were to develop organically, then that might be the way to continue. But if it never does, if it is always the community against their circumstances, and the various conflicts about how to deal with them remain simply a series of subplots, it could still be an excellent story.