1.02 Character Arcs: From Point A to Point Z
The first book I ever finished remains close to my heart. It became the first in a series of six that I wrote over the course of a few years, which meant I spent years building those characters, detailing their lives. By the end of the series, I felt I knew them better than most actual humans in my life. The books were also, and I can’t stress it enough, a hot mess. Constant head-hopping, bloated prose, plot lines that took much too long to get to the point. It’s like the awful finger painting you made as a kid, with the sky drawn as a single blue line at the top of the page and the earth a single green one at the bottom. Something cute that evokes a nostalgia for a simpler time, but also makes you cringe a little every time you see it.
Now that I’ve had so many years away from that story to improve my craft as both a writer and an editor, I can see where those early books struggled. One of the biggest pitfalls was character arcs.
I adored my protagonist and pitted her against impossible odds, but in many ways the girl I started with wasn’t all that different from the one in the closing scene. The supporting cast had the curse of being too supportive, many existing just to cheer on the protagonist rather than having actual goals independent of the main character.
Building characters is a multi-faceted task with a seemingly infinite number of decisions. What do they look like, where are they from, what is their level of education, what do they care about, what do they believe in…should you wish it, there is no end to the minutiae you can invent.
Back in my days of participating in “Writblr,” the writing community within the Tumblr platform, I often saw these character quizzes circulating. They were fun lists that asked you to fill in details about your characters, from eye color to favorite pizza toppings, while others delved into questions of their backstories that may or may not ever make it to the page. This isn’t to bash those lists—they’re enjoyable to fill out and are a decent exercise in fleshing out a character beyond “looks like” and “sounds like,” if you’re stuck on basic details.
But your characters simply must be more than a laundry list of fun facts and traumatic backstories. That’s where the character arc comes into play. What it boils down to is this:
How does your character change from the start of the story to the end?
Do they grow into something braver, something crueler, something softer as they progress through the story? Do they get what they want, and how does that change them?
They don’t have to become “better,” but they should change in some way. Your reader’s investment in your characters is more than skin deep; they want to learn where they’ve come from, yes, but even more so where they are going.
But isn’t that just the plot? Why are we discussing that in a character unit?
Generally, yes, the character arcs are enmeshed with the greater plot. Like two twisting strands of DNA, the character and plot arcs are the pillars that form the identity of your story, but they are separate entities. What a character wants isn’t always what the story demands of them, and therein lies the tension!
Even just imagining an arc is helpful. There is a climb—a rise toward action—a peak and fall. Even if they end on the same level, they will always land in a different place than where they began. Frodo of Lord of the Rings may return to the Shire when his task is done, but he’s nowhere near the same person; the journey changed him in ways that could not be undone. He is a brilliant and tragic example of a protagonist enduring lasting consequences.
If your story is broadly about an apocalyptic event and your characters’ quest to stop it from happening, you could call that your plot. But the characters (hopefully) had lives and motivations before this world-ending threat came to pass, and it is those more personal details that lay the foundation of their specific arcs. Your ragtag group of heroes could have the shared goal of “stop the world from ending,” but if that is the only goal, the only want, and the only need that anyone has, your story runs a serious risk of becoming one-dimensional and frankly boring. Remember: protagonists can be many things but they must be interesting! Part of that interest is learning how they will change.
Your characters may have several goals along their journey that they fail or achieve, and they should. The setting and ruination of smaller plans are fundamental building blocks toward the plot’s final goal. As they go through these trials and setbacks, you have the opportunity to show how those characters might be changing. Do they get more desperate? What does that desperation drive them to do?
Avoiding the Cardboard
To choose a somewhat ubiquitous example: within the classic story The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, get whisked away into the fantastical land of Oz. Right away we learn her personal goal is to get back home to her family, but there is great trouble in Oz and an evil witch who immediately has it out for Dorothy (and to be fair, I would also have beef with someone who dropped a house on my sister). The plot’s goal is to destroy the Wicked Witch of the West.
The Wizard of Oz is among the simplest examples of character arcs because each of Dorothy’s companions have their own clear progression that is separate from the goal of destroying this powerful foe. The cowardly lion must learn to be brave, the Tinman yearns for a heart, the Scarecrow for a brain, and Dorothy must survive it all to get back home. And while the Wizard himself is a sham, no more a sorcerer than Toto, he proves to each of Dorothy’s companions that they had it in them all along and grants them tokens to symbolize it—the heart, the courage, the brain. Dorothy, too, had only to wish herself home the whole time but needed to discover that for herself.
Granted, The Wizard of Oz is one of the more “on the nose” examples. You don’t generally want your characters to do a little song extrapolating their need for the audience’s benefit. Recognizing too that this was an early family film explains why so much of this winds up being spoon fed to the viewer.
The dynamic of this classic, if blunt, tale was later turned on its head in the book and subsequent musical adaptation Wicked, where the so-called Wicked Witch gets her own story. Elphaba Thropp, born with green skin, is hated and feared for her appearance, but she yearns to do good, to be good. When her talent for magic is discovered, those who she believed to be heroes, like the famed Wizard of Oz, prove to be cruel. She becomes a great example of an earnest character forced into the role of a villain while the true villains of the story are celebrated as heroes.
Wicked became one of the most successful musicals of all time, and it’s easy to see why. The Wicked Witch of the West, once a paint-by-numbers antagonist who is thwarted by the pure and virtuous hero, is suddenly given context. She is given an arc. The narrative calls out the cardboard villain of the original by asking: are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them? Elphaba is a good example of how a protagonist doesn’t have to progress into a perfect hero. Her story resonates to this day with underdogs and minorities of all sorts, who have also found themselves unjustly painted as villains.
That is the beauty of a character’s arc! When well crafted, you can challenge the definition of heroes and villains. By the last page, you can leave your protagonists (and your reader) feeling whole and triumphant, gutted, or my personal favorite, leaving them with that perfect bittersweet ending that says “I won, but at what cost?”
If you aren’t sure how to make this change from A to Z more dynamic, consider a writer’s best friend: Consequences.
Consequences
Another common bit of feedback I give to writers has to do with the consequences (or lack thereof) their characters face. As someone who works predominantly in science fiction and fantasy genres, I’m quite willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of establishing magic systems or futuristic tech. Given that I have the technological prowess of a toaster, it’s not difficult to convince me with some well placed jargon. Where I cannot be fooled is with characters who never face consequences for the risks they take. I’m not saying someone has to die every time your protagonists pull off some daring do—that would also get tiresome—but if you notice that you’re halfway through your book and your character has never faced a real setback, that’s a sign that something could be wrong.
This can go south one of two main ways: either the expectations for the character are not realistic/expressed, or they aren’t facing enough real risk or danger.
To the first: you have to establish who your characters are, while also keeping in mind what a reader would reasonably expect of them. If your protagonist is a twelve year old girl, I’m going to have a hard time believing any attempts to intimidate grown adults. It’s not that you can’t pull it off, but since most readers aren’t going to buy into that on face value, you have to connect the dots. Even when characters deal within their wheelhouse, there can be the risk of glossing over the details. Don’t just tell me your spy is the best at what they do, show me how. Why can they pull off what no one else can?
Another possibility is your characters aren’t facing enough danger or adversity. This can be a double edged sword: insert too strong a foe, and your reader will be galled at how your protagonist always gets out scot-free, but too weak an adversary and it will feel like the stakes aren’t high enough. Across the board, I encourage higher stakes. (I’ve yet to encounter a manuscript where I’ve had to tell an author to lower their stakes.) But that means striking the balance of depicting characters with enough cleverness to overcome those adversaries, and at least on occasion letting them fail.
Now, failure is great, but it’s not a consequence. It’s what happens as a result of that failure. Whether that’s losing access to something important or losing a limb, those consequences can be some of the strongest cornerstones of your characters’ arcs.
Character Arc Recap:
Know who your protagonists are at the start: what do they want, what do they lack, and establish that to the reader.
Who are they at the end of the story when their endgame goals are confronted? Where do they end up? How have they grown (for better or worse)?
Consider how the character arcs interweave with the greater plot. Is there a push and pull? Do they have goals independent of what the plot demands?
Remember the shape of the arc: the rise and fall. If your story is feeling flat, how can you ruin your protagonist’s plans and introduce consequences?
Establish expectations for your character and show the reader how they achieve their goals. (i.e. don’t just call them the “best at what they do.” Show us why.)