The Importance of Character Arcs!
Are you struggling with discovering a powerful emotional journey for your character? Considering the arc of your character is one of the most important things when writing a novel, it can feel intimidating and it’s easy to lose track of where your character is at mid-way through writing. This blog post gives you insight into what about character arc’s are so important and some resources to help you strengthen the change that happens in your character’s life from the start to the end of your novel!
Without character arcs, a story wouldn’t really be a story.
Throughout every story, we see how the characters get from one place in their life to another – and if we’re thinking about how that works in real life, it is impossible to not change throughout the events of your own life. Your characters should be changing, learning and evolving in your stories, they shouldn’t be the same person they were in the last chapter that they were in the first. They should be changing, whether for better or for worse.
The question to ask yourself is, what kind of change does your character have? The events of their life can cause them to go one way or the other. Better or worse. Hero or villain, or maybe they stay somewhere in the gray area. But, HOW do they get there? And what goes down in their life that causes this change? Keep reading for some helpful questions you can ask and resources for how your character can have an arc that moves and captivates your readers!
You want your readers to root for your main character. Whether they are destined to watch their downfall or not, a sign of a well written character is when you are reading their story and you're cheering them on, getting frustrated with their decisions because you want them to do better, or because your heart is breaking with them. You want to FEEL what the character feels and you want to vividly SEE them go from one point to the other. The way you capture this is not through the events of the plot, but how the CHARACTER responds and reacts to the world happening around them. This is the first piece of figuring out how your character will change throughout your story.
But how do you know how your character will respond? How do you know what decisions they will make? Well, everything they do should be driven by a conflict inside of them or a desire to reach whatever they envision as the top of the pyramid. Imagine your character at the bottom of a mountain and they have to climb up, but maybe they take a step in the wrong direction because they are afraid of any other direction and it results in a newfound challenge. For example, perhaps your character is terrified of getting fired because they have a strict boss, so when they mess up and refuse to fess up about it, the blame gets pinned on their closest friend and co-worker and that puts a damper on their relationship with them. Now, this is only a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to a full character arc, but this is where it begins: a conflict driving your character and deciding the way they climb the mountain. Now we have a conflict and a desire in one, the characters’s fear of getting fired and their desire for a good reputation. This is going to keep taking them up the mountain, now the journey to the top of the mountain is your character arc, but it is absolutely all about how they get there.
Stories that are character-driven will always be my favorites because, yes, a strong plot is necessary and is another blog post in of itself, but if we are reading a story purely fueled by the plot and the characters are catered to the plot – there really isn’t much room for the reader to connect to the characters. Now, if we flip it around a little bit and imagine a story where the plot is happening to the characters, BUT they are responsible for the paths they go down, that is when the stakes become higher. We have a character who can make decisions that alters the plot and that changes their life. They might not get to always choose the things that come at them, but they choose what to do with it and how to carry on with those plot arrows coming at them.
QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT CHARACTER ARCS
As for the actual arc of your character, here are some questions you can ask yourself in the beginning to start figuring out how your character will evolve:
Where is my character at in their life at the beginning of the story and what is keeping him/her there?
What is my character's internal conflict (their greatest struggle keeping them from getting what they truly want)?
What is my character’s misbelief (what do they believe wrong about the world, themselves, or something else in their life)?
What is my character’s greatest desire? Where do they want to be at the end of the story?
How do the events of the novel change their views of the world?
What significant moments in their story change them forever and how?
How does this character react to the challenges they face due to their conflict + desire? Explore how their reactions and actions affect their life and emotional state.
How do you want the character to change in the end?
There is so much that goes into a character arc and so many questions you could ask yourself, but a key thing to remember is that the way your character reacts to the things happening around them will make or break their life and reputation. If you have a character who is falling towards the villain route, they are going to be more prone to making decisions that either help them raise them to power, ultimately lose everything, or whatever conflict is driving them into their madness. If they come out on top and have a major shift in life for the positive, they are going to be fighting to make the right decisions throughout the events of the book (or maybe their villain arc starts with wanting to make the right choices, but ultimately failing in the process)– however, we all make mistakes and all decisions your character makes are reliant on the conflict they feel within and how that conflict drives them to try and reach their goal. What do they learn about that inner turmoil inside of them? That is what it’s all about. It gets uninteresting when we have a character that either stays the same for 300 pages, or suddenly finds their destination in the last few pages but we never got to see how they ended up with their realizations and insights.
MAKE A CHARACTER ARC LINE
An exercise that can help you with character arcs is drawing a line of your characters highs and lows. The higher the line, the more positive that point in the journey, the lower is obviously the darker moments of your character's life– or right in the middle is simply that their life is fine. Start from the beginning of your novel and start going through the most pivotal events, writing about your character (their emotional state, questions, struggles, desires) at each of those points in your line until you reach the end and you can properly see the flow of your character's arc. This line does not have to be pretty! In fact, the more up and down the better. The only thing to keep in mind is the consistency of what is driving your character and what their desire is.
BEGINNING. MIDDLE. END.
This is a simplified version of the exercise above and it is essentially writing out your character’s arc at the start, the middle, and end of your novel. Take note of what their conflict/struggles are, their misbelief, and what their greatest desire is and describe how their life is affecting these things at each of these points.
DEAR PAST/FUTURE ME
Another exercise you can do if you are struggling to find where you want your character to go in the story is to write a letter in the POV of your character, but they are writing to either their future or past self. Your character writing to their future self could help you unlock what their greatest desire is and what they plan to do to get there and your character writing to their past self can help you discover how they have changed since the beginning.
STUDY YOUR FAVORITES
Lastly, find a character in a book or even a movie/tv show and study how exactly their journey moves you. Think about how they start at the beginning and where they end up, how they have changed and then really pinpoint exactly what things brought them there. What decisions, what life events, their desires, and how did these things either bring them closer or further away from the end result? Progress in real life is a very “one step forward and two steps back” thing because of our decisions, the things life throws at us, and what motivates us or tries to hold us back, if this is showcased through your character chances are your readers are going to become attached and feel the realistic shifts and growth in your character from beginning to end.
I could make multiple posts on character arcs and this probably only scratches the tip of the iceberg, but I hope some of these things were helpful! If you want to speak on this topic more or have any writing questions, please feel free to reach out to me here.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and enjoy the beautiful ups and downs of your writing journey. You are doing amazing, don’t give up!
~ Hannah