Before you start writing your novel, you need to establish character arcs for the key characters in your story.
A character arc is the journey a character will go through in your novel and the way they change through the challenges they experience.
In this article, we look at how to write character arcs.
1. Create the character
The creating of a character is done on two levels – physical and psychological. The physical traits of the character (age, gender, body shape, skin color if relevant, eye color, hair color and type, etc.,) will help you to keep a visual representation of your character in mind while creating them.
The psychological creation of the character is an amalgamation of several elements. First and foremost is their childhood – where were they born? Who are/were their parents? What were their formative years like?
Second, depending on the character’s age (child, teen, young adult, adult, middle aged, senior), what was the character’s life like up until the moment your story starts? What happened to them? How did that shape the way they think and act?
Third, what kind of principles does the character abide by? Why does the character have those principles in place?
Fourth – and this is where the physical traits of the character come into play – how does the character feel about themselves? For example, if your character is a 40-year-old woman, how does she feel about her body? Has she tried to postpone aging with Botox and other plastic procedures, or is she happy with getting older? If your character is a teenager, how do they feel inside their body? Are they taking puberty and the hormone overload that happens to teenagers in stride, or do they feel long and lanky after a sudden growth spurt?
You need to answer all of these questions before you start writing the novel. While most of that information will not make it into the novel, you need to know it so that you can create a character who thinks and acts in a certain way that is in line with their life experiences and the principles they have developed.
2. Establish the character
In the beginning of the novel, up to the 1/3 mark of the length, you get the chance to establish the character within the course of the story. This does not mean automatically writing out the biography of the character in the first few chapters (although many novels do start off that way by giving a brief biography of the main character).
What you need to do in the beginning is put the character in situations that would demonstrate their basic character traits, beliefs, and principles (even if the character is wrong about themselves).
For example, perhaps the protagonist is a jaded veteran who thinks that they are only good for violence. So, in the first chapter, we see the veteran starting a fight when they notice a man trying to flirt with an unwilling woman in a bar. After the fight, the woman tries to thank the veteran, but they leave, angry with their own selves because they lost control. On the way home, they see an injured animal lying on the street, about to be hit by a car. The veteran rescues the animal and takes him to the nearest vet.
With those two scenes (the bar fight, helping the animal), we establish a character who, despite being a veteran from a war, has not lost their sense of justice or empathy. The way the veteran reacts in this two situations shows that. Meanwhile, in the narration, how they feel about their own reactions (angry with themselves for losing control and getting into a fight, angry with themselves for wasting time to help the injured animal), tells us what this character thinks like and how they see their own self (as a violent person on the verge of violence at all times).
It doesn’t matter whether the character’s perception of themselves is correct or not. Most of the times, in the beginning of a novel, a character will see their own self in a certain way and part of the journey (the character’s arc), is learning to see their own self differently.
This is where the challenge comes in.
3. Challenge the character
So far, you’ve created the character and established them, and through that, you’ve given the readers (in the beginning of the novel) an idea of:
– how the character thinks about the world and about themselves;
– what their principles are;
– how the character acts (as a result of their principles + way of thinking).
The next step in creating a character’s arc is to challenge the character, mainly their principles and way of thinking. This is where the plot comes in. You need to put the character in a situation that challenges one of their principles or ways of thinking.
For example: Let’s say the protagonist is an archaeologist. She led a team of ten people in a mysterious dig in the Atacama Desert, but all of them except for her died on the mission. So, she swore off field work and worked as a professor for ten years. One day, she is called back to the Atacama Desert. A team of five people had fallen in a trap underground, and she is the only one with enough experience to help dig them out in time.
The main plot of the novel needs to present the protagonist with a problem that, if they accept to solve, would mean going against some principle they have adopted prior to the beginning of the story. And once they agree to take on the task, they need to be faced with more and more such challenges to their ways of thinking.
4. Choose the type of character’s arc
Once you have determined the basic challenge of the protagonist, you need to determine how the protagonist will react to it and what type of character’s arc you will go for. Mainly, there are four types that you can go for:
- Positive happy character’s arc: where the protagonist starts off with negative views of the world, other people, and their own self, and through the course of the story, they learn to view the same more positively and become happier from doing so;
- Positive unhappy character’s arc: this one is where the protagonist starts off happy, then learns something (about the world, other people, their own self), but it leaves them unhappy. In this type of arc, the protagonist starts of as more naïve but ends up more cynical and skeptical for the future;
- Negative arc: where the character learns something about the world, but ends up worse off: both unhappy and with negative views of the world. Oftentimes, this type of protagonist becomes a villain by the end of the story;
- Flat arc: A flat arc is where the protagonist has been challenged in their worldview, personality, and how they see their own self, but by the end of the story, they choose to stick to what they believed in before, and they make a conscious decision not to change how they think and what their principles are.
Out of the four types above, the first two types (positive happy and positive unhappy) are the most common. A negative arc is rarer – and difficult to execute as well – no matter how interesting it might be to watch a protagonist become a villain or antagonist. A flat arc usually happens in long running episodic series, like detective novels, where the main task of the protagonist is to solve the current crisis and there is no overarching plot.
Whichever way you choose to go, keep in mind that character arcs are not reserved solely for the protagonist. The same applies to the major side characters as well, even if they have less page time, especially if you’re planning to write a series (of two or more novels).