Character arcs
An arc is not growth. It is not what happens to somebody either. It is one belief the story tests, and the five ways that goes. Five types in a table, three read close in novels, and the four things an arc keeps getting confused with.
What a character arc is: one belief, tested
A character arc is what the story does to one belief, measured from the first page to the last. The word doing the work is belief. A plot changes what a character has. An arc changes what she takes to be true, or tests it and leaves it standing, or lets her hold it until it finishes her. Those are the three outcomes, and they are why she can lose everything and have no arc, and why another character can end the book in the same room with the same job and have one.
Most flat drafts have somebody who changes circumstance instead. She gets the promotion, the house, the verdict, the man. Nothing she held to be true on page one has been touched. The last chapter reads as an outcome rather than an ending. The test takes two minutes. Write the sentence she would agree with on page one. Then write the sentence she would agree with on the last page. If they are the same sentence, you have a plot and no arc.
Archetype and arc are two halves of one answer. Have both before you draft. An archetype is what a character is for. It is the job the plot needs doing: the one who brings the news, the one standing in the doorway. An arc is what happens to what that person believes while they do the job. The archetypes page has forty-four of the first kind in a table. A cast with every archetype filled and not one belief moving is the commonest version of a novel that reads as competent and dead.
Five types of character arcs, and what each does to a belief
| Arc | What she believes at the start | What the story does to it | Where the turn sits | A novel that does it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positive change | Something false about herself, and comfortable | Takes it apart and makes her act on the truth instead | Three quarters in, and it costs her something she wanted | Emma, Jane Austen |
| Flat | Something true, which the world around her denies | Tests it and confirms it, and changes the people who hear her | In whoever she convinces, rather than in her | To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee |
| Disillusionment | Something false and consoling | Shows her the truth and leaves her worse off for holding it | The moment she cannot un-know it | The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro |
| Fall | Something false, and she keeps it to the end | Lets her act on it until it finishes her | There is no turn. The nearest thing is the scene where she declines the ordinary alternative | Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert |
| Corruption | Something true, which she trades away | Offers her what she wants for the price of that belief | Early, and the rest of the book is the bill | The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde |
These five are not one canonical set. The disagreement is worth knowing before you plan a cast around any of it. Positive change and flat turn up in every treatment of the subject. Splitting the negative arc into disillusionment, fall and corruption is K.M. Weiland's. September C. Fawkes drops those names and sorts arcs on two axes instead: change against steadfast, positive against negative. The three negative names are here because they are what a writer searches for, because the distinction between them is a distinction between three different endings, and because a character can run two of them at once, which is most of what a subplot does.
Three character arc examples, read at the turn
The examples on this subject are mostly films. A novelist is served better by a novel. Here are three arcs at the sentence where the belief gives way, holds, or gets sold.
1Positive change: the belief comes apart in a few minutes
Emma has spent the book certain she can read a room. Austen takes the certainty away in one paragraph, with no scene and no company.
The turn is interior. It is fast. Austen gives the collapse of a belief four hundred pages in the making three sentences and no witness, because the belief was not about anybody else in the first place. Notice what the paragraph does not contain. No new information arrives in it. Emma has had every fact she needs for chapters, and the arc turns at the moment she reads them, which is the difference between a plot event and a turn. A draft that keeps withholding facts is usually a draft with no turn in it, because the writer has confused the two.
Try this. Find the chapter where your character has all the facts and has not drawn the conclusion. That is where your turn goes.
A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart.Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes.What blindness, what madness, had led her on!
2Corruption: the belief sold, then hidden
Dorian knows exactly what the portrait is. Wilde has him name it, and then put a screen in front of it.
A corruption arc needs its character to understand the trade, or the book is only a misfortune. Wilde settles that in the first sentence, where Dorian names the picture as his conscience made visible. The second sentence is the rest of the novel. He does not burn it and he does not look at it. He screens it. That is a decision he can take again tomorrow, and a corruption arc is a series of repeatable decisions rather than one fall. That is what separates it from the fall below. There the belief is not traded, because it was never in doubt.
Try this. Give your corrupting character the sentence where they name the price. Then let them go on paying it.
The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it.
3The fall: the belief intact to the end
Emma Bovary believes love arrives as weather. Flaubert states the belief early, in her own terms, and then lets the book run on it.
Three sentences from the first half, and the measure inside them does not move for the rest of the book. She learns what Rodolphe and Léon are. What she does not revise is the measure itself, love as weather and happiness as a place, and the arsenic is the last act of a woman still holding her life up against a sentence she read at fifteen. That is what separates a fall from disillusionment, where the belief itself goes. The hurricane sentence is worth reading twice. It is Emma's register rather than the narrator's, at one remove through Aveling's English, and the arc is the distance between that register and what happens to her.
Try this. Write your character's belief in her own words, at her most florid. If you cannot hear her saying it, you do not have it yet.
Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere.She wished at the same time to die and to live in Paris.
Arc, story arc, character development
Four things get called an arc and three of them are something else. A story arc is what happens, the shape of events from the first page to the last, and a character arc is what one person makes of those events while they happen. The two run through the same book and they are not the same line, and a manuscript can have a fine story arc with not one person inside it changing their mind.
Here is a worked case, because the two lines are easiest to see when they disagree. A detective novel where the murderer is caught has a complete story arc: a body, an investigation, an arrest. If the detective ends the book believing what she believed at the start, which is usually that the work is worth what it costs her, she has no arc, and what you have written is a puzzle. Change one thing and the lines come apart. Let the arrest be the scene that shows her the work is not worth it, and the story arc closes while the character arc opens, which is how a series earns a second book.
Character development is the second confusion and the more expensive one. Development is everything a reader learns about a person. Her history, her habits, how she takes her coffee. An arc is one belief and what the story does to it. You can develop a character for four hundred pages without touching that belief, and that is what a flat middle usually is. A great deal of development. There is no arc.
A flat character arc is not a flat character, which is the third. A flat-arc character holds a true belief, the story tests it, and the change lands on the people around her. Atticus Finch is not the one who changes in To Kill a Mockingbird. The town changes. Scout changes with it. The book is not thin for it. A flat character is Forster's term for a person built out of a single idea, which is often deliberate and sometimes the best thing in a novel. The two names sit next to each other in every glossary and they have nothing to do with each other.
The fourth is worth settling before you plan anything. Not every character needs an arc, and most should not have one, because an arc costs scenes: the belief has to be visible early, tested in the middle and answered late. Spend that on five people and you have five novels competing. Two or three is the normal load.
Where the arcs matter is where they cross, and the relationship chart is built for that. A belief a reader cannot see is a different problem, and usually a point-of-view one rather than an arc one. The point of view page has it.
Three tests for an arc you think you have written
All three are run on a draft rather than on a plan. The first and the third take an evening, and the second takes a weekend if the book is long. If the first one fails, stop. The fix is upstream of everything the other two measure.
Name the belief in one sentence
In her words, not yours, and without the word wants in it. Wanting is a plot. If the sentence will not come, the arc is not there yet, and the type you picked from the table above is a label on an empty box.
Find the scene she cannot come back from
There should be one page where the belief stops being available to her. Mark the page. A middle with no such page is a middle where the reader is waiting. If the belief survives every scene in the book, mark the scene where it should have broken instead, and you have found what the middle is missing. Then work backwards, because whatever that scene needs in order to land is what the chapters before it are for, and it is usually two or three scenes where the belief holds and costs her something each time.
Read the last chapter against the first
Two sentences on a card. The one she would agree with on page one, and the one she would agree with at the end, side by side. The gap between them is your arc, and the fields for the belief and the last page are on [[page:templates/character-profile|the character profile template]].
The same character with an editor on it
A synopsis paragraph where everything changes except the person. Then the same paragraph with one belief in it. The note is from Danae Marcelline Brooks, a developmental editor inside Draftly.
Drag to compare original and revised text
Questions & Answers
- What is a character arc example?
- Emma Woodhouse is the standard one. She spends the novel certain she understands what the people around her feel, and Austen spends it proving otherwise, until Emma reads the facts she has had for chapters and has to act on them instead. Austen puts the turn at chapter forty-seven, and Emma is alone for it. The passage is quoted above.
- What makes a good character arc?
- The belief is visible before it is tested, the test costs her something she wanted, and the change shows in an action rather than in a summary. One more thing separates the good ones. The reader can see the old belief still pulling at her afterwards, because a character who converts cleanly reads as a diagram rather than as a person.
- What is the difference between a character arc and a story arc?
- A story arc is the shape of the events. A character arc is what those events do to what one person believes. A book can have a tight story arc and no character arc, which is how a good deal of crime fiction works, and it can have a strong character arc inside a plot where little happens. The section above works an example through both.
- Is it character arc or character arch?
- Arc. It is the geometric word, the curved line, and it describes a change that leaves from one point and lands at another. Arch is the thing over a doorway. The mistake is common enough to be a search term, so it is worth knowing which one an agent expects to read.
- Does every character need an arc?
- No, and most should not have one. The reason matters before you start adding them. An arc is not what makes a character worth reading. A want and a limit will do that, and the minor characters a reader remembers are usually the ones with one of each. Arcs are for the two or three people the book is about, because they are the only ones you can afford to test.
- What is another word for character arc?
- There is not a good one, and every substitute on offer means something narrower. Character growth assumes the change is upward, which rules out three of the five types in the table. Character development means everything a reader learns about a person. Transformation comes closest, and it still misses the flat arc, where the change lands on the people around her.
Write down the belief
The lie they believe about themselves and what is different about them on the last page are two fields on the character profile template, and that is where an arc stops being a type.
Open the character profile templateOne place for the whole book.
Open a chapter and everything it needs is already beside it: the cast, the places, the rules you invented, the note you left yourself last November. Nothing to hunt for, nothing to keep in sync by hand — and with the friction gone, the days you write start adding up.