Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas, an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. She offers a wide range of courses on the craft of fiction, as well as a free ebook, Cracking the Code: 10 Craft Techniques That Will Get Your Novel Published.
I write a lot about character arc, and I talk a lot about it with my clients.
Because if there’s a magic bullet for creating a novel that sucks the reader in, holds her attention, and ultimately makes her feel like it was worth the 6+ hours it took to read that book, character arc is it.
Many writers are clueless about the importance of a character arc for their protagonist, but I find that even those who do understand how important it is often still don’t know what it takes to actually make one work in practice.
Basically, there’s one key mistake they’re making: When it comes to the major events of the plot, they’re focusing on how their protagonist feels in the moment, based on different issues in their past, rather than on how that emotional reaction connects with their character arc.
To show you how this works in practice, let’s build a little story, starting with just the plot.
Example 1: Just the plot
Callie is a programmer working on AI development. She’s been assigned to the team developing Ella, a large language model designed to provide therapy to those who can’t afford a human therapist, when she makes a discovery: the online therapy that Callie herself has been paying good money for, ostensibly for empathetic human support, is in fact being provided by a prototype of Ella.
Incensed, Callie calls out her online therapy provider for false advertising. Her customer complaint is handled by a chatbot (she knows this, because she helped to build it) and passed on to a “customer care associate” (also an AI, which she can tell by the way it responds to nonsensical statements) and then ultimately to the therapy company’s Director of Communications (an actual human), who tells her that he’s sorry, but he cannot confirm nor deny that her therapist is an AI, though he would be happy to provide her with a free month of therapy, because she sounds pretty worked up over all this.
Callie hacks the transcripts of her own therapy sessions and confirms that she was talking to an AI program, but she can’t go public with this information without sharing her own deepest, most private matters with regulatory authorities, and the public in general. Will Callie sit tight on all of this, or will she reveal these secrets—both hers and that of the online therapy company?
Example 2: Incomplete or unfocused character arc
Let’s say the author looks back over this plot and decides they need to “get a character arc in there.” So they develop different elements of the protagonist’s backstory that might make the events of the plot more meaningful—and create a real change for the protagonist at the end.
So the author decides that Callie starts off in this story a very private person, and her big secret—the reason she needs therapy in the first place—is that her family is super toxic. Oh, and Callie is also crippled by perfectionism, due to her super-critical, no-good family.
So in this version of the story, when Callie discovers that her empathetic human therapist is, in fact, an AI program, she’s angry—not just because this company has engaged in false advertising, but also because this version of the program isn’t as good as the one she’s working on, and it shouldn’t be out in the world, it could say the wrong thing and hurt someone (that’s her perfectionism).
And when she’s ultimately passed on to the Director of Communications at that company, she’s intimidated at first, because that guy reminds her so much of her terrible father. She convinces herself that her therapist has to be human, because “Sheila” is so much like the mother she wished she had, growing up.
She hacks her transcripts, just to make sure, and finds out that Sheila is an AI. But she can’t expose the therapy company without exposing her own transcripts about her terrible, no good, manipulating family, and if she does, they’ll be hurt, and maybe disown her.
Callie decides maybe ultimately that’s for the best and does it anyway.
In this version, you could say there’s a character arc—a real change in the protagonist over the course of the story—but it feels like it’s all over the place. Is this a story about cutting ties with toxic family members? Is it about overcoming the desire to protect yourself in order to protect others? Is it about not being so hard on yourself that you require therapy, from either human or bot?
Given this progression, I have no idea. And neither would any reader.
Example 3: Complete character arc
So let’s see if we can narrow this down to something that actually makes sense.
Growing up, Callie was taught not to “spread her business around town,” which essentially meant never asking for help. That’s why, when she got doxxed by a veritable army of trolls as a woman in tech, and developed PTSD around it, she went for an online therapist: Not because she couldn’t afford an in-person therapist, but because going to a therapist at all felt so shameful to her that she wanted to do so as anonymously as possible.
So this AI developer discovers her therapist is an AI, and that her only recourse to exposing this company’s false advertising would be to expose herself—not only as needing therapy, but needing therapy because a bunch of teenage yahoos called her a bunch of misspelled curse words on Twitter. What would her family think? What would the world think, given the confident online persona she projects? Moreover: Would the trolls come for her again?
But maybe doing what she has to do to expose this company’s lies will also show the world just how real the psychological damage of doxxing can be. And maybe if she’s brave enough to ask for help from her online allies in fending off these trolls—showing the same bravery she did in seeking out therapy in the first place—she won’t be so alone this time.
Which means that the events of this story will now force this protagonist to face her greatest fear, making herself vulnerable and asking for help. And when she finally does, for the sake of the greater good, chances are good that readers will stand up and cheer—in part because it’s clear what this story is actually about: It’s about overcoming the fear of asking for help.
The upshot
Character arc isn’t a thing you can create with a patchwork of different issues and emotional reactions. It’s a thing you create by focusing on one clear thread that runs the whole length of your novel, with each and every plot development pushing the character to confront one particular internal issue—and, ultimately, make a change for the better.
Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, a finalist for the Foreword INDIES. An independent editor and book coach, she specializes in helping writers from historically marginalized backgrounds, and those writing socially engaged fiction, break through into publishing.
This is exactly what is wrong with my current plot–I am writing plot example #2 but #3 is what I want to write. The way I am internalizing it is with a river metaphor. Example 1 is like a navigation chart. It gives you turn by turn instructions and tells you where the danger is but there is no energy to the description like a plot with no emotion.
Example 2 is like a river delta where the main channel disintegrates into a fan of smaller flows with no clear path forward. The energy is dissipated and the stream drops sediment further obscuring the path.
Example 3 is like a mountain stream during snow melt. The water cascades down the mountain crashing into rocks, taking out trees, foaming white until it quiets into a cool pond that eventually overflows down the hill again. Clear direction and lots of energy carrying everything before it.
I am trying to articulate what makes #3 better. I think the inciting incident (being doxxed) is specific and specifically focused on putting the character in a situation where she faces her lie “don’t ask for help” directly. She’s doxxed, she gets PTSD, it’s so bad she finally decides to get help but only in such a way that she can hide it. Doing that causes her to realize that her therapist is an AI bot and one she knows that (I’m guessing at the end of act 1) she has to decide what to do about that. And the plot continues to revolve around ask for help/don’t ask for help. There’s a cause and effect chain that compels the character forward.
Not sure I’ve encapsulate it enough to be a reliable compass (continuing the river metaphor) and I’d love to hear other thoughts.
Love that metaphor, Elizabeth! So good!
In this case, though, being doxxed isn’t the inciting incident, it’s part of the backstory–something that happened before the story began. This allows the discovery that her own therapist may be an AI to act as the inciting incident–the event that sets into motion the whole cause-and-effect trajectory of the plot.
Not to get too literal with an example plot but I’m trying to understand the principal so I can test my own plan. I think discovering the therapist is an AI is a better inciting incident because it lets the story start with her fear. Maybe the beginning of the plot is her first session, she exposes her backstory by describing what happened to her. Maybe she senses something wrong & starts to look into. And then when she discovers it is AI, she’s faced with a decision. Does she ignore it or does she do something about it?
Until she decides to do something about it, she can return to life as normal.
A specific instance of the damage that doxxing causes could have been an inciting incident if the story had been about confronting doxxing. But in your plot discovering the AI therapist directly sets up the decision to expose the company. Starting with the doxxing muddies the water (pun alert) as it is an indirect cause and could have led to many different outcomes. Which leads us back to the wandering channels of the delta.
Thanks for letting me ramble. That was helpful.
BTW–I went to wikipedia to confirm my terminology for the river delta (yes, over research is a problem.) It’s actually quite startling how many metaphors that apply. Like the reduction in the energy of the flow causes the water to drop sediment–exactly like a plot without focus.
so helpful jane thanks for sharing xx cbri
Glad you found it useful!
Great article. Very helpful.
Really helpful essay, sophisticated stuff, but it strikes me that in the excellent examples you provide, it is a clearly defined conflict that captures the character’s story arc. Or maybe creates it.
I see the arc in the “just plot” example merely lacking resolution. In the second example, the arc is more clear, and while not directly wired, the fact that it is not straightforward appeals to me in that it suggests nuance, a three-dimensional character.
The fact that a character starts with some complexity, faces a conflict, and rises or falls on its resolution creates the story arc, which I found in all three examples.
Of course, I may have sideswiped the whole point of your engaging essay: the arc-less, arc-deficient, and arc-ful character.
Thank you for such a thought provoking item.
Jeff–in the first example, my sense is that the author wouldn’t exactly know how the story was supposed to end, because they hadn’t given much thought to a character arc. And while the nuances of character in the second example might work if scaled back, my sense is that one core internal issue would have to be foregrounded in each of the major events of the plot in order to work.
Thanks for your thoughts on this!
Thanks so much for this excellent article. I have a question though. Many times, I’ve noticed that a protagonist will have a major and a minor arc that are related but not identical. For instance, the protagonist might go from being only concerned with protecting her family to defying a tyrannical government. At the same time, she will go from having trust issues to becoming more trusting and open. Do you advise against this?
If you’ve seen this in a published novel, then somebody made this tactic work. That said, it’s not something I recommend for anyone trying to break through with their first published novel, as it’s a tough one to pull off.
Character arc for antagonist — thoughts?
Susan, you are brilliant at laying this out. I, like Elizabeth, am stuck in #2. You make it so clear why we want to work as hard as we can to go from #2 to #3. I’m sticking with it, because I know my story (and my readers) deserve it!
Let me start in the right way… A wonderful article. I loved the story and ideas (in fact I would enjoy reading that story). I enjoyed the directness and the fact that your story and character arc really worked for me. So, my little thoughts should be taken with a pinch of salt. They are not meant as a critique but rather as questions.
David Brin wrote “Earth” as a series of Newspaper articles. No character arcs whatsoever but is lauded as one of the greatest works ever. (Lol- won the Nebula, Campbell, locus, and Hugo awards) and he was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature on the back of it.
“Call of the Wild” after Spenser the clearest form of Darwinian thinking after discovery and one of the earliest fictional thoughts on the subject, a well-loved family book but the characters keep changing apart from “Buck” degrading. Or perhaps, becoming what he was meant to be.
Lol- and lastly, (you will be glad to know) I bring up “The Social Contract” One of the most important books ever. Short but salient. No need for a character arc.
Lol- Am I being difficult?
Hadn’t known Brin won all those awards for Earth, although he’s among my favorite authors. It was a terribly involved book, and not (I thought) his best. Still have it on my shelf. May take another look out of curiosity.
Very good point.