How to design strong character arcs
Characters are changed by story events. But how?
One of the more common craft terms that’s thrown around yet hardly ever defined is character arc. We often seen in reviews that readers are unsatisfied with a character’s arc or maybe we even notice our own lack of emotional response to the resolution of a plot in a novel we spent a month reading (by the way, is there anything worse than that?) and conclude that the characters lacked an arc.
But what are we really saying? Is an arc the plot that takes us on a rollercoaster ride—physically or emotionally—through all manner of death and damnation only to drop us off at the queue with a pat on the butt and a “have a nice day?”
Hardly.
If a satisfying arc were merely the design of your story events, then even the goofiest action movies (Fast and Furious fans please stand up) would change viewers lives immediately from the profundity of the adventures of Hobbs and Shaw.
No, an arc, especially character arc, isn’t the result of a tightly structured plot. A character’s arc is when a story opens with the protagonist as one person—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—but finishes with them completely changed.
We’ve talked a little about the aspects of character before. First, characterization has nothing to do with physical attributes. Then we went a little deeper and sketched out basic elements of complex characters. But how, exactly, is a writer supposed to create a character arc that narratizes tremendous change and satisfies a reader enough to tell all their friends to buy the book?
Well, science. Duh. And a little bit of weird, woo-woo mysticism thrown in as well.
Big Five Personality Traits are patterns for character arcs
Understanding your character’s basic personality traits is critical to designing their arc. Sound easy until you consider the problem. Which traits should we use? In what combination? And why?
Psychology is a useful model. The Five Factor model of personality claims that one’s personality consists of specific traits: openness, contentiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Research confirms this claim in two important ways. First, these traits, unlike other potential factors, remain relatively stable over a person’s life. Second, they are known to effect certain outcomes like level of education attained and health.
The Five Factor model of personality is most interesting because the traits are assessed along a spectrum rather than as binaries. This spectrum allows us writers to have characters with a clear psychological starting point and then a path for our characters to travel along as they encounter and overcome the pressure of story events. We can use the empirically verified Five-Factor model as a way to write character arcs that readers find familiar and believable yet surprising.
A basic breakdown of the Five-Factor traits and their spectrums looks like this:
Every person, and thus character, exhibits each of these traits to some degree. A person high in conscientiousness, low in agreeableness, neutral in neuroticism, high in openness, and neutral in extraversion would be someone extremely goal focused with impatience for people they judge incompetent, willing to pass those people by as they pursue ideas and concepts others might not understand without second thought. They’re something of an analytical thinker who examines existing systems to find ways to make them better (I should know, this is how I score on a Big Five Test and it seems true to how I experience my life).
What would happen if our main character had these traits and the first event of their story finds them paralyzed from a car accident? Or what if their ambition and impatience alienated them from their family? Their society? Even the world?
We could go much quieter than these dark premises and design an inciting incident in which this very same character makes a mistake at work that has minimal impact but hints that they are, in fact, the incompetent one?
These inciting incidents would set off a series of character actions and reactions that move them along the spectrum of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism toward heartfelt change.
You should take a Big Five personality test for every major character in your story as if you were them to have a roadmap for how they could change as a result of the events of your plot.
Enneagrams help build a cast of characters
Arcs aren’t as simple as the changes of individual characters experience as they’re tested by story events. There’s a much broad eco-system of interaction between single characters and every other character in the story. We can’t simply establish the Big Five traits for our main character and opposition character and them let them loose in the story world. We must make considerations about the entire cast—and design our story as such—so they we can achieve nuance, shading, and foils for everyone in the story. The best ways to design a cast that also has an arc is to use Enneagrams.
The Enneagram is a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. The Enneagram describes nine personality types and maps each of these types on a nine-pointed diagram which helps to illustrate how the types relate to one another. Though less scientific, the Enneagram is popular because it accurately describes how certain types of people interact with others that feels true to life.
The system is too much to go into detail here but what’s unique about Enneagram and useful to writers is they describe how these 9 types function when things are going well physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually while also detailing what happens when those factors suffer. There are detailed explanations for how each Enneagram type interacts with every other type when things are going well and when things are going bad which will allows us to design story events that produce conflict and cooperation across and entire cast that readers recognize from their own life experiences.
Using the Enneagram will allow you to create a pattern of personalities and their dealings with each other as the fortune of your story events rise and fall by every one of their decisions. Take an Enneagram assessment for each of your characters to create a roadmap for how your cast will arc across the entirety of your plot.
What do we do with character arcs and casts?
This is a lot of work to do before you even write your first sentence. While this may not be right for many people when starting a first draft this is an excellent exercise for anyone in the revision process.
Answering questions concerning your character’s personality traits and how those attract or repel everyone around them—and vice versa—will allow you to identify why the second act seems to drag, or the final pay off doesn’t have the emotional blow you intended, or even why all of your workshop friends and beta readers just plain old don’t understand your hero’s reactions to the story events. Knowing these answers will give you options.
It might even get you the kudos of a five-star review from that random person in Ontario who can’t stop thinking about your awesome character arcs.
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