I have written a few books in my career, but I have played midwifed even more of them. And they’re all that mental labor, it seems to me that all this character arc stuff people keep talking about may actually be important. Actually, strike that. It’s so important, determining what my main characters’ arcs are going to be the very first thing I do when I suspect I have a new story on my hands.
Why? Because going what I’ll call “backwards”—starting with the plot points and inventing characters to mosey on through them—can get real messy. You’ll have to kill your darlings, spend precious time and brain power figuring out how to have your cake and eat it too, and find yourself slogging through several more rounds of revisions then you reckon you would while penning page one.
Don’t get me wrong. I love working backwards. Working with the raw clay of a writer’s ideas and untangling knots in a yarn makes me absolutely giddy. But I prefer the characters to tell me what to do, not the other way around. When a character has a solid path in front of them, they demand to walk it, and if you pay attention to their wants and needs, they’ll be all too willing to help you write about it.
If that sounds great to you, let’s get to the good stuff already! I never start a story without completing these four steps for each of my main characters.
Step 1: Determine why your character can’t get their act together.
Some writers begin planning knowing their character will have certain personality traits. Other writers will look to archetypes such as MBTI, Enneagram, or even zodiac signs to get a sense for what kind of person their character is. Regardless of how you came to know your character, and regardless of who your character is, you ought to be able to identify the flaw or personality trait that’s holding them back from happiness.
Let’s use the titular hero of Shrek as an example because it’s currently on Netflix and I’ve seen it twice this month already. Shrek is lots of things—temperamental, unsanitary, funny, brave, thoughtful—but the thing that’s most notable is that he drives everyone away, including those who would otherwise want to stay with him. (We see this with how he treats the talkative Donkey.) He doesn’t let anyone in, and this has led to loneliness.
Step 2: Figure out what happened in their past to make them this way.
There are debates to be had about nature versus nurture in terms of how we develop personalities, but that debate is not going to be had here. For the purposes of developing a character arc, your character is the way they are because of something that happened in their past. For best results, it is one big thing that happened—a major wound—and other, less significant instances throughout their life have poked at and exacerbated this wound.
In Shrek, we see onscreen and hear the character say later that everyone turns and runs from what they perceive to be the hideous, terrifying ogre. Over and over again, we see humans—an angry mob in the beginning of the movie and citizens of DuLoc later—shriek when they see Shrek because they see him as dangerous. In his own words, “they judge [him] before they even know [him].” This has happened so many times to Shrek that he assumes everyone will leave him, and that everyone sees him the same way. To protect himself, he will purposefully scare people away in any way he can so he never has to face the painful rejection. Thus, he doesn’t let anyone in and is lonely.
If you struggle with this step—or maybe you don’t, and it’s actually step one that trips you up—then I highly recommend purchasing The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, or at least checking out the index on One Stop for Writers. I’ve purchased the book on Kindle to be able to search the contents, and it’s made building character arcs practically painless.
Step 3: Turn it upside down, and there’s your ending.
This is where paths diverge. If you are writing a happy ending, your character is going to see the error of their ways (see Step 4) and break their bad habit or cease their self-sabotaging. They will still be flawed in other ways by the end—as all people are—but they will no longer suffer from their most poisonous trait and method of viewing the world.
On the other hand, if you’re writing a villain, your character will instead lean in to their dark side instead of learning their lesson.
Back to Shrek. At the beginning of the story, Shrek had no friends whatsoever. By the end of it, he has opened up, and he’s getting married to the ogress of his dreams surrounded by fairytale creatures who have come to know him as a hero. He also has a loyal best friend in Donkey, and has stopped pushing people away at least for this movie. Quite the turnaround! And this is all because of Step 4, which we’ll get to in a jiffy.
But first, let’s say you are writing a villain. The villain in Shrek is Lord Farquaad, and it’s clear he has a problem that goes hand in hand with the hero’s problem: he judges everything on appearance alone. He sent Shrek to collect Princess Fiona not because he knew anything about her, but because she was beautiful and marrying her would elevate his status. Everything is superficial with him. And at the climax of the movie (spoiler alert!), when Shrek declares his love for Fiona and Fiona shares that she is cursed to turn into an ogress at sundown, Lord Farquaad does not see these moments as awe-inspiring, but declares that Fiona and Shrek are monsters who want to ruin his perfect day and perfect world. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with him for very long after that.
Step 4: Imagine the moment where everything changes.
So you know what your character is going to be like at the beginning. You now know that your character is going to have to transform in some way in order to achieve a happy ending (or not!). But how does that transformation take place?
For Shrek, everything changes for him when he begins to fall in love with Fiona. Though he initially judges her to be a stereotypical princess, while journeying from her tower to DuLoc, Shrek and Fiona show each other their true colors and discover they are much the same despite their vast differences in appearance. There are still ups and downs to be had—Fiona refuses to reveal her sunset transformations, and this leads to a misunderstanding with Shrek that breaks both of their hearts in the moment—but it’s because Shrek falls in love with Fiona that he’s able to step into his happily ever after (after a push from our sage, Donkey). He learns that opening yourself up to others can be painful, as can rejection if it doesn’t go well, but the joy of sharing your life with people is worth the risk.
So, in summary, Shrek’s arc at its most basic level looks like this:
- Because Shrek is an ugly ogre, people judge him to be terrifying and dangerous right off the bat. (The origins of this are offscreen, but we see occurrences of this throughout the movie.)
- And because of that, Shrek lives in a swamp alone and scares people off before they have a chance to reject him.
- Shrek falls in love with Fiona—and she returns that love—after opening up and getting to know each other.
- A happy Shrek gets married to Fiona surrounded by friends who care for him.
How your character comes to make their transformation will largely depend on the plot of your book and even the expectations of your genre. It might help to brainstorm a list of possible scenes or plot points under the heading, “What would make [character] realize that [how they’ve gone about things] is wrong, and that they should [do the opposite of that]?”
All the rest of your book will be connecting those dots alongside your plot.
