Character Arcs
- Vivian Nagy
- 29 de jun.
- 15 min de leitura
Hello everyone, this tip I have for you here can also be found in video form on my YouTube channel, Nagy in the Margins. Feel free to learn wherever is best for you!
On my first video of my YouTube channel, I have talked briefly about flat character arcs, but today we are going to explain in more depth the most popular character arcs that exist and analyze how they work in stories we know and love!
So, first of all, what is a character arc?
A character arc is how a character changes throughout your story, be it for better or for worse. Sometimes the arc is actually a flat line, which is a bit contradictory, but more about that below.
Any character arc you might find out there will fit within the 3 most basic pillars of character development: Positive, Negative, and Flat Arcs
The Arcs
Note: the way I named these arcs were based in many different names I have seen throughout my studies, and I stuck with the ones I think represent their contents well in a very clear way, but below it all you can find links to some articles from people who have also summarized and explained well the different character arcs with sometimes other names than those I use here.
The Positive Arc
The Positive Arc is the most satisfying journey to follow because it’s built on hope and transformation for the better — something we can always get a bit more in our lives. The Positive Arc can act like a mirror for what us, humans, usually want to be, but we lack either the courage, resources, motivation, or time to do so — or maybe society and unplanned events can get in the way and block us from going through our metamorphosis.
Though I said we have three pillars, the Positive Arc one is usually divided into two very popular categories:
The Growth Arc:
The most common arc there is, as this can be applied to basically any story there is to tell. On the surface, it is just about ‘getting better’, ‘improving’ oneself, but on the deeper level? It is about a character confronting a conviction, a belief they have about themselves, usually born from a past wound or trauma or even just cultural living.
This conviction of the characters, when it comes from one event or a series of related events, constitutes the character’s ‘ghost’. A character’s ‘ghost’ is basically something that happened to them and that is the reason behind their worldview, behind their beliefs, explaining why they act the way they act.
This ‘beginning’ of theirs, of how they became who they are when the Growth Arc is starting, can happen either on page as the beginning of the story or as a backstory that will be revealed later on (or never at all if you prefer to simply leave it implied). Thinking of that, the characters in a Growth Arc usually start either as a 'blank page' or as someone with a good heart but a specific flaw.
Take Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit for instance, he starts out as your typical Hobbit, just wanting to live his life in peace, but also trying not to show what makes him a bit odd amidst the other Hobbits (his passion for adventures). His ‘ghost’ is the cultural living among the other Hobbits. He is who he is and believes what he believes because that is the life in The Shire (no need for a whole complex explanation of backgrounds here, see?).
He is a blank page because before him there are many paths laid out, there are many open possibilities to what he can become, including the path of simply staying in The Shire and laying low for the rest of his life.
He is also someone with a good heart, but his flaw is that first: he’s petty; and second: he’s a coward. That may be a strong word, but what I mean by that is that he lacks the courage to face problems that are right on his face, he doesn’t want to deal with the challenges put in his way, and we see that plainly when the dwarves simply start to enter his home and he does barely nothing to stop them.
When we think of the Growth Arc, the character that is chosen to go through this arc has the plot forcing them to face their issues and choose what will make them… well, grow as a person.
Bilbo has Gandalf and the dwarves to act as the force pushing him towards improvement. His first step towards improvement is when he decides to join the quest, but throughout the adventure he overcomes, little by little, the beliefs he had about himself, and embraces the new truth — that he is not an ordinary Hobbit; though still a bit petty, he is brave, kind, humble, and he learns to accept his flaws but, above all, he learns to embrace his strengths, his virtues, making him a better Hobbit even though he might not fit in with the others in the Shire so well anymore.
By the end of the Growth Arc, the characters have not only conquered the external antagonist — be it a dragon in a cave full of treasures or the social hierarchy of where they live — but also their internal shadows.
The Redemption Arc:
The Redemption Arc (which I know plenty of people love, myself included) has characters that start in a dark place. They can be morally grey, be a bad person in general, or be a true villain in someone else’s story. Their journey is about making amends. Their arc is all about seeing they’ve done wrong, learning about the bad things they did and acknowledging they were bad, and then trying to set things straight, fight off the evil within them. It requires a massive sacrifice or a series of difficult choices to prove they have changed.
The climax of this arc usually happens when they are put to test at the most excruciating moment, and they probably have to make the utmost sacrifice to prove they aren’t ‘bad’ anymore.
Taking my beloved Tolkien characters again, Boromir has a very heartbreaking redemption arc. He starts off as the greedy human, ready to take on anything deemed evil if it benefits him and his kind, he even tries to justify he isn’t a bad guy because it is for a greater good. Our relationship with him starts off pretty much the same as Aragorn’s relationship with him — mistrusting, suspicious, ‘he’s up to no good’, ‘why is he even in this fellowship?’. Whenever the Ring is within his reach, we are all worried he’ll grab it and ruin everything. However, as the story unfolds and his Redemption Arc starts to kick in, we see him in Lothlórien and our hearts open up a bit for him.
He expresses his internal thoughts, his doubts about himself, how he’s just trying to do good but he knows the right way to do it is much more difficult and he shows us he’s scared because of it, because he thinks he cannot be good enough. And that’s when we see the good in him, that’s when we open our doors to give him one more chance, he’s finally turning good.
But then he has his utmost challenge placed in front of him. Frodo, alone, with the ring. All he needs to do is reach for it. And he falls under that temptation, he tries to take the ring from Frodo, making him scared and run away (using the ring which brings more tragedy afterwards, but anyways). When this happens, instead of us saying ‘told you so’ and not being surprised by Boromir’s actions, we instead feel sorry for him, as he was following a great path to his improvement, but the temptation overcame him.
Once Frodo is gone, he realizes instantly what has happened, he instantly regrets his actions, and then make us feel sorry for him! He knows he’s done wrong, and he wants to be better. That is essential for the Redemption Arc, having the character wanting to be better.
And then we move on to the end of his redemption arc, when he is, indeed, redeemed, because he goes and makes the utmost sacrifice to prove not only to everyone, but above all to his own self that he is not bad anymore, he is good. If you read the books or saw the movies you know what I’m talking about.
The uruk-hai are attacking, the hobbits are unprotected, Pippin and Merry are about to be taken, but in comes Boromir, with all his mighty fighting skills, protecting the little ones. Strike after strike he keeps on going, protecting both hobbits to their own surprise, and then the first arrow comes. Just like Pippin and Merry we don’t believe it. Just now, when he became who he was supposed to be you kill him? But no, he rises, and keep fighting, keep protecting, keep being good, until all the arrows find him, and he’s down, barely grasping for breath.
If the Boromir from the beginning had died, we’d mourn him briefly, because he was still part of the fellowship, but we’d move on quickly, as we didn’t like him that much. But this Boromir? This redeemed Boromir? We cry. We truly mourn. We have the beautiful speech where he recognizes Aragorn as his king, the cherry on the top for his redemption. We put him on the boat and let the river of death take him away.
This is what you want in a Redemption Arc. You want the reader to go from despising the character to rooting for them, mourning them if they die, like it was a close relative of theirs. This is one of the hardest emotional beats to pull off. But you see, it isn’t negative. We’re proud of what the character has become in the end.
The Negative Arc
In the Negative Arc you’re looking to either make your reader’s heart ache in disappointment and grief of the character that was good and succumbed to the temptations of evil, or to make them simply dislike the character by the end of it all. This pillar of character developments also has two subcategories:
The Corruption Arc:
In the Corruption Arc, the name explains itself: The character starts with potential for good but is slowly seduced by power, greed, fear, you name it. This is the story where we see the evil side of a person grow with them throughout the arc. The character doesn’t even have to be good to have a corruption arc, the character can be a truly neutral person — the importance is for them to have the potential for good, just as for evil, but the story takes them to the evil side.
And, of course, if the character begins as good and ends up evil, or simply dislikeable, the impact of the corruption is stronger. I say ‘simply dislikeable’ because to have a Corruption Arc one does not need to become truly evil by the end. As it is a negative arc, the character simply has to turn worse than they were in the beginning.
One example of this is Lydia Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice. Though she isn’t 100% likeable in the beginning, she still has potential for good, just as her sister Kitty. As they are much alike from the beginning, it is easy to see who has a Corruption Arc and who has a Growth Arc. While Kitty improves and becomes a better person by the end of the book, Lydia… well… If you’ve read the book or seen one of its movie adaptations, you know how despicable she becomes. From a silly adolescent, by giving in to her greed and envy, she marries a terrible, supposedly wealthy person and thus become insufferable. She isn’t a villain or evil by any means, merely a bad person in the end, now with apparently no room for improvement.
Taking the Corruption Arc to a higher step, we can take a look at Saruman — if you’re new here, I think you understand by now that The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite books. Saruman is Saruman the Wise for no other reason that he was, indeed, wise. He was the head of the council of the Istari, which happens to be the group of wizards sent to Middle-Earth to stop Sauron LOL the irony.
Saruman begins, then, as a very good person, prone to good, so much so Gandalf goes to him to ask for help. His arc, however, shows him falling for the temptations Sauron and his powers give him, and thus he becomes evil, fighting alongside Sauron, betraying his own kind, but with plans to betray Sauron in the future as well and take the power to himself.
In the end, the Corruption Arc will make your readers openly dislike, hate, despise the character, sad for the lost of what they could’ve been, but angrier at what they have become.
The Disillusionment Arc:
In this arc, the character usually believes a lie, and it is shattered by a harsh truth about the world. However, instead of growing from it, they become bitter, nihilistic, or simply depressed.
In this arc we usually like the character from the beginning, we see hope in their future, but as things get progressively worse, all we are left is with grief for what they could’ve been, and pain for what they’ve become.
One example of this is Winston Smith of 1984. He begins by being ‘just another person’ in a dictatorial world, but we, the readers, know that he knows the truth, that the Party is deceiving and lying to the people. The lie in which he believes, though, is the one where he thinks the Party can lose. In his story, that is the lie, because the more he gets himself contradicting the Party, being hopeful (a.k.a. believing) that the Party will fall soon by the acts of the resistance, the more he puts himself in danger and, when the Truth is revealed, it is worse than he imagined.
His hope is shattered, his illusion of freeing himself and others from the Party’s manipulation is shattered, he becomes truly disillusioned. The climax of his arc happens when he has the utmost choice of betraying Julia (his 'partner in crime') or not.
In a Growth Arc we’d see our hero probably dying to keep the hope alive and set the Truth free. Instead, Winston Smith betrays Julia and thus succumbs to the evils of the Party, becoming what he criticized in the beginning — just another clog in the machine.
Another example of the Disillusionment Arc is Frodo, from, again, The Lord of the Rings. His arc is very, very slow, which is why some might not notice it is a Disillusionment Arc. He starts as a loving Hobbit, also craving adventure like his uncle, and having an ideal image of what an adventure can be, based on what his uncle says.
When he gets on his own adventure, though, the truth shatters his beliefs, as it is much more dangerous and sometimes hopeless — he even mentions to Sam at one point how different it is from Bilbo’s tales, if I’m not mistaken. By the end of the story, in Mount Doom, to Sam’s surprise but also ours, he doesn’t want to get rid of the ring. He succumbs to the evil he had been carrying until then. If Gollum wasn’t there to take it for himself and destroy it, perhaps Frodo’s arc wasn’t going to be one of disillusionment, but of corruption. Gollum, by the way, is there as a mirror of what Frodo could’ve become (a.k.a. Gollum has a corruption arc).
So, Frodo’s arc is one of disillusionment because after he returns to the Shire and even helps eliminate Saruman from there (yeah, Saruman lives after the Ents take over Isengard, people who only watched the movies), still he is broken inside. The wound of the Nazgul on his shoulder is there as a reminder of his ‘failure’ under his eyes. He has no hope anymore, his beliefs from the beginning of the book do not exist anymore, and his leaving with Gandalf in the end shows us how he simply cannot fit anymore in his previous life. He is mostly disappointment at his own self, for failing and crushing his last string of hope.
By the end of a Disillusionment Arc, the character has lost their humanity, their essence. It leaves the reader in a state of ‘mourning' for who the character used to be or for the potential they had, and usually a state of ‘sadness’ or 'disappointment' for who they have become.
Little side note: there is another negative arc, the Fall Arc, which I feel is too similar with the Disillusionment Arc, because while in the Disillusionment Arc the character sees the truth and accepts it, embraces it, understands it, and sees it as more terrible than what he believed before, in the Fall Arc the character sees the truth as more terrible than his original beliefs, but instead of accepting it or understanding it (and making terrible choices due to it), the character neglects it and reinforces his belief in the lie he had as truth from the beginning. Since this is the only difference, I like to think that the Fall Arc is just a variant of the Disillusionment arc —meaning the Fall Arc is within the Disillusionment Arc, but a Disillusionment Arc is not necessarily a Fall Arc.
The Flat Arc
I’ve briefly talked about this on my first video of Nagy in the Margins, but I’ll reinforce the idea here, because though the Flat Arc is often misunderstood as 'boring,' in reality it is the arc of the Icon.
In this arc we don’t worry about them believing a lie about the world because they already know the truth and they simply follow through with life, knowing what they know. They may be one of the good guys or one of the bad guys, maybe even one of the neutral guys, but the thing is that they remain so for the rest of the story.
Instead of having a character change, we have the world around them change. They are usually there to be the spark that starts the fire of change for other characters, or they are there to simply be there as the story develops around them.
The irony of the Flat Arc is that it isn’t an arc. The character you see in the beginning is the same you’ll see in the end, at least concerning their essence and personality.
I’ll start with The Lord of The Rings because I already talked about Gandalf in that first video I mentioned, so this time I won’t prolong myself — if you want to check more about Gandalf go check the video.
Gandalf, though he changes from Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White, ask yourself: has he really changed? No. He hasn’t. He’s still Gandalf. What he says, what he does, how he acts, his beliefs? They are all the same from when he was Gandalf the Grey. He is the same Gandalf in the Hobbit and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. No real change in his essence has happened.
Another place we see plenty of flat character arcs is within detective stories. Sherlock Holmes is the greatest example, because even if you haven’t read the books, you probably have an idea of how Sherlock Holmes acts and talks. This Icon he has become is truly that, an Icon, a steadfast symbol that is recognizable in any story he participates, because he doesn’t change. Little details might change, of course, he may be a drug addict in the novels and a drunk in a movie, but you see how the essence is the same? He’ll always be the extravagant, sometimes rude, straight-to-the-point detective who sees and notices things that no one else does and that makes him an excellent detective.
Another detective who has a flat character arc (as far as I know) is Harry Hole, from the Harry Hole series. Jo Nesbø wrote him to be the same — the same flaws, the same virtues, same mannerisms — in every case he has to solve. His attitude towards the criminals, towards the victims, towards witnesses, towards those he cares about? You’ll find it is the same throughout the novels (up to the Leopard at least, which was the last one I read of the series — at the moment of this post at least).
With flat character arcs, you don’t want their struggle to be about becoming something, good or bad, you want them to remain themselves despite the pressure to change.
Multiple arcs
Now I want to give you some food for thought: can I have a character going through multiple arcs in the same story?
Yes you can!
Usually that happens when we are following the story in more than one book. As an example, let’s take Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games.
Katniss has a flat character arc at first, in the first and second book of the trilogy. She starts out with her view of the world, she knows the truth about the Capitol, and the more she gets involved in President Snow’s puppetry act, the more her beliefs of that truth are reinforced. The Katniss we see entering the arena in Catching Fire is, essence-wise, the same we see entering the arena for the first time in The Hunger Games. The Capitol even uses her steadfast personality against her in the arena.
But then, by the end of Catching Fire and throughout the Mockingjay, her views start to change, and her beliefs begin to shatter. Her arc, thus, become a Disillusionment Arc. The catalyst moment, for me, is when the bomb falls and kills her sister right in front of her and then she learns it wasn’t the Capitol who dropped those bombs. Until then, she still had that hope that by eliminating the Capitol, everything would be fine, the evil would vanish and they’d be set free. When she learns it was her own side who did such atrocity is when she learns the devastating truth that the horrors will never stop even if the Capitol is taken out.
Though her arc follows most of the standard disillusionment arc, the end of it is different, because instead of her being all depressed and giving up hope, She. Fights. Back.
The Disillusionment Arc here then transforms into a Growth Arc. She has this moment of glow, fighting back and acting on the shattering truth after becoming pessimistic for a good while, but only to fall back to her flat character arc. Pick up Katniss from the first chapter in The Hunger Games and Katniss from the last chapter of the Mockingjay —they are the same.
Another possibility is having a character who has a Corruption Arc in one book or in one part of the book, then having a Redemption Arc in the next book or part of the book.
The key takeaway for writing multiple arcs for the same character is knowing when to change it. For Katniss that works because the thematics of the third book is vastly different from the previous two. If the themes are the same, then what is the new challenge this character will have to face that will make them go through a different arc?
Conclusion
Look at your own characters. Is the story changing them, or are they changing the story? Do they fit any of the arcs mentioned here?
And if you’re worried your character’s journey feels a bit 'flat' when it should be 'transformational,' or too 'transformational' when you wanted it to be 'flat', that is exactly what a Developmental Edit is for. Just check out my services above if you want my professional eye on your character’s arc.
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