Seven ways to show character growth
The best novels offer a strong storyline coupled with a strong character arc. A character arc is nothing more than the inner process by which a character becomes a better person. When the events in a storyline, coupled with how a character reacts to them, cause the character to become in some way a more mature person, that’s a character arc.
Readers love character arcs because when the storyline is over, the character’s final moments of personal growth leave the reader with the feeling that the story had a higher purpose to it. That it wasn’t just a fun adventure romp, spy thriller, or whatever. You leave the reader with the feeling that the book meant something.
Writers love them, too, because threading a strong character arc into your storyline is a wonderful way to add a layer of complexity and interest to a story. A strong character arc can be the difference between rejections that say “good, but not right for me” and “I would like to represent this book.”
Seven strategies to create a strong character arc
Gain direction, motivation, drive, or ambition. Take a character from being a boring lump with an unfocused, undirected life, and fix that. Give the character a goal, a raison d’etre, something to get him out of bed in the morning.
Get active. Take a character who from being a passive pushover, and let her start taking charge of her own life. Show her making decisions, making plans, and by all means, taking actions.
Shake up the old, boring routine. Show the character working free of a familiar and confining—if comfortable—routine life. Show him trying new things and embracing the world. Let him travel, see the world, and make new friends. Hint: if your storyline already involves travel, build the arc the other way around by saddling the character with a hum-drum routine of a life at the beginning of the book.
Expand your mind. Let the character learn something. Show her finding a new interest, pursuing it with joyful zeal. Should she self-study or go back to school? Stay in her garage and experiment, inventing something? Who knows, but if you can tie her chosen interest to the rest of your storyline, you’re golden.
Lose the ego. Start with a very me-focused character, and let him start to think about other people. Make him shut up about himself for a change. This can be a very effective arc strategy for stories that involve the “haves” getting involved in the lives of the “have-nots.”
Limber up. Mentally speaking, that is. Take a character who is rigid in her viewpoints and force her to loosen up. Let her begin to consider new evidence, to challenge her own assumptions. Let her fail a few times early on because she assumed she was right when she wasn’t, and from that, learn a lesson in humility: after all, you’re not always as right as you think you are. Don’t forget to let this new-found self-skepticism save her from a critical mistake or lead her towards a critical victory later, when the stakes are highest.
Refocus on the basics. A well-worn technique (well-worn because it’s effective) is to show a character’s disorganized, chaotic inner life by means of a slovenly, unkempt, unhealthy outer life. These are characters who are overweight, who drink and smoke, whose apartments haven’t been vacuumed since the Reagan administration, and who are failing to take decent care of themselves. They’re ignoring their responsibilities at the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. For them, you can reflect inner growth by showing them taking a new-found interest in their physical needs. Let them start to eat right, exercise, and occasionally even iron their laundry.
Every one of these strategies involves meaningful change somewhere in the character’s life. Some are changes in attitude, some in behavior, some in outlook or priorities. These are all inner changes, substantive ones that affect a character’s personality. It’s more than just changing your wardrobe. Character arcs are always deep changes that must be reflected in the surface levels of a character’s actions.
Note, this is another application of the famous Show, don’t Tell rule: The surface actions you tell the reader about are what show the character’s underlying growth.
Oh, and one final note. Are you planning a series and wondering how to manage a multi-book character arc? Why not start with a deeply flawed but loveable character, and in each volume let the storyline lead the character to growth in one of the above areas. There’s your seven-book saga, right there.
May 14, 2010 21:31 UTC
12 Comments:
Posted by Jessica Brown on May 15, 2010 00:43 UTC
Great post Jason! I love your blog. Keep it up.
Posted by Randolph Lalonde on May 15, 2010 00:58 UTC
Great post. I can’t think of an example of character growth that isn’t a sub-category of the seven you mentioned above.
Using variants and combinations of the advancements you have listed here you can move character development along for a good long time.
One variant I enjoy is using models of contrast. Having one character start improving as another spirals downward. Lots of fun, and a great source of tension if your improving character happens to be trying to save the failing one.
Great post.
Posted by Jason Black on May 15, 2010 02:39 UTC
@Randolph Lalonde
One variant I enjoy is using models of contrast. Having one character start improving as another spirals downward.
Yes! Excellent suggestion. That turns 7 possibilities into 14, per character, for 196 character-pair combinations. Enough to keep you writing for a lifetime!
What? Me, a math geek? Why do you ask?
Posted by Lexi Revellian on May 15, 2010 11:48 UTC
Ah yes.
Who can forget the mousy heroine of Rebecca saying to Mrs Danvers, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!’
Posted by Arvael O'Tierney on May 15, 2010 13:36 UTC
Great post! It’s very inspiring & thought-provocative. Thank you for sharing it!
Posted by Emily Casey on May 18, 2010 15:31 UTC
This is great. I recently reworked the physics of my UF world in order to make my characters work harder for their happily ever after. Before, the main character just learned from some expert what she needed to do and she did it. Now, she uses her own cleverness to figure out a solution, based on what she learned (on her own) earlier in the story.
My biggest problem now is showing her emotional growth more gradually. I have two scenes where she has epiphanies (she sees other characters move through similar or worse situations) and then just decides she can do it too. Any suggestions on how to make her progress her own? How can she move past her issues in small steps, rather than simply making a decision to think differently?
Posted by Jason Black on May 18, 2010 18:14 UTC
@Emily Casey
Any suggestions on how to make her progress her own?
Of course! :) Look at it this way: smart people learn from their mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others. When your MC sees others moving through worse situations and chooses not to make the same mistakes, she is being wise.
Ok, but has she been smart first? That is, before we see her doing that, have we seen her learning from her own failings?
And before that, have we seen her being dumb? That is, not learning from her mistakes?
I’d refer you back to the five stages of grief and see if you can work with that model, because it all starts with denial, denial that she has a problem. You might work it like this: she starts with a problem that readers can see, but she can’t see, and that is blocking her from achieving her goals. Here, she’s not so much in denial as she is simply oblivious. She needs something to wake her up to the existence of the problem.
For that, you can let her observe the same or similar problems in other people. “Oh, too bad for them,” she will say, “I’m so glad I don’t have that problem!” There’s your denial.
But of course she does have that problem, and it will cause her to experience some unpleasant failures along the way. Will she then get smart and learn from them? In the end, yes, but perhaps not right away. She may have to fail several times. Kind of like this:
Fail, and wonder why.
Fail, and understand why.
See the same situation coming, but still fail anyway.
See the same situation coming again, and this time, catch herself soon enough to behave differently than she has before.
There’s a journey involved in going from being unaware that you have a problem to having fully conquered the problem so you don’t have it anymore. Break that journey down into whatever smaller steps make sense for your story, and show a little bit of growth at each one.
Thanks for the question. I think I will put this on my list of topics to blog about.
Posted by Emily Casey on May 19, 2010 00:53 UTC
Wow. Thank you so much! This is good stuff. (Now back to editing.)
Posted by Daniel on February 02, 2011 11:52 UTC
Great advice.
Though I have to wonder ‘how it fits’ with genre fiction...
Posted by Jason Black on February 02, 2011 18:06 UTC
@Daniel—
I think it fits with genre fiction just fine. Truth be told, I don’t think there is much value in the whole concept of genre to begin with. When you really look at them, most stories fit the definitions of multiple genres. Is it a western, or is it a love story? Well, it’s both. Is it a fantasy novel, or is it a political intrigue? Well, it’s both.
We’ve all read books like that, and once you start looking, everything turns out to be like that and the false-walls between genres start tumbling down. Look at a book like The Time Traveller’s Wife; it’s sci-fi, sure, because there’s a guy who can time travel. It’s clearly romance, in as much as the storyline itself revolves around the relationship between the two main characters along the course of their respective lives. And it’s clearly literary, having been written to a very high standard of both writing craft and character development.
So what genre is it? My answer is “who cares? How does it matter?”
As to your question of how the advice in this article, then, fits with genre fiction I say it applies to everything. Fundamentally, stories are about people, doing things, having adventures, solving problems, saving the world, et cetera. Having experiences. Inevitably, if the writer is taking seriously the business of rendering realistic characters, these people are changed in some way by those experiences. One of the ways people change is to grow, in classic character arc terms, which is what this article is about.
Don’t worry about genre. Write the story you want to write, and let your agent and publisher argue about where to put it in the bookstore. You just concentrate on writing the best possible story you can, with the best possible characters you can create. Which, you know, is kind of what this whole blog is about. :)
Posted by Traci Kenworth on February 23, 2011 15:34 UTC
It is very important to have flawed characters, like you said. They make our story not only more interesting but breath life into it. I hadn’t thought of making a character “grow” through the sequels though, that is a fantastic idea and one I’m sure to follow in the future!!
Posted by Anna Staniszewski on May 15, 2010 00:10 UTC
Excellent post! The multi-book story arcs are especially tricky to get right, but it’s so exciting when they work.