Idea Garage Sale: Who Are You?

What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Who were you before that?

Who are you now?

How did that transformation happen?

You don't have to tell me (I'm certainly not going to tell you mine!), but you should tell yourself. Because that's your character arc. If you don't understand your own, how can you be sure you understand those of your characters? And you're already using it anyway, just as you use everything in your life when writing because your life is the handiest mine of material.

I don't know why the elements of a story are called arcs. I should try to find out. When I use the term in presentations I spontaneously delineate a curved line in the air with my finger, and I tend to think of them as structural arches holding the story up, but I don't know how the term originates.

Character arcs aren't absolutely necessary for telling a good story, but most modern fiction includes them, or pretends to, as a matter of course. It's one of the artistic problems that serial fiction has - writers and audiences feel incomplete if there's no character arc, so the writers of superhero comics, sitcoms, cartoons, and soap operas write stories involving them - but the series bible doesn't change, so the next episode puts the character right back where he was before the life-changing events of the story. Wise artists in serial formats accept this and use it to reinforce the character - Charlie Brown has learned the hard way not to trust Lucy, but he can never resist making another try for that football, and each annual football event through the run of Peanuts revolved around his increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics in overcoming the lessons learned in past football seasons. If he ever held true to his intention of not kicking the football this time, he'd grow up too much to be Charlie Brown any more.

So you need to make your peace with character arcs - you'll be writing them, or writing around them, for your entire career. And the fact is, you're probably going to be writing around your own for the duration, too.

By tradition, the first novel is expected to be autobiographical, and a lot of writers never get past it. They have one story to tell and then they stop; or they think of new ways to tell the same story, in different kinds of fancy dress. Which may be artistically sterile, or may drive an increasing richness and subtlety of imagination. That's up to you.

You have more than one character arc in your life, though. The worst thing that ever happens to you may not have happened yet, and isn't that a cheery thought? But in addition to that - your character arcs intersect with those of everyone around you. One reason I'm not telling you mine is that it's inextricably bound up with that of my husband and I'm not discussing the details of my marriage with the entire internet. So when you examine your own character arc, ask yourself about those of the other people in your life. Odds are good that the time you got hit by a car was the start of the driver's character arc, too; your divorce had a profound effect on the life trajectories of your children; the bully you learned to walk away from needs a character arc if she's not to be stuck in bully mode for the rest of her life. And those character arcs are a part of you, too.

Where does that take you?

And if you're thinking that all this is too much, your character arc hurts too much for artistic treatment, go read some Nancy Werlin. I don't care what your character arc is, it does not hurt more than hers, and she's been dealing with that for several books now.