How to link characters and plot
It’s been a weird week in the world, with lots of static and noise—try to block it out and stay focused on your stories, your words. If you need a distraction, take a dip into a world you don’t know about. Maybe birds or McMansions. And then get back to work.
That’s what I’m doing this week as we continue our discussion of characters. In my previous post about characters, I said that novelists (that’s you!) show us how it feels to be alive by giving us access to their characters’ experiences. And not just any experience—readers want to see characters navigating pivotal experiences, turning points.
The key thing to remember is that, in order to be effective, these turning points need to be both external and internal. I work with a lot of novelists who have nailed one aspect and neglected the other. Sometimes they’ve built a dramatic plot with a grand showstopper of a climax, but it feels artificial and flat because we don’t believe in or care about the protagonist. Sometimes they’ve taken us deep inside a character’s mind, body, and soul, but the portrayal is static—we don’t get to see this richly drawn character navigating a turning point in the external world.
So let’s add to our hypothesis: Novelists show us how it feels to be alive by showing us a character’s internal and external experiences as they navigate turning points. The most satisfying stories are those in which there is a tight logical relationship between the internal and the external stories. Harry Potter prevents Voldemort from getting the Sorcerer’s Stone, but to do so he must trust in the love and support of others. Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy, but first she must admit that her judgment of many of her fellow humans has been flawed and naive.
One of the earliest steps of your revision process should be to think through the relationship between your protagonist’s character arc and your novel’s plot arc to see if they are as tightly aligned as they could be. Here are some questions that will get you started:
What does your protagonist want, and how does this conflict with what they currently have?
Does your protagonist even need the thing they want? Or want the thing they need?
What personal flaws or unresolved emotional baggage are holding the protagonist back from achieving what they want?
What person/event/entity is standing in the way of what your protagonist wants?
Over the course of the novel, you want to create an arc for your protagonist which gradually works through these challenges and shows them moving from point A (weakness, lack, unrealized goals) to point B (strength, fulfillment, realized goals) by the end of the novel through confronting and resolving their conflicts and experiencing personal change and growth. John Truby, whose book The Anatomy of Story I highly recommend, has a nifty little formula that I think encapsulates this quite well:
Weakness x Action = Change
The weakness is internal, the action is external, and the change is both internal and external.
Now, there are some exceptions to this arc-ing business, and I’ll talk about those next week, as well as how to handle character arcs in series.
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