What is your character’s pathological maneuver?
My writing and editing garret has had an extra resident for the past two weeks because my partner was required to self-quarantine at home after a business trip to Korea. Luckily, he’s fine and is now in the clear. I was thinking today about what a bad story it all makes: guy has a higher but still very low chance of having been infected by a disease that would be unlikely to harm him or anyone in his immediate circle; he is asked to stay away from people for two weeks and does so; it’s no big deal because he didn’t have important plans and can work from home; he and his partner navigate sharing an office space just fine after one small spat about cliqhop music; he is fine; the end. [Note that this blog post was written just before the pandemic shut everything down in the US; I’m leaving it in its original form as a reminder to myself and others of just how little we understood, even as late as early March 2020.]
But if you are a storyteller (or an anxious person), look at all the possible knobs you can turn to make this into a great story. Maybe it’s ebola, not coronavirus. Maybe he’s got an immunocompromised family member. Maybe he has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to interview for his dream job during his quarantine period. Maybe he refuses to turn off the cliqhop and his partner’s brain explodes. You wouldn’t want to live this story, but you’d definitely want to read it.
These are all plot knobs that work by increasing the stakes—by making the outcomes more consequential or forcing the character into a best-bad-choice situation. They are all external, outward-directed. But remember that you have another important instrument panel: character development. What could this character confront and learn through the crucible of this situation?
In Write Away, the novelist Elizabeth George discusses what she calls the character’s “pathological maneuver.” It’s what the character does under stress, and it’s usually the flip side of their core need. As she points out, the “supreme stress” for a character is “having his efforts to meet his core need thwarted.”
Your goal as a writer is to construct your story machine so that there is a feedback loop between the plot knobs and the character triggers. Think of that pathological maneuver as a big red button that causes the whole system to go haywire. The resolution, then, is the point at which the system has found harmony and a new equilibrium.
Now, let’s talk about some exceptions to the general wisdom to give your characters a well-defined arc over the course of your novel. Does this apply to all novels and to all characters? How do you handle character arcs across a series? What about minor characters or villains?
There are certainly scenarios in which you might not want to build a classic development arc for your characters. Maybe you are writing literary fiction and you are trying out an alternate shape, like a spiral or an explosion. That’s fine, as long as the choice is deliberate and the shape is clear to the reader. (Read Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode for inspiration and guidance if this is your path.)
Another scenario in which you might want to avoid a dramatic character arc is in a long-running series that repeatedly puts your protagonist in similar but different scenarios—think of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels or Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series. In these cases, what works is incremental change and occasional forays into the character’s backstory. There might be an arc, but it’s much flatter.
The other choice for series novels is to give your protagonist a series of development arcs that build on one another. What is life like for your protagonist on the other side of the resolution? What fresh challenges and opportunities are there to explore?
In novels with multiple protagonists, you can also vary the shape of character arcs to good effect. There are a number of weaknesses in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (aka J. K. Rowling), but one of the strengths is the variation between Strike’s relatively flat character development across the series and Robin Ellacott’s more dynamic series of arcs.
As for supporting or oppositional characters, you’ll need to think about how they function in your novel. How do they intersect with your protagonist? Often it’s these characters who are pushing the protagonist’s psychological buttons or fiddling with the plot knobs inside the story world. You may not have enough space to give them full arcs, but I’d argue that you need to either make us believe that they are capable of change or you need to give them a core need that also explains their pathological maneuver.
Think about Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: she is the definition of a static character who accepts only the inevitable and incremental changes forced upon her by the passage of time. But she’s a compelling character because we know her history and thus understand her core need to wreak revenge. Like two-year-olds, readers always want to know why—and your job as a novelist is to deliver. This is part of what you signed up for when you volunteered to show us how it feels to be alive.
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