Craft a Compelling Character Arc

Writing interesting characters that grab your readers from page 1 and keep them riveted to your story is easier said than done. We all know it’s important and we’ve all probably gotten the feedback that your character ‘just wasn’t connecting’ or ‘felt flat, two dimensional’. 

Ugh, right? It could be entirely valid feedback—but what do you do with that? How do you solve it?

Frankly, when I started writing my novel, I figured I was halfway to home from the start. When someone asked me what my book was about, I’d say, “It’s about a female pirate in the 1700s…” and it didn’t really matter what I said after that. “Awesome! That’s so cool!” If I could sell everyone who said that a copy of my (still in progress) book, I’d have a guaranteed best-seller on my hands.

But folks who actually read my early pages—in workshops, my writing group, beta readers, and other wise writer friends—were not as excited. Did they like my protagonist? Sure. Were they rooting for her? Yep. But did they really care? Were they staying up late at night with my manuscript because they couldn’t wait to see what happened next? Nope.

Kerry, I can hear you say, couldn’t this be because nothing exciting was happening? Sure, theoretically, of course plot can be a problem. However, I can assure you my protagonist was not sitting around twiddling her thumbs. She was learning, loving, fighting, and keeping a big secret to boot.

So where was I going wrong?

As it turns out, I hadn’t applied some of the most basic lessons and principles—things I consistently coach my own writers on—to my own work. 

Remember, no one gets it 100% right the first time. (Or often the next X number of times after that.)

(We coaches often joke that the lessons that we’re sharing with our writers are the exact things that we also need to hear. We laugh because it is SO true and it can also make us feel like we’re less good at writing or coaching because of it. That second bit, not true! This is the reason editors and coaches exist. It is ridiculously hard to critique your own work.)

There is a lot that goes into making a powerful, compelling character who makes your readers feel all their feelings. Start by asking yourself the following questions.

At the beginning of the book:

What does your character want more than anything in the world?

I don’t mean a plate of nachos or some hot new shoes, no matter how hungry or poorly clad they may be. 

If they had a fairy godmother with an iron-clad confidentiality policy, what would they ask for? What would satisfy their soul on the deepest level?

Maybe they’re the kind of badass who knows exactly what they wants and how to ask for it. That’s amazing! But chances are, they’re actually afraid to say it out loud (hence that magical NDA). They might even be afraid to acknowledge it to themselves. 

Don’t let them keep it from you, though. You must know, because the desire for this thing is what drives them and guides their decision-making throughout the novel. Whether they know it or not, they’re either running towards it or away from it, and this push and pull drives your narrative.

The thing that can make this so hard, even though it seems obvious, is that you’re exposing your character’s greatest vulnerability. It’s tough stuff. Writers are often people with great empathy and diving into the heart of big, scary things is exactly that.

For example, my protagonist’s deepest desire was to be loved for who she is, for someone to see her true self and accept her. Simple, right? Ha!

Over the course of the book:

What stands in their way?

This question is two-fold, in that there will be external forces (the antagonist[s]) AND internal forces standing between them and their greatest desire.

The external is usually much easier to identify: the characters and events that keep throwing obstacles in front of your protagonist for them to overcome.

The internal is where a lot of the juiciness lives, however. Your protagonist is going to do an excellent job of stopping themself from getting what they want, because that’s what we humans do. We self-sabotage, doubt or mistrust ourselves or others, do the easy thing instead of the hard thing…because it’s easy. And of course, this creates problems and trials for us to overcome. Seeing your protagonist deal with these things is what makes us keep reading—we’re living vicariously through them. 

Much of this struggle is around a misbelief that your character is clinging to like a safety blanket. It might be irrational to an outsider, but to them, it makes perfect sense, based on their life experience. (Don’t forget, these experiences can and often do happen ‘off the page’ of your novel but they are no less important for you to understand.)

For example, my protagonist believes, based on some formative experiences, that she has to be someone else in order to be loved. This makes it pretty hard for her to be loved for who she is, doesn’t it? Her greatest desire clashes with her fundamental misbelief about herself and the world—and throughout the course of the novel, we get to walk with her while she navigates all of that and tries to overcome it.

In future posts, I’ll dig more into how you can ensure that you’re getting this across in every scene in the novel. Fundamentally, though, if you can identify in every scene and chapter that your protagonist is struggling in some way with their misbelief and their deepest desire, you’re doing great! If not, be brave in interrogating that part of the book. Is it really doing its job? How could you strengthen the ties back to these fundamental aspects of your character?

At the end:

How does your protagonist get what they want? 

The last thing you want is a reader to get to the end of your novel and throw it across the room in disgust because your ending wasn’t satisfying. By satisfying, I don’t necessarily mean happy—although depending on your genre and particular tropes within, that might be a near-requirement.

What I mean is that you’ve given the reader some resolution, a closed circle. Your character has conquered their misbelief and achieved their deepest desire.

There is still a world of possibility here—maybe getting what they thought was their deepest desire doesn’t satisfy them. Maybe they realize it’s not what they wanted after all. Maybe it came at a cost that they realize, too late, was too great to pay. Maybe this resolution has opened up a whole world of possibilities they couldn’t have imagined and we leave them pondering more questions than they started with.

All to say, there’s a lot of room for happy, sad, or even open-ended endings. (Ouch, sorry.) It is okay to leave your reader with something to imagine on their own.

What is not okay—what is going to make a reader curse you and throw the book across the room—is if you do not resolve the problem you created at the beginning of the book, which stems from the desire that drives the character from the get-go.

For example, my protagonist wants to be loved for herself and throughout the book, has struggled to overcome her misbelief that to be loved, she has to be someone else. Her problem is that she’s never going to get what she wants unless she changes. So she struggles and takes one step forward and two steps back and inches ever closer until—bam!—she figures it out.

Does it look like what she expected it would? Not at all! Has she solved all of her problems? Not even close. But that’s okay, because she’s solved this key thing and the reader can feel her own satisfaction and relief, how this fundamental part of herself and her life now makes sense to her. They feel it too. The pressure valve has been released.

If you struggle to answer these questions for your own work-in-progress, here are some things you can do:

• Pick up a favorite novel or a work that was successful in the genre in which you are writing. Answer these questions about the protagonist. Remember that these things are not often going to be stated directly in the narrative, but they should be very clear based on the character’s development.

• Step away from the events of your narrative and explore the life of your character ‘off-stage’. Think about the formative events that happened before we meet them at the start of the book. Write a scene about each. (Bonus: You’ve just generated some amazing potential back story!)

• Think about your protagonist like a three-year-old, which is to say, ask ‘why’, repeatedly. Keep peeling back the layers until you arrive at the core. Push through the discomfort!

Also, here are two highly recommended books for digging deep into character development and why it matters (backed up by neuroscience!) Wired for Story and Story Genius by Lisa Cron.

Remember, writing a novel is a process, not an event. It takes time, patience, and a whole lot of bravery and honesty to create a character that readers will not forget. You’ve got this!

If you want some help getting to the heart of your character and creating a satisfying arc, I have a few 1:1 coaching spots open this spring. Grab a free coaching discovery session and let’s chat!