《How to Write Stories People Will Love》23. Give Your Character a Journey
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Most writers have no problems giving their characters quests, but what I mean when I say "journey" is the emotional kind. Before I delve deeper, there are exceptions. If you write action and adventure, then the focus is on the action and adventure, not really the character. Stories like Jack Reacher won't have much character development because it's all about the thick plot.
My favorite kinds of stories involve characters who start off one way, then through self-discovery, embrace a better version of themselves by the end of the story. This is their character arc. Sometimes planning a story can follow the character arc, especially in contemporary romance and young adult. Even a lot of action movies try to squeeze in a small character arc. (For example, a stone cold mercenary learns to care about something and fights for a cause.)
If you Google "character arc", you'll find tons of information. My favorite interpretation is this: Each person carries an Identity and an Essence. Identity is how you see yourself, and Essence is who you really are inside. If you are lucky, they are the same thing. But most of us aren't that lucky, and therein lies the conflict.
A few examples: Greg is pretty smart, but his parents called him a loser all his life, so he thinks he's a loser. Marsha thinks her life is perfect, but deep down she's growing more and more disgruntled at work. Chris's self-doubt and anxiety prevents him from embracing his full potential as a talented writer.
You may have seen various ways to structure a story plot. Most of them involve three primary "acts". In a character arc, they perform the following roles:
Introduce protagonist(s) and create empathy. They start out fully in their Identity, but throughout this Act, they'll face an opportunity and the reader will glimpse their Essence.
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The character wavers between their Identity and their Essence.
Character fully returns to their Essence, faces the climax, and lives their life transformed.
The explanation of the three acts were borrowed from Jami Gold's "Six-Stage Plot Structure Beat Sheet". (I've added an external link to the page.) There are tons of different beat sheets you can use to plan out your story. The trick is to find one that suits your style. This one suited me more than most, although I still have lots of trouble filling it out before actually writing.
By planning your plot around the character's emotional journey, your story has direction. And when you have direction, you are less likely to meander or encounter the dreaded writer's block. It takes practice to master the beat sheet. I still haven't mastered it myself, so give yourself time to get your brain used to being structured a bit. I love writing by the seat of my pants, but discovering the character arc has helped me tremendously because I am less often lost.
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Sarsaparilla's Scary Super Power. Completed
Sarsaparilla is an older teenage girl living on Mars. And, like many other young people around her, she has a super power. Or, rather, she is supposed to have a super power. Only she has never been able to activate it, she doesn’t even know what her super power is. This annoys her, tremendously. But she hides this behind a really sweet smile. Adalace is another teenage girl, also on Mars. She knows what her own super power is, and it is quite a good one. She is also really cute… so long has she keeps her feelings under control and doesn’t let out anything from her dark past. Teylon is a man, currently living on Earth. He likes to think of himself as still young, even if he is over fifty. He’s a bit smug about his successful career and is thinking of retiring… until a sadly unfortunate event leads him to the conclusion that he had better immigrate to Mars. Immediately. Apparently, meeting one’s own Angel of Death tends to cause people to make profound changes to their lives… Mars society had better brace itself, because once these three people, plus another three also not so quite stable individuals, collide with each other, the resulting explosion is not going to leave anyone on Mars unaffected. This is another Esmeralda, the Angel of Death, story. It follows on from my previous two such stories, but it is in no way dependent on the previous stories. They can be read in any order. It is fully written and proof read (using Word for Windows, no real editor touched this transcript) and comes to about 247,000 words (about 895 Royal Road pages). It is organized into 50 chapters and I will be publishing them roughly one per day. In my writing, there are multiple characters and multiple points of view. Each change in a point of view is introduced by a header, giving the viewpoint character’s name first, and possibly a title. Inside a Point of View section, dialog in italics represents the Point of View character’s thoughts, while dialog between quotes represent normal spoken dialog. This story is very much inspired by the anime A Certain Scientific Railgun. However I have only taken some elements from the anime, and changed everything I took to make my own story, and so it does not count as fanfiction. Yeah, I know, the book cover page isn’t very good. It’s the best I could do, by tracing over a stock image. The two ladies shown are supposed to be Adalace and Sarsaparilla. Ideally I would have liked there to be two images of this pair, one where they are smiling sweetly and looking cute, and one where they are looking really angry and dangerous. But that totally exceeds my graphics abilities. You will just have to imagine it.
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I am Nine. Here, I will give you a world grown with more love and hope than ours was. Maybe things will be better. [No longer under 4.5k word minimum; I need to write what I feel like writing. I'm sick and not employed lol.] [ Image Copyrights go to Shionty~] [ Prologue will be rewritten to better include pre-game terms. Consider this entire story to be a concept regurgitation. ]
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