However, you may have not put much consideration into character arcs while constructing your early drafts. Have no fear. Whether you paid attention to them or not, your character arcs are already starting to form. More often than not, like your story's emergent theme, traces of character arcs are already hiding inside your narrative, waiting to be identified and brought to the surface.
What follows is a technique I have developed to help you do just that.
Step 1
Look over your script scene-by-scene from the opening sequence to the inciting incident. On a sheet of notebook paper, list block-paragraph style each and every character trait that is communicated to the audience within those scenes. Include everything that the audience could possibly gather on your character, from superficial characterization, (such as “tall,” “smoker”, “dog lover”) to the deep, possibly hidden, impulses that influence the character's behavior, (such as “afraid to connect with people,” “resentful of the past,” “feels a need to be recognized”). Make sure you list only the traits that are physically present in the scene. Don't make the mistake of listing all the things that you, the creator think you KNOW about the character. You might know it, but that information may not exist on the page. Look at your scenes with an objective eye and list ONLY the traits the audience will be able to gather from the physical evidence on the screen.
You should wind up with something around an entire page filled with traits. If you don't have nearly a page, this is your first RED FLAG. You have not put enough effort into developing who this character is and what makes them unique to their particular world. Most likely this character will come off as flat, generic, hollow, boring. Go back and flush out this character until you know them as well as a best friend before moving on.
Step 2
Look through your list of traits. Some traits will be physical constants that cannot change (such as height, physical appearance). Some will be personality constants that do not change (such as your action hero's confidence, or your child hero's enthusiasm and curiosity). Most of these will be somewhat “positive” traits, traits your protagonist has at the beginning which serve him/her well, and thus remain unchanged through the end.
The traits we are looking for are personality traits that go through a significant change or a complete reversal during the progression of the story. These will most likely be “negative” traits that hold the character back at the beginning. As the story progresses, the character must eventually overcome these bad traits in order to reach his or her goal. (In less common cases, we find scripts that tell a “downward spiral” type story about a character who goes from virtuous to corrupt. In this case, the pattern is reversed).
Mark these traits with a highlighter. You will most likely have several synonyms that could be grouped together as the same trait. “Ashamed,” “regretful,” and “guilt ridden,” for instance, can be combined into a single group.
Out of your page-full of character traits, you should find anywhere between three to seven highlighted traits or groups of traits. If you don't have at least three, this is another RED FLAG. Most likely, it would seem that your character doesn't change throughout the course of your story and a character arc doesn't exist. You need to go back into your story and pay attention to this. No human being could possibly go through the life-changing events found in any feature script and not be forever changed. Another problem may be that you have failed to give your character any negative traits. You have instead decided to create a dull, bland, goody-goody character incapable of any of the faults or hang-ups we all possess ourselves. Audiences connect with flawed characters because they identify the character's problems with their own inadequacies. Any story experience is immeasurably enriched by a watching a flawed character reach their goals in their life by finding the courage to change for the better. This is one of cinema's greatest social functions: to teach us that success is possible if we are willing to become better people.
Step 3
List your highlighted traits or groups of traits on a second piece of paper, spaced evenly down the side. Then, draw an arrow across the page from each entry and write the opposite of that trait, the trait you wish your protagonist to embody by the end of the story. For example, if your protagonist starts out “valuing work over family,” the opposite of that trait would be “valuing family over everything.”
Now, on the five or six lines beneath each set of traits, briefly come up with the reason why the character possesses this negative trait. Delve into the psychology of the character. If you were a psychiatrist, what about this character's past life or present way of thinking could have caused their negative behavior? After you have done that, identify what in your story acts as the catalyst that forces your character to begin an internal transformation. It must be something active and real, something that physically occurs on the screen. Personalities, like physical objects, have inertia. Some form of actual force must exist to get the ball rolling in order for the character to overcome years of bad habits.
Step 4
If you are like me when I first tried this exercise, you will begin to see some sort of pattern forming in the answers you came up with in Step 3. Some variation on the same cause for your character's negative behaviors may start to come up in nearly every group of traits. Find this pattern. This will show the ROOT of your character's problem – to take a phrase from Robert McKee: your character's “starting value."
When analyzing my own script, I found that all my male protagonist's problems came from the fact that, although he is a moral person, he lacks the inner strength to do what was right. His change is initiated when he is forced to do something so bad that he must finally refuse and begins to fight back. His character arc is MORAL WEAKNESS to MORAL INTEGRITY. My female lead character is, at first, angry and spiteful towards people because past experiences had created a false set of beliefs about her world. Her change comes when actions by the protagonist cause her to questions those beliefs. Her character arc is IGNORANCE to WISDOM.
Find this pattern. State the starting value in one word or short phrase. Then find its opposite. This is your basic character arc.
If you do not find any pattern, or that your negative traits are created by radically different, even contradictory causes, this may be another RED FLAG. You may be trying to force character change in two or more directions at once. Take careful consideration if you find this is the case. If you have two separate arcs for the same character, with no direct relationship between them, you have have a two-headed monster for an arc that confuses character development and saps it of dramatic possibility. The potential dramatic power of each arc might just cancel the others out. Just as a writer should watch out for plot tangents that sap the narrative of its forward drive, a writer should look out for character tangents as well. Pick to strongest arc and drop the other, or find a way to create a connection between the disparate arcs so it will become part of a single, cohesive one.
Step 5
This step is not mandatory, but I find it creates a nice, easy-to-read guide to my characters that I can return to time and again during the revision process.
On the top of another piece of paper, write the basic character arc you discovered in Step 4, such as WEAKNESS to STRENGTH. Then, in a paragraph about a quarter-page long, summarize how your character's starting value (i.e. “weakness”) creates your character's negative traits (the traits you analyzed in Step 2). Then, describe how story events motivate change in your character until that character possesses the final positive value (i.e. “strength.”). This should create a quick encapsulation of your character's inner journey from the beginning of the story to its end.
Step 6
Now that we have a basic idea of our character arc, we can look into the script and find out how well the structure of that arc aligns with the structure of the plot.
Look over your plot and locate the events which act as the TURNING POINTS of your character's development-- events that affect your character on a personal level, triggering a change in thought or behavior. Mark these out on paper, labeling them TP1, TP2, TP3.... You should start to see some form of structure arising. Like the story arc, a protagonist's character arc will often have a 3-Act structure, with its major turning points closely coinciding with the plot's major turning points. If you find this is not in the case while performing this step, you should put some effort into massaging your moments of change into their most structurally-suitable places in your next revision.
Below each turning point, briefly describe how and why this plot event creates a change in your character, and how the character is different from this point onward. This will serve as a character guide when rewriting each section of the script.
Keep in mind that your characters are human beings, not light switches. They cannot abruptly change who they are based on a single, sudden event. It must be a slow, gradual process. A believable character arc has multiple moments of change; a gradual and slowly escalating wearing-down of bad habits. Old habits die hard, and like a lump of coal, a human being needs constant pressure to eventually turn into a diamond.
Some RED FLAGS to look out for: the first is the “light-switch moment” mentioned above: one single, big turning point where the character's behavior suddenly does a 180. This is never believable. You need to seek out multiple events to gradually change your character. Some people might point out Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol as a light-switch character. Maybe to the other characters in the story he seems that way, but if you look closer into the story you will see a slow gradual change in Scrooge's character from his first ghostly visit to his eventual epiphany.
Another problem is that you might not be able to find your character's turning points in your plot. In this case, you need to go back over the major events of your story and put more thought into what kind of effect these events might have on the mental, emotional, and physical state of your characters. Character reactions create opportunities for character change. You might also have to add new events for the sake of a character's development – but make sure these new events remain connected to the Story Spine and continue the advancement of the plot. Bringing the plot to a halt to shoehorn in a character arc moment not only kills momentum, but usually comes off as a contrivance the audience sees right through.
Step 7
REWRITE!
You now have a grasp on the arc of your character's change, along with a map of the moments which create it. Now all there is left to do is to go back into your script and make sure that these moments and the changes they create are communicated to the audience in a way that is clear, consistent, and natural.
Scribble on.
