Introduction
Dear reader, we need to cook.
I’ve written about characters before, and I’ve written about plots at quite some length.
The word of the day is arc, that progression of a character from nascent beginnings to some more realized form. But need I say any more after pointing you at those posts? Does an arc not simply turn in the same fashion as any other plot, only with character traits as one of its gears?
To me, plots are a chain of logic concluding in an answer to a question. Can the protagonist achieve their goal? By what means, at what cost, with what aftermath?
Months ago, I had a very simple thought that struck me as oddly profound. Not because it was, but only because I was just so deep in a plot-writing rut at the time. I had drawn so many story circles and act structures, all focused on the controlled build up and tear down of setpieces and dramatic actions, and it took years for me to consciously consider simply turning that inside out — deliberately structuring a plot around a climatic change inside the characters’ own heart.
All of this is to say, today I want to write about arcs because I think I’ve severely neglected the art of developing actual characters rather than mere plots. But what is the difference? Haven’t I said that “characters don’t exist, only actions”? (I no longer believe this, but that will have to wait for another post.)
Here’s my take: stories may be about answering questions, but a plot is telling how the answer to a question like “could this character take this action?” changes from “no” to “yes” (or the opposite), but an arc is telling how the answer to a question like “would this character take this action?” changes.
A plot deals with possibility and causality, an arc deals with inclination and motivation. It’s easy to see how you could have a purely plot focused story (a character wants to save the day from the start, and just needs to overcome outside impediment), or completely character focused tale (the character could have sequence-broken right to the conclusion from page one, they just didn’t want to).
One might wonder whether me getting to the point of this essay is a matter of plot or character.
Linear Chains
I still haven’t really motivated this blogpost. Hell, not only does the quasi-hero’s journey structure of my “metadevelopment” refuse to privilege inner or outer changes, the framing downright encourages every plot to incite parallel character transformation. And yet as time goes on, I’ve grown ever more embarrassed of that post, near the point of outright hating it.
The problem with story circles, and hero’s journeys, and every analysis that breaks stories down into a series of general step-by-step beats is that stories aren’t shaped this way.
I only need to spend so long justifying this — read Temporarily Embarrassed Drafts if you want to see a (inadvertent!) real time demonstration — because anyone who’s actually tried to write stories like this will feel it.
They might not believe it, though; I’d almost call it a confidence trick. The marks select themselves: if you don’t believe in story structures, you won’t use them, but if you do, then once you give it a try and notice all of the contortions and blank spots, you’ll assume that means you aren’t doing it right, or interpret the model in a vague, unfalsifiable manner of horoscopes, or wave it all off as if it’s just a matter of writing itself being hard — because the model itself obviously makes sense.
This doesn’t mean only fools use these models — I still swear by them; and, while the outlining essay (accidentally) demonstrates the limitations, I literally created one of my favorite WIPs starting with one.
But here’s what I notice, when I try to use them. When you sketch out a story as a circle, you can make a good one page summary. But so many people insist that it goes fractal, functions recursively. Like circles nesting within circles, they say scenes, chapters, arcs, books, sagas can all be mapped out with the same structure.
Stories are too interconnected; things halfway into the structure will need to be set up and should be already influencing the story three steps before they’re “supposed” to be focused on. There will be subplots that diverge and then fold back into each other.
Now, I’ve long ago realized this and have tried to salvage the concept, likening the steps instead to the notes of a scale that can be played in any order but with a nevertheless definite structure; or like sentences, which can be rearranged in complicated yet rule-bound ways (and are never quite perfectly recursive).
But at a certain point, it’s like adding epicycles to insist the sun can still revolve around the earth — it’s cope. A truly flexible model of story can’t force things into a single linear mold; stories start in different places and go in different orders. The only way to apply the same linear steps to every story is to make them so vague you could put that frame around anything.
It’s what I once did, but I’ve developed since then.
The Alchemy of Arcs
If we want to describe how characters develop, we need a sense of what they are. Now, I’m doing things a bit out of order here; I have a whole essay still in the works (look out for “Literary Figure Models”) which exposits my model for describing characters. But honestly, an exhaustive model is too cumbersome to move flexibly, and arcs are all about motion.
So let’s get by with something simpler here. An arc is a transformation of traits. A character rises from cowardly to brave, or has their practicality harden into ruthlessness, or broadens their concern for their loved ones to altruism for anyone in need.
But characters are actions, still, so it’s sharp and atomic to pin these vague traits down to specific choices. A character goes from fleeing one battle to standing to fight in another, or once believed in lines they’d never cross, or finally does something for others at the expense of their own family.
If you don’t yet (or refuse to) have a whole story mapped out, you can instead view these as what ifs. You can imagine them as being the sort of person to do this or that in a made-up hypothetical scenario. Indeed, it’s probably clearest as all to see arcs as acting on the impulse to take a certain action, nudging one inclination into another.
How do we find the missing link between the start and the end? Do we just write a series of scenes where one character acts braver and braver until they’re purged of all cowardice? Do they cross their lines one by one? Somehow, it feels a bit flat, kinda uncompelling.
I want to borrow a couple of concepts from alchemy — it’s the metaphor that inspired this whole post, truth be told. When it comes to transmutation, you have sulphur (that which is burned away), mercury (that which is to be transformed), and salt (that which is immutable).
Those names are a bit esoteric, and I’ve considered others (how about skin to be shed; muscles to strain and grow and atrophy; and backbone to hold it all together?) But I love vacuous writing guru-speak, so let’s give them nice and clean-sounding names.
A character has limitations holding them back from their potential and an essence that persists once they achieve a realization.
Limitations might be flaws and inhibition, but they might also be a scrupulous morality. What matters is that they answer the question: “why don’t they simply complete their arc right now?” Removing, negating, or simply loosening the limitation frees them to move toward realization, letting the seeds of potential blossom into a flower, be it fragrant or poisonous. And essence is what keeps the character recognizable. (Despite everything, it’s still them.)
What I find noteworthy about this model is that it’s almost exhaustive. Logically, if you’re going to operate on a character, there are exactly four things you can do: leave a trait unchanged (essence), remove traits (limitations), change traits (potential), or add traits. So where’s that last term in the question?
You could add it, if you really want to, but I think you shouldn’t and don’t need to. Ultimately, aesthetically, I find a satisfying character arc bears a certain kind of inevitability. There’s no tricks or contingency or deus ex machina, not if a character contains their future self within them like a little homunculus.
Still, what determines which is which? On a long enough timeline, won’t every essence warp like potential? Is not every potential a limitation to wither away with the ultimate realization — death? Trivial observations, but still, if a limitation is negated, how is that really different from a mutation of potential? Is this distinction without a difference?
It’s true: everything’s the same when you’re just looking at the character. What needs to be added to breathe life into these labels is context and circumstance — or even just the author’s intent. Specifically, what makes an arc different from a random walk through character space is the presence of an attractor.
If the character has unresolved issues, if there’s a villain threatening to blow up the town, if there’s a better place to be somebody else, then there’s an attractor. Limitations lead away or hold you back from the attractor, potential is what points or can be pointed toward it; essence is what’s compatible here or there.
For all the whining about linear structures, have I not invented another?
- Essence
- Potential
- Limitation
- Negation
- Realization
- Attractor
It even looks just like a story circle.
But no. Not at all. It’s about to get much more complicated.
Failed Opus #1
I said alchemy inspired this post, and that runs deeper than the mere idea of sulphur, mercury & salt. In fact, I stumbled upon those three later; the real thing that caught my eye for the great work, the production of the philosopher’s stone.
Many have broken the process of spiritual transmutation down into a number of steps and you can find a lot of articles talking about how to apply this to character arcs. (They are largely not worth bothering with, IMO; it’s sifting through pure rubbish, but that might just be google’s enshittification hiding good ones.)
Nobody agrees on how many steps there are to the great work, because alchemists are all making this shit up, but seven steps are pretty common.
- Calcination: to burn a substance into ashes. A character is harrowed, tested and found wanting, reduced to desperation. False beliefs and unnecessary attachments are broken down.
- Dissolution: to immerse a substance in a liquid. A character becomes fluid, perhaps swept up in something greater. Emotions are released to flow free, rampant and uncontrolled.
- Separation: to filter a substance. A character choses what thoughts and emotions to hold on to or discard, perhaps individuates themselves from a collective. Unsteady steps are taken toward a new perspective
- Conjunction: to unite a substance with another. A character integrates disparate feelings to construct a new identity, pieces click together, a marriage of opposites. The way forward is finally witnessed.
- Fermentation: to allow a substance to rot and grow. A character flexes and grows accustomed to their new role, breathing life into what once was affectation. The great labor begins to bear fruit.
- Distillation: to condense and purify a substance. A character defines their highest ambition, and pares away what’s unnecessary, elevating themselves further beyond. They have everything they need, and stand on the knife edge of rising or falling.
- Coagulation: to solidify a substance into a stable form. A character realizes their potential, matures, heals their wounds. And the great work is complete.
Now, the vibes here are fantastic. Who doesn’t want to style their narrative shape rotations as if you’re a bearded hermit probing the esoteric secrets of the world?
When I had my first conceptual brush with “the seven operations of alchemy”, I was thinking they’d be these distinct, atomic operations you could mix and match like a chemist in a lab. What if you could Calcinate, then Conjunct, then Dissolve then Calcinate again? What sort of story would that feel like?
And, there is… something to that; you can argue the protagonist of my short story “A Heart to Judge” undergoes an arc that begins with a fermentation only to be brutally calcined then separated before achieving a final dissolution.
But what disappointed me is that, if you try, you’ll first of all find that these ideas are as vague as the worst sort of story structures, and more than that: this is exactly where we started! This process just echoes the hero’s journey. With fewer steps, granted, but you can feel how these steps are meant to be followed in a linear sequence: the very chains we seek to break.
Now, I’m not the only one who walked down this path of thought. In my searching, I’ve encountered a single good post about alchemy as a character writing tool: Paracelsus, Alchemy, and Character Development an old post by Gord Sellar, a writer and musician with a decade of archived posts I’m tempted to pursue. They created this lovely image that definitely fires up my imagination:
They even share my intuition that the goal shouldn’t be to hit every beat in a single story.
But in the end, I couldn’t wrap my head around this in a practical way. So for a while, my thoughts fizzled out here at a dead end. It was a tempting proposition, but I couldn’t think of a way to arrange these pieces in the same elegant logic I strive for in all my models.
So let’s forget about alchemy, and take this from first principles.
The Character Cookbook
Imagine you have a ball in a great sandy expanse. Maybe it’s windswept or a playpit in a park, endlessly dug out and littered with ruined sandcastles. What matters is that it is uneven. You kick the ball, and where does it land? In a hole somewhere, that’s just gravity. But suppose you wanted to play a sort of golf, land it in a particular hole. If the landscape is so precarious, you’d need many calculated swings, weaving around the wrong holes, skirting around rocks and sticks, using hills for sick curve shots.
I’m setting up a metaphor you can complete yourself. You know what the attractor and limitations in this analogy are. What it illustrates, though, is the twists and convolutions involved. Arcs, as you all know, turn. Maybe from a distance, it looks like cowardice turning to bravery when fear is removed, but ‘cowardice’ isn’t a single impulse, nor ‘fear’ a single inhibitor.
Perhaps there’s a collection of fear-ish things that get peeled away one by one, perhaps there’s levels of confidence between pure cowardice and headstrong bravery, contextualized and conditional. But this is still linear thinking. If the fear is gone, why wouldn’t their cowardice not mutate into something similar, latching onto a different motivation? There’s nothing stopping potential from yielding more limitations on the road to realization.
You can kind of do anything, here. Maybe you’re starting to see the appeal to linear models; it’s certainly more manageable than this dizzying multiplicity. But if we think categorically, we can divide and conquer.
Suppose a character has taken on a step on their arc. How do we measure what’s different?
Has their potential mutated? Did these changes bring them closer or farther from the realization? Does it leave them more aligned or crooked?
Have their limitations, the reasons blocking them from realization, decreased or increased? Has this step purified or contaminated them?
// FIXME: these first two are kind of the same in practice
The next two are interesting ones, because they are character-relative, and require no attractor.
What does their potential as a whole look like — have their old traits yielded new impulses and desires, split in two diverging directions, or have they united different aspects into a unified theory, subordinated one desire to another? Have they liquified or crystalized?
How does their altered potential relate back to the rest of themselves? Have they overcome an inconsistency and become more coherent, or are they fraying and breaking from their patterns? Is it harmonizing or dissonant?
How strong is their inclination, how profound of an action would it drive them towards? Have they grown more ardent and passionate in its pursuit, or has their flame guttered, if not been snuffed out entirely? Is it intensifying or diminishing?
Direction, complexity, coherence, intensity.
Let’s sketch out some examples, because the abstractions might be difficult to parse.
Imagine we have a good old sword and sorcery fantasy adventure. Our protagonist hitches a ride with some merchants through the countryside. Everything is in order until bandits drop down from the trees, weapons brandished, threats and demands flung free. Maybe the merchants’ guards fight the thieves, and so the protagonist joins in. Then the hand of one bandit starts glowing with magic, and our heroine pales and flees on the spot, leaving the guards to die and merchants to go broke.
Pretty clean demonstration of limitation and potential there. Here’s the question: how do we develop this?
Imagine she camps out in the woods overnight, then, driven by a guilty conscience, returns to the scene of the attack, finding bodies just left on the side of the road. Confronted with the consequences of her cowardice, she vows to do better.
Another possibility: she keeps running, and later on, encounters a boy being chased by a big, snarling dog. Maybe it spooks her, too, but it’s just a dog, so she intercepts it, and scares it off, saving the boy from getting mauled. The boy thanks her, and she feels a swell of pride.
These are workable instances of purification. How would we contaminate her? What if she keeps going to the next town, and meets the caravan there, only to discover that the guards took on the bandits just fine without her, so it wasn’t really a big deal that she ran out? What if the bandits were actually slavers, and the guards and merchants are being auctioned off, and that could have been her if she hadn’t ran? (Perhaps it’s a story about her eventually growing courageous enough to fight slavers.)
Let’s continue with the route where she saves a boy. Suppose she follows the boy back to his village, and hangs around for a bit. They keep interacting, a relationship budding. Maybe the boy does odd jobs around town for anyone who asks, and one day a mage passes through, and the boy’s gonna go ask what they need, and the girl finds herself urging him to be wary and stay away. Fear of the spell earlier has begot fear for the boy’s safety.
Relationships are the most straightforward way to draw forth complexity and tie new threads into a character, and