Character Archery

I'm going places. On a train.

So, yes, that's me.

I know it's been a few days since I posted. Sorry about that. I've been writing.

And while I was writing and reading my books about how to write, I kept coming back to this question of character arcs. The books I read on novel-writing have a lot to say about the character arc. Generally, it begins in the first paragraph of the first chapter and ends in the last paragraph of the last chapter.

I don't agree with that line of thinking. It is my belief that if your character is 20 years old at the beginning of the book and 23 by the end of it, then their character arc begins 20 years before the first paragraph and about 70 years after the last paragraph (assuming they survive your ending). The rather startling idea that a writer should just think of a character in terms of what they personally write about them is rather naive, in my opinion. I pose that such thinking is akin to believing that when a friend leaves your house they cease to exist until the next time you see them. Your friends do not, as I'm sure you know, merely pop in and out of being as you will it. Neither do the characters of your novel.

Instead, they go on living, independent of your pen. My ole paw (grandfather) used to say that you can never truly know another person. I believe that extends to the characters of my story as well. They surprise me all the time. The things they say and do can be outright staggering. They constantly impress me with their fortitude, their sense of humor, their evil and their good. And it is a constant lesson in patience to try and understand why they go about in the world behaving as they do.

This is my struggle: to know the secrets of my characters, to know the regrets of their past and the hopes for their futures, to understand them and love them for who they are. They are people, like us. They wish and laugh and grieve and hate like us, in all the myriad and wonderful ways that we mortals do. I would not have it any other way.

In conclusion, the character arc, or the change in a character over the course of a story, is not the change in them over the novel we write. Rather it is the character's growth in their own story, the human story. Keep this in mind as you write: you do not write a character, you write about them. A subtle truth, but a truth nonetheless.