How Scene Choices Determine Successful Character Arcs
About The Author:
Emily Golden and Rachel May help tenacious writers level up their stories and skills. After working together on their own fantasy stories, they learned two things: (1) it’s impossible to see the holes in your own work, and (2) learning together is infinitely more productive than learning alone. From this discovery, and their love for story, Golden May Editing was born! As book coaches and developmental editors, they help fiction writers identify their books’ potential and teach them how to fulfill it. You can find them on Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
While reading, we become active participants in a point-of-view character’s journey (seriously, our brains become the character). This means that when characters undergo a deep journey of change, we do too. Character arcs are the method through which authors move hearts, change minds, and influence the world.
What is a character arc?
A character arc is the trajectory of a character’s inner journey of change. They begin the story with a false view of how the world works (often called a lie, misbelief, or inner obstacle), and the plot pushes them to unlearn that view. In a heroic story, the arc is ‘positive’. In a tragedy, the arc is ‘negative’.
At your story’s climax, your character’s proof of change (or failure to change), and the consequences of that decision, make your story’s overall ‘point’. But your characters can’t change overnight. They must continually struggle against their lie throughout the story—in every scene.
Character arcs are formed from scene decisions.
Action is the proof of change. For example, a character who’s struggled against a lie that ‘power is more important than friendship’ throughout a story may believe they’ve learned otherwise near the end, but it’s not until they’re forced into a corner and have to make a really hard choice between power or friendship that they prove it.
Your character must be given a choice between upholding their lie or challenging it in every scene. At the beginning, they will always choose their lie. But as the consequences of their decisions get worse, they’ll start to see the error of their ways and begin making different choices.
A Positive Arc Case Study: Laia of Serra
(Spoilers Alert: If you’ve never read An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir, stop now because spoilers abound!)
Let’s break down how scene choices build Laia’s positive character arc in Sabaa Tahir’s brilliant An Ember in the Ashes. The lie Laia struggles against throughout the story is her belief that ‘some people are inherently strong, others are inherently weak.’
We won’t look at all of Laia’s scenes, but we’ll choose key moments in the story and highlight the choices she makes to show the general shape of her arc. Note how she’s always forced to choose between her lie (believing herself weak) and an opportunity to change (believing herself capable).
The Opening
At the beginning of your story, you must show how deeply embedded your character’s lie is through the choices that they make.
An Ember in the Ashes begins with Laia’s family being attacked by the ruling class, the Martials, in the dead of night. As the Martials kill her grandparents and imprison her brother Darin, Darin tells her to run.
The Choice: Give up and run away (believing herself weak) or stay and fight for her brother (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: She chooses to run because she thinks she’s too weak to save him.
“Laia!” Darin cries out, sounding like I’ve never heard him. Frantic. Trapped. He told me to run, but if I screamed like that, he would come. He would never leave me. I stop.
Help him, Laia, a voice orders in my head. Move.
And another voice, more insistent, more powerful.
You can’t save him. Do what he says. Run.
The Inciting Incident
During your story’s first act, your character comes face to face with their lie and they are forced to act. But because they’ve not overcome their lie, they ultimately act in a way that upholds it.
After running, Laia is plagued with guilt, blaming her weakness and guilt for Darin’s capture. Desperate to save her brother, she knows she must act, but she decides she cannot succeed on her own.
Laia tracks down the Resistance, a group of rebels, and asks them to save Darin. The Resistance agrees only if Laia will pose as a slave and spy in the Martial’s Blackcliff Academy for them.
The Choice: Help the resistance so they can free Darin (believe herself weak) or try to free Darin on her own (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: She agrees to help the Resistance as a spy, not believing herself capable of saving Darin on her own.
Marinn. The free lands. What I wouldn’t give to escape there with my brother, to live in a place with no Martials, no Masks, no Empire.
But first I have to survive a spy mission. I have to survive Blackcliff… I fall silent, as if considering, but my decision is made the second I realize that going to Blackcliff is the only way to get Darin back.
The Middle
In the second act, your character should fight against their inner obstacle the wrong way. The scene choices they make must have negative consequences that keep piling up, whether they’re obvious to the character or not.
Laia enters Blackcliff Academy as a slave to the awful Commandant, a woman in charge of the school. Laia still believes herself inherently weak and thinks only the Resistance is capable of freeing her brother. She struggles to summon the courage to spy in her fear of the Commandant.
The Choice: Protect herself by obeying the Commandant (believe herself weak) or spy on the Commandant (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: In several consecutive scenes, Laia fails to spy and nearly fails to uphold her end of the bargain with the Resistance.
Only four lashes and I feel like my skin has been torn open and drenched in salt. Blood drips down the back of my shirt…
I’m too numb for tears. It occurs to me then that the Commandant’s office door is still probably open, her papers strewn about, visible to anyone with the courage to look.
Commandant’s gone, Laia. Go up there and see what you can find. Darin would do it. He’d see this as the perfect chance to gather information for the Resistance.
But I’m not Darin.
Because of her failure to spy, the Resistance threatens to withdraw their pledge to save Darin. Despite her efforts to lay low, the Commandant still ends up torturing Laia on several occasions. One night, Laia overhears the Commandant speaking to someone through an open office window.
The Choice: Protect herself by ignoring the opportunity (believe herself weak) or spy on the Commandant (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: Laia still believes herself weak, but she’s terrified the Resistance will abandon Darin and realizes that the Commandant will torture her regardless of whether she spies or not. With nothing left to lose, she climbs a trellis to listen in on the conversation.
Why would she meet a student at midnight? Why not during the day?
She’ll whip you, my fear pleads with me. She’ll take an eye. A hand.
But I’ve been whipped and beaten and strangled, and I’ve survived. I’ve been carved up with a hot knife, and I’ve survived.
Darin didn’t let fear control him. If I want to save him, I can’t let fear control me either.
Knowing my courage will diminish the longer I think about it, I grab the trellis and climb.
Laia overhears valuable information and brings it to the Resistance. They’re pleased, but instead of freeing her brother as promised, they claim that saving Darin will be more difficult than they thought because he’s in the prison death cells and give her another task: find a way to get their troops into Blackcliff.
The Choice: Keep helping the Resistance so they’ll save Darin (believe herself weak) or try to save Darin herself (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: Having just succeeded, Laia’s belief in herself is bolstered, but not secured. She agrees to help the Resistance without hesitation, but never considers saving Darin on her own.
“I’ll find you an entrance,” I say… This, finally, is a task I know I can accomplish. “But how will an entrance into Blackcliff help you break Darin out of the death cells?”
“A fair question,” Keenan asks softly. He meets Mazen’s gaze, and I’m surprised at the open hostility on the older man’s face.
“I have a plan. That’s all any of you need to know.”
… For the first time since the raid, I feel light, as if maybe I’ll be able to accomplish what I set out to do.
The Dark Night of the Soul
At the end of the story, your character must face a major failure that forces them to learn that they’ve been deceived by their lie the whole time.
In each scene, Laia gets braver in her mission, but her remaining lack of self confidence keeps her from freeing Darin on her own. She constantly chooses to trust and help the Resistance, rather than trust herself.
Finally, she finds the Resistance a way into the Blackcliff, only to discover that it was a ruse. They never intended to save Darin.
The Choice: Blame herself for being deceived (believe herself weak) or blame them for deceiving her (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: At this point, Laia has started to believe in her abilities. Rather than blaming herself (like she did when the Martials took Darin), she places the blame where it truly belongs—on the Resistance. She attacks the Resistance leader to find out where her brother is.
I feel as Elias must have felt only a short time ago. Betrayed. Desolate. Fear and panic threaten to strangle me; I knot them up and shove them away.
Keenan tries to take my arm, but I dodge him, pulling out Elias’s dagger. Mazen’s men rush forward, but I’m closer than they are, and they aren’t fast enough. In an instant, I have the blade at the Resistance leader’s throat.
“Back!” I say to the fighters. They lower their weapons reluctantly. My pulse pounds in my ears, and I have no fear in this moment, only rage for everything Mazen has put me through.
“You tell me where my brother is, you lying son of a whore.”
The Climax
Once your character unlearns their lie, they must make a difficult decision at the climax of the story to prove they’ve changed. In doing so, they prove the story’s point.
After Laia finds out she was betrayed, the Resistance tells her friend Keenan to kill her. Instead, Keenan offers Laia freedom. He can sneak her to safety and help her save her brother—but she’d have to leave the friends she’s made inside the Academy who helped her survive.
The Choice: Let Keenan take care of her and save Darin (believe herself weak) or save her friends and get Darin out herself (believe herself capable)?
The Decision: Laia decides to finally believe in herself rather than rely solely on others. She doesn’t meet Keenan at the rendezvous point, and instead risks her life to save her friends and free Darin on her own.
[Keenan] only wants to help me. Yet I take no comfort in what he said: I’ll find you in Silas. I’ll find a way to Darin. I’ll take care of everything. I promise.
Once, I’d have wanted that. I’d have wanted someone to tell me what to do, to fix everything. Once, I’d have wanted to be saved.
Laia’s climax choice to believe in herself allows her to escape—with her friends—to save her brother. The positive consequences of her climax choice prove the story’s point that ‘Your power and freedom are in your hands, and your hands alone.’
In Conclusion: Scene choices are critical to character arcs!
Character arcs must be driven by scene choices, specifically between upholding their lie or challenging it. As the consequences of their choices pile up, they’ll be forced to change over time.
Laia doesn't become brave overnight; she is tricked and pushed into it by the plot. The negative consequences of her failures, and the positive consequences of her bravery, push her to a climax moment when she realizes that her power lies in her own hands—not others’. The lesson is proved when she acts on that realization.
Never give up a chance to pit your character against their lie and an opportunity to change. In fact, try to do so in every single scene. (If you have a scene that doesn’t address your character's lie, chances are you don’t need it!) The impact will be a strong character arc that is backed by character action, woven throughout the entire plot, and powerful enough to move readers.
