Honestly, this blog should have Elizabeth’s authorship. 🙂 In last night’s mentoring class in the Book Writing World, we had an important discussion about character arc, and what that meant to each individual writer when he or she talked about “character arc.”
Elizabeth asked, “What engages you, frustrates you, confuses you about character arc? Where are you in your project with character arc?”
My answer, somewhat convoluted, is: “character arc is a movement of the protagonist from point A to point Z. It is a journey, but my concern about it is that there’s enough of a journey to constitute a true arc. What is enough?”
Indeed, in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the journey per se takes place after breakfast and ends before that evening’s dinner party. In Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, the journey takes place a fortnight before and leading up to Hurricane Katrina making landfall in Louisiana. Each to its own.
In my novel in progress, Shadow Gardens, time is fluid; there are sections in the distant past and there is a present action. I’m trying to braid the time, so that the story hops from past to present and back to the past.
But as I write this, I’m warming to the idea that the journey is not physical, exactly. It’s a change from one way of thinking to another. It can be illustrated through a physical journey, but the character arc is really about the movement in mental space.
The other important questions Elizabeth asked of us were, (1). What would your protagonist always do before the change in character took place and (2). What does your protagonist never do before the change takes place?
My protagonist Mrs. Lahiri would (1) would always smooth things over, not exactly lie but close enough, so that everything would continue to run smoothly in her life; and (2). She would never just consider her own feelings and her own wishes.
This is what changes: at the end, when she considers that all of her hard work is burning (her prize winning garden) and she needs to put out the fire, she is willing to defy the law and watering-ban and try to save her garden.
What are the burning questions that need to be answered so that your characters make a shift?
Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and will be reading some of her work on April 9 at the Sacramento Poetry Center in CA.