The Art of the Arc

“Trajectory” is one of my favorite words in the English language. It encompasses the entirety of history, drawing lines from event to event until the dawn of human awareness leads to my fingers typing these keys at this moment. That’s all a story is­, an arc starting on the first page and ending on the last.

An Arc in All of Us

So what’s your story? Where does your arc begin and which barriers did you bounce from to become who you are? We were all born as cute but completely ignorant blobs of cheeks and chubby legs and then something happened to us. Maybe immediately or years later, something bent each of our paths in different directions. Then, it happened again. Whether by choice or chance, monumental events or casual conversation, we each developed traceable trajectories.

So do your characters.

A Life in Pages

As I developed my writing, I often came across advice to write short biographies for each character to learn who they are as people. I never did. It felt hokey, like something people wrote to call themselves writers without doing any actual writing. Often, the reader of said advice is provided with a questionnaire, like a job interview for your characters. Through my work, I’ve found that what you really need is to become their therapist.

You don’t need to formally script a therapy session. I’m still very much in the mindset that writing about your characters is a waste of time when you could be writing the story that creates them. But think about those moments that make them who they are. Did they grow up rich or poor? Safe or abused? Did they lose a parent or a sibling? Have they been hurt or hurt someone themselves? Have they ever been in love? Were they ever loved back?

More important than the events are how they shaped the person who endured them. That’s why the job interview questions don’t quite cut it. You’re not looking for who they are but why, which is where the true character lives. A hero can emerge because of or in spite of the life that brought them into your story. The same can be said for the villain.

Sympathy for the Devil

I once read an interview with the actor Mads Mikkelson, who I believe is one of the best at portraying villains. In response to a question about how he builds such engaging characters, he said he approaches each bad guy as if they believed they were the hero. For me, that explains the difference between a two-dimensional and three-dimensional character.

As important as it is to know what motivates your characters, the why is just as crucial. If you need evidence, look to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which went from influencing the entirety of the movie industry for almost two decades to being a disappointing afterthought. One reason for this is how it handled its rogue’s gallery of villains.

From the baddie of each individual movie to the overarching Thanos, the first bad guys had backstory and motivation. Many of them, deep down, even had good intentions. In the second Avengers movie, the title team built a sentient AI to help them protect the world only to have it realize they were its biggest threat. Though Thanos wanted to snap away half the universe’s population, it was because overpopulation was a significant reason for all war and suffering.

That’s not to say that your antagonist can’t be purely evil. There is evidence all around us that sometimes people do bad things in spite of their past instead of because of it. But I bet even they had trajectories that brought them to whatever terrible decisions they make.

A Writer’s Confidence

As any good therapist in the actual world, you should keep some confidentiality with your characters. The reader doesn’t necessarily need to know that your hero had bed-wetting issues until they were teenagers but secretly did their own laundry to cover it. But the time they found a dead body in the woods and didn’t tell a soul, even after it was officially discovered, might give your big bad a layer of depth that hooks your readers.

The trick to separating critical information from TMI is to gauge each moment in a character’s trajectory by how it affects the story. If it is the exact motivation behind their action, then it definitely belongs. But if it’s a trivial factoid to back up another meaningless detail, leave it between the two of you.

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As always, thanks for reading! I’m posting the edited chapters of the third and final edition of The Road Cain Walks along with commentary over at Substack. Usable feedback (i.e., more than “it’s great” or “it sucks”) will earn access to future chapters that will appear behind the paywall.

I’ve also recently found the file disk for the original edition of The Road Cain Walks. As soon as I have time to convert the files, I’ll start adding the chapters for it and the second edition rewrite here.