Thoughts of a Mad Man

Easy as one, three, two.

Writing a story that centers on a character arc is really easy when you start at the right point of the character.


Find a character you like, an adult. Figure out what they do and what they want and what they like. Give them a few interesting quirks or odd relationships. I started out with a thief who was in love with her boss and her husband's boss. She ran the castle security and was the in nomine boss of the crime syndicate all while loudly forcing everyone to pretend she was just a washerwoman.


Now this wasn't quite where I started, at first she really was the weak woman she pretended to be but then her female boss needed someone to break her out. So I booted Hortense and brought in Kissla, a character from my D&D days. She was just pretending to be like Hortense, faking cringing and throwing in a lot of "maybes" into her language. "I'm always springing people from this dungeon. Never I think, maybe it will be milady I must spring from her husband's dungeon."


Now how does a washerwoman get the stones to break people from the Duke's dungeon? And how does she get away with that with such a bad acting skill? Probably the Duke and the Thief are old friends. Adventuring buddies. There's an uneasy truce with the criminal element, the Duke arrests them and Kissla releases them after the appropriate time. Maybe there are dalliances...


So when they were younger Kissla was a brash adventuring thief, the kind that opens doors in dungeons. The Duchess was not married and she did the healing when they got into trouble. But Kissla was raised by a narcissist or at least narcissistically defended mafia don who sent her to infiltrate--not join--the good Duke's family. Her dad taught her that she was better than the Duke and his family, so she thought she could one day be the Duchess of Westwood.


Then I started writing and found that the Faerie Tales she was raised on were far darker than even she expected and it was all she could do to save her friends (the future duke and duchess) from the evil she risked her life to bring back in the form of an Emperor's magic signet.


In short, though, the story arc came from a simple question. Or rather, a simple series of questions brought me to the arc. First, how are you now? What were you like before? And what did you do that brought you to the way you are now. With Kissla, it was obvious she had to have been more openly brash than her extreme humility. So, the rest somehow followed from there. I followed a similar tack for my Paladin, Sigrun. She could not have been born an obsessive rescuer. No, she was a naive child who believed her spirit friends when they urged her to get involved in things she didn't understand. This made her and her family a target for her spirit friend's enemies, leading to tragedy and years of asking, "Who was supposed to stop this?" before finally realizing that she could stop these things going forward--and as long as she did her part, she need never quite sit in the darkest pit of that pain. Maybe I'll even work on how Willa became interested in Will-o-wisps (admittedly, a less dramatic issue) or how Binchenzo started chopping up robots instead of people. In either case these stories, my most solid, came from asking a character how she became what she is now.


The events that radically alter our characters will come out of any character if you ask them how they became the man or woman they are. These events will involve a character arc by definition, and will usually be charged with the greatest drama and tensest plot of that character's life. So you can't go wrong with some form of these questions: 1. Who are you now 3. Who were you initially and 2. What happened to move you from there to here?








For further reading, check out the highlighted stories on my portfolio.








What do you think? Comments are always welcome!