Crafting the Character Arc

by Jennie Jarvis

  2. All events in the Ordinary World need to be “on screen.” In other words, the reader should read about it on the page or the viewer/player needs to see it happen on the screen. No backstory! Your story takes place NOW, so your events should take place now. The backstory can always be added to your narrative later on in the tale. For instance, in Hot Fuzz, Nicholas tells us why he became a cop very late in his Rising Action. Harry Potter doesn’t learn about the events that made him famous until after his Inciting Incident. Start with the now. You have time to develop the backstory later.

  3. Try to make your protagonist identifiable. When we first meet her or him, we should see a piece of ourselves in this person. Even if a character isn’t likable, give him a moment that makes us still identify with him. A bully can be abused by an angry parent at home. A grumpy man can keep a child from getting run over. Blake Snyder refers to this moment as a “Save the Cat” moment. By showing your protagonist doing something slightly redeeming or making him/her some kind of underdog, we will immediately identify with him/her, even if they aren’t likeable people.

  4. Disney also likes to include an “I want” song during the Place of Rest. Here, the characters bluntly state their inner need/emotional motivation through song. Ariel wants to be “Part of [the human] world.” Aladdin doesn’t want to be seen as a “riff raff, street rat.” Anna wants to connect with her sister, even if it’s only to “build a snowman.” For non-musical writers, we can turn the “I want” song into an “I wish” statement. The character can bluntly say or do an action that implies their inner emotional need. This way, you set up your emotional need in the Ordinary World, which allows for us to understand what motivates the protagonist once the Inciting Incident arrives. What would your protagonist’s “I wish” statement be?

  Chapter 6

  The Inciting Incident

  Once you have established your protagonist’s Resting Place, then it is time to throw the Ordinary World out of whack. We do this with the Inciting Incident.

  By definition, the Inciting Incident is the external event that launches a protagonist after her or his goal. Keep in mind, the definition reads “the external event.” The character can’t just wake up one morning and decide to go on a quest. She can’t just say, “hey, you know what I would really like to try to do today…” and then begin fighting for her goal. He can’t just randomly decide that today, of all days, is the day to change his life forever. Something must enter from the outside world and force him or her to begin the uphill battle towards winning the goal.

  Screenwriter Michael Arndt refers to the inciting incident as something that threatens a character’s happiness. For example, at the beginning of the first Toy Story, we meet Woody. In his Resting Place, Woody is established as Andy’s favorite toy. This defines him and makes him worthwhile. However, the inciting incident is the arrival of Andy’s “new favorite toy” Buzz Lightyear. Buzz’s very arrival in the bedroom threatens Woody’s place as Andy’s favorite toy, and therefore threatens Woody’s happiness as a whole.

  In The Proposal, Margaret is a successful executive editor-in-chief at a publishing company. She’s known for being a savvy yet bossy businesswoman, and she loves her life. She loves being in charge and having the power to put people in their place. When her bosses her tell she must leave the country due to visa issues, her happiness is threatened. It is the desperation created by this threat that pushes her into blackmailing her assistant into marrying her for a green card.

  In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (book), Frodo Baggins loves his life in the Shire. He is innocent and friendly. Even though his uncle’s sudden disappearance saddens him, he settles quickly and happily into his new life at Bag End. It isn’t until the Shire (the symbol of his happiness and innocence throughout the books) is threatened before he sets out with his three mates to bring the One Ring to Rivendell. Keep in mind, he doesn’t just decide to leave his life when Bilbo disappears because, as much as he loved his uncle, he wasn’t the source of Frodo’s happiness. When Gandalf tells him he must take the Ring to the elves, it is the threat to the Shire that launches Frodo out the door.

  Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett’s happiness is threatened by the rather insulting remarks of Mr. Darcy. Normally happy and carefree, hearing him refer to her as “tolerable” and “slighted by other men” impacted her otherwise pleasant evening. This “shocking rudeness” greatly influences her every other action in the book as she tries to get her subtle revenge on the rich Dr. Darcy.

  Sometimes, the “happiness” upset by the inciting incident can’t quite by seen as “happiness.” In these cases, “contentment” might be a better word. At the beginning of Dark Places, protagonist Libby Day can’t be called happy – not by a long shot. Growing up as the famous, lone survivor of a mass homicide at her family home, she’s become comfortable in her place playing the victim. She’s a neurotic mess with no real interpersonal connections. She has a cat but she rarely remembers to feed it. She has become completely dependent on her identity as the survivor of the “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” Unable and unwilling to hold down a job, even her income is based on her victim status. When her lawyer tells her that the money she accumulated after the murders is completely gone and she must find a way to support herself, her victim status is now threatened. This is her inciting incident because the life she has come to accept can no longer continue to exist.

  Similarly, The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen isn’t exactly happy at the beginning of the first book. However, she has found a comfortable place as her family’s stand-in matriarch. Since her father is dead, her mother is one step above catatonic, and her sister is helpless, Katniss has stepped up to be the guiding figure in her family. Each day, she hunts illegally in order to keep food on her family’s table. While you can’t exactly call her happy, she has come to terms with this position. When her sister’s name is called at the Reaping (her inciting incident), her position as family savior has been threatened. In order to fight for her family, she has no choice but to volunteer as tribute.

  Don’t get the wrong idea; Inciting incidents aren’t all bad. Sometimes, the “threat” to happiness isn’t that happiness will be taken away. Sometimes, the protagonist can be confronted with some opportunity for their happiness to be secured. In The Goonies, Mikey has come to terms with the unhappy news that he must move to a new community. His neighborhood will be destroyed by a local country club making a new golf course, and so he must say farewell to his lifelong friends. But when they find the old treasure map in his father’s attic (inciting incident), he realizes he might not have to accept defeat after all. He has one last chance to do what his parents couldn’t: save his neighborhood by finding One Eyed Willy’s treasure.

  Harry Potter also experiences a similar opportunity for happiness in his inciting incident. When Hagrid arrives at the falling down shack in which his foster parents have attempted to hide him, Harry discovers his life means more than he was originally led to believe. Harry is a wizard whose parents died, not in a car accident, but in a heroic fashion. Now, Harry has the opportunity to prove that he isn’t the loser orphan his aunt, uncle and cousin said he was.

  Hamlet, too, finds himself confronted with the ability to reject his current lifestyle. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is disgusted by his mother and uncle’s wedding because he thinks it’s too soon after his father’s death. When Horatio brings him to his father’s ghost, the resentment he felt against his mother for marrying too quickly after his father’s death is compounded by the fact that this new husband is also the murderer of his father. The ghost has tempted Hamlet with an offer he can’t refuse – to seek vengeance against the man who murdered his beloved father.

  The inciting incident has upset the “normal” or “Ordinary” world of the protagonist. This makes the events that follow matter. We want to see the protagonist bring his world back into balance, and that is why readers and viewers stay tuned (t
o continue to read or watch) the rest of the story.

  It is easy to see how the Resting Place and the Inciting Incident are interconnected. Without having a chance to see the protagonist in their place of happiness or contentment, we can’t really understand why the change at the end has affected them so completely. Similarly, without seeing that external event which inspires them to action, we can’t really appreciate the lives they had before the change. These two pieces are essential to master, not only because of how they work together but because they are at the beginning of the story.

  Crafting Your Inciting Incident

  Write out a paragraph in which you explore your inciting incident and the effect it has on your protagonist. As you create this section of your story’s Major Dramatic Curve, consider the following tips:

  1. It’s important to ask one big question about your inciting incident: why now? An inciting incident needs to have importance and be a once-in-a-lifetime event that ultimately changes the character at his/her core. Therefore, it can’t be something mundane. Ask yourself why the events happen when they happen. Could it have happened a week earlier or later? If so, then rethink the events surrounding your story to make the Inciting Incident a result of a perfect storm of well-timed events. This is why so many of our modern stories take place around last pinnacle life effects: the cop who has to solve his hardest case just before he retires, the disappearance of his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary, the last party before the students go off to various colleges, etc. What’s the timely importance of your inciting incident?

  2. The inciting incident needs to immediately result in a character fighting for his or her goal. This means a long stretch of time can’t pass between an inciting incident and the beginning of the Rising Action. If a character’s inciting incident is the murder of a parent, then character needs to immediately seek revenge unless we are told the character fought for her or his goal when we weren’t present. Inigo Montoya tells us he trained for years to be a master swordsman in order to avenge his father’s death. How much time passes between your Inciting Incident and your character’s fight to win a goal? If there is a gap of hours, days, weeks, months or years, then why does that gap exist? Why did the character wait so long to start their journey? And why did they start it when they did? Why not the week before or the week after?

  Chapter 7

  Rising Action

  The Rising Action is the meat and potatoes of any story, and it tends to be the material the viewer or reader most remembers. By definition, the Rising Action is the protagonist’s uphill struggle to win her/his goal. This is the interplay of tactics and obstacles that make up the meal of the narrative.

  Tactics

  During this period, the protagonist will do anything to win that goal. In writing terms, we refer to all the ways a character attempts to win the goal as tactics. A well-written character won’t just try one thing to win the goal; they will try any number of combinations of items until they discover the one that works best.

  In his pursuit to save the Shire, Frodo Baggins not only takes the One Ring to Rivendell, but he later agrees to take the Ring all the way to Mount Doom so it can be destroyed. He agrees to have friends accompany him in his pursuit of his goal when it is helpful (Sam, Merry, Pippin, etc) but he is also willing to part with them when it is not (Boromir, Aragorn, etc). He puts on the Ring when he needs to hide, and he offers it to Galadriel when he thinks she can protect his world better than he could. All he cares about is protecting the Shire, and he will do anything he must in order to win that goal, even if it means accepting his own death at the end of the trilogy.

  In Gone Girl, Nick does whatever he can to get his wife, Amy, returned to him and, in turn, not go to jail for murder. He cooperates with the police, investigates some of Amy’s past stalkers, hires an over-priced attorney, and even admits to his year-long affair on national television. Once he realizes Amy has staged her own disappearance, he lies on television in an attempt to manipulate her to returning to him. He’ll do anything he can to get her back: first because he doesn’t want any harm to come to her, and later because he wants to kill her himself.

  In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy blindly follows the advice of anyone who tells her how she might get home. When the Munchkins tell her to follow the yellow brick road to find the Wizard, she agrees. On her way, she only befriends the Tin Man, The Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion because she believes they can help her on her journey, and, at the same time, she can help them. In the end, trusting them to help her pays off. Once the Wizard tells her he will only help her if she brings him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, her three friends are the only ones who can save her from the Witch’s murderous rage and flying monkeys.

  The key thing to remember about choosing tactics for a character is that you must allow your characters to be selfish. When it comes to fighting for a goal, all characters should be selfish, even if they aren’t otherwise selfish people. For them, whatever they want should feel like it’s a life or death situation. They should be desperate to win, and it is this selfishness that will change them on a fundamental level. They will be willing to do things they would not otherwise have done because of their desire to win their goal.

  In the novel Dark Places, Libby Day only reveals her secrets to the Kill Club, and later comes face to face with the truth of the past, because she needs money. Mikey’s pursuit of the treasure drives him to give the motivating speech that prevents the other Goonies from going up “Troy’s bucket,” an act that would have assured the safety of their lives. Wreck-It Ralph only befriends the obnoxious and rude Vanellope in order to get back the medal she used to gain entry into the big race. The overall plot of each of these stories is a direct result of the tactics each character uses in order to win their goal.

  The tactics a character uses to win her or his goal should be rooted in the unique personality you have created for that character. Let’s say, for example, you have a scene that takes place on a playground. One child has stolen another child’s toy, and the second child’s goal is to get that toy back. If the child trying to retrieve her toy is an innocent who believes others can help her, then she might run off to a teacher. However, if the child has learned, even at their young age, that adults can’t be trusted, then the child might kick and bite at the other child in order to get the toy back. This is why, when Draco Malfoy steals Neville Longbottom’s remembrall, Harry immediately jumps on his broom to get it back whereas Hermione scolds him, reminding him of their teacher’s threat of expulsion.

  No choice of tactic should be obvious or stereotypical. Don’t default to assuming a character will react to a stimulus in a given way because that is the way “everyone reacts to it.” No one but loyal-to-her-friends Dorothy would have thrown water on the Scarecrow to put out the fire on his arm, inadvertently melting the Wicked Witch of the West. No one but Mikey would have allowed Andie to think he was his brother so he could experience that first kiss. Only Elizabeth Bennett would walk through the mud for miles to reach her sick sister. We are even told that Katniss Everdeen is the first volunteer tribute from District Twelve. These are well-conceived tactics that the writer has included as a reflection of the individual characters.

  Even if two characters want the same thing, they can use different tactics in order to achieve the same goal. In the movie National Treasure, Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) and Ian Howe (Sean Beam) both want to find the long-lost treasure of the Templar Knights but Ian is willing to kill for it, whereas Ben is not. Think about how both men attempted to steal the Declaration of Independence: Ben snuck into a party and used intelligence and technology to bypass security. Ian, however, broke into the facility, knocked out a guard and even fired bullets at the Declaration. These varying tactics were direct results of the individual personalities of the characters.

  As the story progresses, the tactics a character uses should become more daring and desperate. A character that would never consider committing murder, for example,
might grow to that level of desperation late in the story. Someone who would never abandon their children might do just that in order to succeed. Elizabeth Bennett throws decorum aside and chides Mr. Darcy after she discovers it was his fault her sister is unmarried. As the cave crashes down around them, Mikey is ready to throw his life away and go back for the treasure instead of swim for safety. Libby Day, once unwilling to touch her past at all, walks willingly into the home of her brother’s ex-girlfriend, narrowly escaping with her life as she tries to learn the truth. Wreck-It Ralph destroys Vanellope’s racing car in order to fulfill the deal with King Candy that gave him back his medal. These characters all must grow into their own worst enemies by the time story is done.

  Obstacles

  If all the characters had to do was fight selfishly for their goals, the story wouldn’t be very interesting. Something needs to stand in the way of the characters’ and their desperate tactics. These are called obstacles. Obstacles are external and internal events that stand in the way of the protagonist winning his or her goal. They can stand in the way directly, or they can thwart an individual tactic the protagonist was trying to use in order to win that goal.