Welcome to Day 5 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books.
Many terms in storytelling are confusing. Luckily, “character arc” is one of the clearer ones. Throughout a story, either the main character changes (dynamic arc) or the main character changes the world (flat arc). In both cases, the story revolves around that change.
The real challenge is writing a compelling character arc. The change should be believable and suitable to the character. It should be gradual and organic to the story, not a sudden transformation between one scene and the next.
The best book I’ve read on this topic is Creating Character Arcs (2016, K.M. Weiland). When building a dynamic character arc, Weiland suggests we consider two elements in the main character: want and need. The former is the character’s conscious desire, while the latter—the need—is rooted in the subconscious, and it is what the character must learn.
A clear example of this appears in When Grandma Gives You a Lemon Tree (2019, Jamie L.B. Deenihan, Lorraine Rocha). The inside cover shows a lonely girl in a house, looking at the empty street. Then we see her birthday wish list—all electronic gadgets. This is her want: she believes owning gadgets will make her happy.
Want = happiness is to have tech devices.
But Grandma gives her a lemon tree. As the story develops, we see the growing tree bringing friends into her life. Her lemonade stall earns her some money to buy what she wishes. In the supermarket, though, we see she walks past the electronics shelves and heads to the garden section instead. By the end, she is surrounded by friends in a garden between apartment blocks. She has changed into what she needed to be. This is how a character arc should work.
Need = happiness is in sharing.
There’s no formula that can tell a writer exactly how to craft an arc. Understanding your character’s Want and Need gives you the road map.
I hope reading this blog post has given you new ideas. See you tomorrow for Day 6. If you would like to read these 40 craft lessons on WhatsApp, please join the channel.
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