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How Many Character Arcs Do You Plan?

Laurence

Inkling
I'm planning and writing a trilogy using Scrivener and am really enjoying mapping out the story and each character arc chunk by chunk.

Those of you out there who map out character arcs before hand, where do you stop? One detailed plot around your protagonist and less around secondary characters or equal attention to everybody?

I'm thinking of plotting out equally detailed arcs for my four main (good guy) characters and five others. Perhaps for secondary characters some of these points will happen off-stage. Does this seem like a little or a lot of planning to you?

My plotting tends to consist of where the character will be, how they're feeling about their initial problem and what they do about it. I'm noting these down for the beginning and end of each of the three books. What do you note and how frequently throughout the story do you use these 'checkpoints'?
 

Yora

Maester
I deliberately decided to keep it simple and make it an episodic series with a single protagonist. For this character I have mapped out several stages of character development, but without specific plot points. But at any given stage, I know who she will be and how she will think and act in the future, which serves as the guidelines for how the experiences in any given story are affecting her.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
It depends on how many main characters I have, of course. In my most recent, there was one main character and I definitely had an arc for her. OTOH, her faithful companion travels with her through the whole book and doesn't really change at all. That was a deliberate choice.

In my first novel, which had a far messier development process, I had an arc for several characters.

But among secondary characters character arc shades away into character backstory. This seems to be mostly organic during the writing--I have a secondary character and I have a few ideas about him. Once he's on stage, and particularly when he starts to talk with other characters, I find I want to know more about that character's background. So I start inventing. Some of that winds up on the page, but more of it informs how that character speaks, dresses, behaves. The background helps me make choices about those things. An arc is more about change.

As for level of detail, it's entirely a non-rational thing with me, called "enough." At some point, I think I have enough of a character arc, enough background, to start writing.

I'm never right. I always need more, and I'm always wrong about some of the choices and have to go retcon the poor darling. I'd love to be able to get it all correct and immutable right out of the gate, but I don't think I'm going to manage that. All I can do is try to hit closer to the mark on my next shot.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I'm writing a series of novellas. Every part of the series will have one of three different protagonists as its main character. I've mapped out the different stories for these characters in pretty good detail, but I've not mapped out anything for any of the side characters.
The novella format is short enough that there's not room for much character development outside of the main character, and many of the side characters won't feature in more than one or perhaps two parts of the series.

That said, there are a few secondary characters that will be reappearing in the latter half of the series, and I haven't planned out characters arcs for them at all. They're there, they have roles to play, but they're not going through any major changes at all. Perhaps their nature is such that I'll need to add in more details about them later - one of them might be. If that's the case, I should be able to pull that off once the time for it comes.
 

Yora

Maester
I think the most important thing is to first identify the core of the story. What is the story ultimately about? Which character is the one whose development has the most significant resolution by the end? The one who at the end looks back at everything and draws a conclusion what it all meant, or who is the tragic figure who ended up destroyed.

The other major character arcs should be supporting this main arc, even when for most of the story they get the most attention. Either by providing a different perspective on the core of the story from another character's experience, or by contrasting it with a character who gets the opposite outcome.
For example, if the main arc is about an important person growing into a great hero, supporting character arcs could be about an uninportant character becoming an unsung hero to people close to him, or about another important person turning into a villain or failing to become a hero because of a flaw.

But I think all the prominent character arcs should be different versions of the same central theme of the story.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
For me, main characters usually get two arcs to start. Anything beyond, I discover along the way.

They get one emotional arc and one external arc. Both are based on what their desires are. External- save the princess and defeat the empire. Emotional - become a jedi like his father.
 

Caged Maiden

Staff
Article Team
I'm with Penpilot. One outer, one inner, and if you have a significant secondary character who needs their own arc (or maybe an antagonist), they get to change too. :)

My reasoning is that arcs work as mirrors. The inner change my character gets must work with the external plot and the external arc. And any secondary characters who have an arc, their's needs to also speak to the heart of the story or the themes. Nothing is done without significant connection to the other parts of the story. If you try to connect too many things, the connections themselves can tug against each other and get flimsy. So I keep the story sort of internally focused on itself and its own themes and meaning. That makes it easier to omit erroneous actions/ events in the story that might conflict if there are too many character arcs going on.
 

Yora

Maester
It's an external and an internal conflict, but they should both be woven together and influence each other in a single arc. The resolution to onr also needs to be the resolution to the other.
 
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