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Now that I have talked about characters that we remember, I want to tell you about character growth. Simply put, a character arc is the transformation, change or growth of a character in a screenplay, book, or TV series.In most commericial screenplays, characters grow-- especially the main character. As we mature as writers, we must understand this and also get a handle on how to make our characters grow.

What are some examples of Character Arcs? One example is Michael Corleone in the Godfather. Michael was a clean war hero, who returned to his crime family. He was to remail clean, but by the end of the film, he was the new "Don." He was the new head of the crime family and people were kissing his ring. In Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman was a mysoginistic playboy, until dressing up as Dorothy and forming a relationship with Jessica Lange cause him to see the inner life of a woman. He then became more sensitive, caring, and able to have an intimate relationship with a woman. In My Best Friend's Wedding, Julia Roberts went to her best friend's wedding with the intention of breaking him up with his fiance and nabbing him for herself. Yet, she learned the true meaning of being a best friend - unconditional love.

More recently, in Juno when Ellen Page sees the adoptive couple who was to take her baby fall apart, she realizes the most important thing is someone who will stick with you through thick and thin. She goes to apologize and reconcile with the baby-daddy, Bleeker. I just saw summer blockbuster, Iron Man 2, in which Robert Downey Jr. realizes that he was being reckless with a special gift given to him and that he needed to be more respectful or his powers and less of a reckless playboy. He also grew to confess/realize his love for Gwyneth Paltrow-- the one woman by his side who stuck with him throug thick and thin.

Christopher Vogler is a Hollywood development executive best known for his guide for screenwriters, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. He was actually one of our top readers when I was just a wee creative assistant, reading tons of scripts and fetching coffee at Walt Disney/Touchstone Pictures.

In Vogler's book "The Writer's Journey," he talks all about the mythic structure that has been the foundation of our stories for thousands of years. Every story has a hero/shero and every hero/shero has a journey. Granted, this approach can be broken apart and played with in ensemble pieces (usually each character has a small "arc" -- they each grow a few steps instead of one character/protagonist growing LOTS of steps). The same transformational work must still be done for EACH character. I always say like jazz music, you can break the rules, but you must first know them and master them to break them. You can have a script with NO CHARACTER GROWTH -- this happens a lot with villians. They don't need to grow. They start bad and remain bad. You can also have a character that has such little growth it is almost unnoticable,

For example, in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, the Hans Landa character, for which Christopher Waltz won an Oscar, never changes really. He's deliciously evil from beginning to end. In fact, Quentin in a filmakker who has mastered the craft of breaking traditional rules-- in many of his screenplays there is no character growth or very little, as in Kill Bill, Resevoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. Howver, 2 things: 1) he doesn't care whether his films are commercial or not and 2) again, he's mastered so many levels of film making that a small character growth/arc in his films can still move us.

How do you work with/create Character Arcs? I know of two ways:

1. Using Index Cards. Some people use each card to write the major moments that change and transform their characters. Depending on which structure model you use and how much detail you want to disucss in the cards, you could have from 10 to 30 cards.

2. The method I use is Character Throughlines. I call it Mapping too. I use lines on a paper draw dots and write down the major turning points in the character's journey below those dots.

What is the importance of Character Arcs?

• A story without character growth of change is BORING. It feels as if the writer is ametur and does not know how to take the audience on a journey
• The audience has an instinctive need to see the character go on a journey and learn something (usually manifested in character growth)
• You should begin mastering character growth, since it is difficult to master on the page, and then experiment with other subtlties or no growth

 

Of course this may not apply to short films which many times are gimick driven! Hope this helps!

Signing off,
The Script Righter