Linking the outer story to the inner story
Helen Corner-Byrant and Kathryn Price note this in their book On Editing (John Murray Learning, 2018): ‘The protagonist’s attempts to solve their problem or achieve their goal are what drives the action…[The problem] must be connected to the character by an unbreakable thread; it must form part of the very fabric of their personality … This can be boiled down to: Because of who they are, the character faces an apparently insoluble problem. To solve it, they must change the situation and in doing so change themselves.’ I would add that you can flip this: to solve it, they must change themselves and in doing so change the situation.
The journey your character makes – called the character arc – will shadow the shape of the plot as your character responds to the story events, and as these events come to mean something for the character. The important thing to remember is that in a sense you are following two interconnected storylines.
- The outer story: the action, the problem to be solved/ the goal, the things that happen to the characters.
- And the inner story: the character arc, the way the central protagonist/s changes and grows over the course of the story.
A number of writers point out that to tie the key problem that is to be solved to your character, you also need to identify your character’s misbelief – their flawed thinking that gets in the way of them achieving what they want, of solving the problem. This is sometimes also called the character’s fatal flaw or false belief. It’s a belief about themselves that isn’t correct. For example, that they are in control when they’re not; that they aren’t worthy, when they are; that they can’t do anything right, when they clearly can; that if they meet the expectations of others they will be happy; that if they had more money, everything would be fine.
In a crime manuscript I read, for example, the outer story concerned the central character, a private investigator, finding the truth about the death of a murder victim – that was the problem that needed solving. The inner story concerned the investigator overcoming her acute mistrust of others in order to succeed in solving the crime (the problem of the main plot line), and also the problems that mistrust of others had borne. There was a well-developed sub-plot with a love interest that allowed this inner story to shadow the outer story.
Tracking character arcs
It can be helpful to track your characters’ arcs to ensure that change happens gradually and organically.
I like this exercise from Donald Maas’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, 2016) which you can undertake when you have a completed draft, or outline of the full story.
Stop at four points along the way and at each ask:
- Right now, what is your protagonist seeking for him/herself?
- What does your protagonist need to find? Why is that newly important now?
- Is this character closer to, or farther away from, what he needs? What is the measure of progress?
- What is encouraging? What says give up?
- Has this character yet become who she needs to become? Is that a problem, or is that for now?
As Corner-Bryant and Price: say, you want the reader to ‘witness the evolution of your character manifest in their behaviour and the choices they make.’ Yes, your characters can have epiphanies, but they need to arise from decisions and actions that feel true to the character, not out of the blue, so to speak. Think about what your central character comes to realise about themselves at the end of the story, and how this relates to their sense of self when they entered the story. Who your character becomes, with misbeliefs and flaws stripped away, or at least overcome to a degree, is fundamentally a truer version of who they have always been.
While it is common to talk in terms of characters changing and growing over the course of a manuscript – the stuff of character development – I have to agree with Ada, a character in Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering (Vintage, 2008): ‘If Ada had reached any sort of conclusion in this life, it was a little one. People, she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed.’ Indeed!
For more discussion about characters:
Knowing Your Characters
Revealing Character: Telling Details