In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Death card to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to craft character arcs and show us detailed examples from famous works.
Question of the week: how do you look at character change and arc, and what tools do you use? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends. Welcome to episode 101 of the Write Away Podcast. It is June 30th, 2022 as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: Oh goodness. It’s been a week. How’s your writing week been?
JP: Yes. It’s been rough waking up in the morning this week. I don’t know why, it just happens sometimes. I’m still moving forward with the edits. I’m about a little under halfway through, and I wanted to be 60-some percent through. I have a couple of days off from the day job so I’m hoping to push forward on that.
And I have been plotting for the Publish in Six which is happening in like one day. And you’re gonna hate me, Crys, because I changed it again since we started talking. I’m not even gonna talk about it, but yes, it’s a completely different story.
Crys: Delightful.
JP: Yep.
Crys: You put the pressure on, and JP’s like, I don’t know, here are 5 billion story ideas.
JP: I think that’s what happens is I go into complete chaos and then I’ll just keep flipping and changing.
Crys: Until the start date.
JP: And I’ve put this in Notion because I’m using the same method Jeff and I use for NRDS so that I can keep it at a specific length. I’m not gonna be super concerned about it getting any longer because I’ve been really good at maintaining lengths when it’s done this way. And I’m actually over 60% through plotting that one out. So I think that’ll be good.
Crys: Delightful. I finished up the book that went live today. So I wanted to finish it up Friday, I did not finish it up until Saturday because I had one of those chapters that was several scenes, or ended up being several scenes. It was written in the outline just as like final battle. As I got to it, it ended up being four scenes and 6,000 words long for the chapter. And the reason I didn’t make those all different chapters, was it was all in one character’s POV. And for this series, we just stick to one POV until we switc to the other one, and that’s the chapter is the POV.
But I finished it up Saturday. I procrastinated for about seven hours straight on writing the last scene, which was in the middle of the book. It was the one that my co-writer had been working on when she passed. So I procrastinated for seven hours straight. And then I finally just put on my big panties and finished it.
And then the first round of editor was following behind me as I wrapped things up. I was able to go through edits very quickly after that and then submit it. And now it’s live and I need to start on the next books. I put the next two books up for pre-order, giving myself a fairly long runway. I really like pre-orders because it captures the reader’s interest when they finish the book. I put a link in the back of the book so they’re able to be like, oh yes, I do want that. I don’t have to work as hard at telling them, hey, this exists.
The commitment helps me as well, so that I know what I need to be doing and in what timeframe. And I’ve given myself a very generous runway. What I would like to do, what I’m very bad at doing, is to sit down and start writing it in the next couple of weeks and just plunk out a thousand words a day. These books tend to be about 40,000 words, and then have it done months before it’s supposed to be released. I can go through the edits, get everything uploaded, get all my emails scheduled, and then just sit back and forget it’s release day like I forget when my birthday is. That’s my ideal.
JP: Yeah. Yeah.
Crys: Indeed.
JP: I love it.
Crys: All right. So our card we’re using this week to inspire our question is the Death card. Would you give us a description of Death?
JP: Absolutely. So upright, keywords are endings, change, transformation, and transition. Reversed its resistance to change, personal transformation, or an inner purging. So in the old-timey tarot, the Death card is the messenger of death. It’s a skeleton dressed in black armor riding a white horse. It represents the part of the body which survives long after life has left. And armor is the invincibility that death will come no matter what.
So I love this card. I love that it doesn’t necessarily mean physical death all the time, but it’s just about endings and beginnings, birth and rebirth, change and transformation.
So this card, whenever I do like weird tarot things, I actually enjoy it just because it means something new is on the horizon and something is coming to a close.
Crys: Yeah. So our question that we wanted to talk about was: how do we craft character arcs? Because those, for the majority of us, involve the character changing from being one person to being another person, or some aspect of themselves changing. Letting go of old beliefs, like letting the old things that serve them die in becoming a new version of themselves.
And the scene that immediately pops to mind when we talk about this is the last scene in Raya the Last Dragon. Or not like the last scene, but like the major, big ending scene. So spoiler alert if you have not seen this movie, the character throughout the whole story is a loner for the most part. She resists anyone helping her or joining her.
She accidentally gathers a little found family that refuses to leave her for their own purposes. And there is one girl, woman by the end of the story because they start out as girls, they start to build a friendship, but because of their parents’ different goals, the other woman, the other girl, betrays Raya. They break the world, literally, and they have to overcome the past and trust each other to not all die.
And in this scene, each person has a piece of the magic and they have to give it up to one person to put it back together. And Raya gives it up to her former enemy and says you need to do this, and gives her full trust. She lets go of all that bitterness and hatred to change the world, and they succeed.
And I cry every time that scene happens because that level of trust, that level of letting those old hatreds and expectations die, and to say, hey, like we’re gonna try and do something different, is so powerful.
JP: Agreed. Yeah, that’s like a perfect example of just a really good character arc and showing how you can put someone in a corner where they have to face their true selves and decide which direction are they gonna go. And everything leading up to that point makes you think that this character is not gonna let it go. But when they do, you are not shocked or surprised or angry about it because it’s a change, a transformation that happens within the character that brings them up to another level. It brings them up to another level of respect almost.
So I really like that because that’s a really good example of a character change that you’re almost like, I don’t know if she’s gonna do this. I can’t believe she’s gonna do this. And then she does, and you’re like, that’s acceptable.
Crys: Because you’ve seen her start to trust the other characters that she doesn’t have a history with. You see them prove to her that they can be trusted. And with her, the girl that she’s been like enemies with for so long, there’s been tiny moments where they’ve both saved each other in small ways, or trusted each other in small ways, where there’s been that hint that this could go differently if we decide to change.
JP: And so when plotting something like that, those are the aspects that you want to ensure that you put in. The facets of how this decision can be made by showing it, show that she puts her trust in these other characters. Show that these two characters have a history together where they’ve been put at strange odds where they’ve had to help each other. so that when it happens later on, you know that yes, this is a natural thing or a natural step to take.
So in my mind, if I were crafting a character like that, I would probably do that in the plotting phase. Because for me, I’m not a pantser. I like to have my scenes set forward so as I’m going through it, I’d be thinking about what that change is gonna be at the end. And then I would try to go back and appropriately balance that within the plot structure.
Crys: Yeah, and this is where I find the lie the character believes is so useful because that is the change I want, for them to go from the lie they believe to the truth. And so for Raya, the big lie specifically was that you can’t trust the other tribes, specifically you can’t trust that tribe and that person.
And I forget, I can’t remember if they were claw or tail, but then she goes on to believe like I’m the only one who can fix what was broken. Like those are her two beliefs. And by the time we get to the end of the story, she learns that she can’t fix things alone and you have to trust people to be able to change the way things were.
And so when you have those two points, like where you’re coming from and where you’re going, then you get to see, okay, what are the little touch points. Like it’s not like we’re gonna do a 180 all at once. That’s not believable. How do we turn 10 degrees then10 degrees? What little things can she learn that are going to build up to the big change?
JP: Almost like thinking about it through your character being this agent of change. She has this internal need for change at the beginning, but it’s within the confines of the external foundations that are set up. And it doesn’t happen until the end, that change agent that’s been internal externalizes and she has to change the way of thinking, the way of the world working in her mind and in other minds. Where these tribes are not separate tribes, but everyone is together. Everyone has to work together. Everyone has to put trust in people that they’ve been told for centuries are the bad guys.
It’s almost your conflict is where your character recognizes that they’re that agent of change, but they’re still working within the confines of the imposing external. And it took this whole time for her to break down that piece and to accept that as an agent of change. She has to change everything.
Crys: Yeah, I’d agree. I do want to just mention that not all stories will have a character arc this intense. Some characters are relatively static on purpose and a lot of those are going to be your episodic mystery of the weak kind of characters. Colombo’s the one coming to mind. I can also picture Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Those characters do not change. They’re not meant to change. They’re meant to be the same person in every story. And so it doesn’t matter where you pick the story up, the character’s always going to be the same and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a very good and useful style of story, but for stories where the character arc is important, this is how we look at it.
JP: Yeah, so like in NRDS, because it’s an ongoing serial, our characters aren’t really having like major character arcs or character growths. We have the bumbling idiot who’s the main character, the only real big arc, quote-unquote, that he’s had has just been learning his role, which isn’t really an arc, it’s just learning how to do something.
But I could see this going on and on where these characters aren’t necessarily changing because the story is driven by like the absurdity of it all. The fact that these characters are so different and they have to work together. One arc we are going through is like a relationship arc. And I can see how you can do these little tiny arcs that don’t really drastically change your character, but it still gives some vibrance to that character. So we get to see a facet of that character grow, but ultimately that character doesn’t change over time.
Crys: Yeah. My question for our listeners this week is: how do you look at character change and arc? And what tools do you use?
Thank you so much for joining us this week and every week. We are about to go record our Patron-only episode, which focuses on business. This week we will be talking about: how do you prepare to transition to full-time writing from a day job? If you would like to have access to that episode and many more, you can come on over to patreon.com/writeawaypodast.
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