Wulf Moon's SUPER SECRETS:
Internal Character Arc: Why We Hope for Change

By Wulf Moon

My favorite time travel movie? That’s easy. Back to the Future (followed closely by Back to the Future Part III). You’ve seen the movie. Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student living in 1985 is accidentally sent thirty years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his older friend and scientist, Emmet “Doc” Brown. Unfortunately for Marty, he bumps into his father in the past, changing events that brought his mother and father together, putting Marty in great danger of being “erased … from existence.”

The plot of this story focuses on Doc’s helping Marty find a way to bypass the dead nuclear reactor in the DeLorean that generates the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to charge the flux capacitor that makes time travel possible. I mean, we all know in 1985 plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. Will Doc and Marty find a way to generate the necessary 1.21 gigawatts to get him back to the time period he came from? The only thing that can generate that kind of power in 1955 is a bolt of lightning, and unfortunately, just like inspiration for writers, you never know where or when it’s going to strike!

Marty’s heart’s desire in this story is to get back home— he has big plans with his girlfriend Jennifer that weekend. Since Marty is the protagonist, we expect him to learn some valuable lessons about himself through the journey into the past and back to the future, but aside from learning ‘never travel in a nuclear-powered time machine without bringing along extra plutonium,’ Marty doesn’t truly grow as a character. He’s skateboard riding, fun-loving Marty McFly at the start, and he’s virtually the same character at the end. No big internal transformation.

The character that does go through major internal changes through interaction with his son is George McFly. The transformation that occurs to characters that takes us on an emotional internal journey while the plot takes us on an external one? It’s called the Internal Character Arc.

Internal Character Arc—What Is It?

Not all stories have a transformational internal character arc built into them, but those that do carry deep emotional power that make stories memorable long after the excitement of the rollercoaster plot ends and the magazine, book, or tablet is closed. It’s an important tool we should have in our toolbox, especially if we seek to write compelling characters that are the foundation of award-winning short stories, novels, and movies. Stories that include a transformational change in the internal emotions, morals, and/or values of characters go deeper than stories that merely focus on surface plot (think of James Bond’s character in all of the older Bond movies).

Done well, the internal character arc can help readers empathize with fictional characters, creating emotional issues within those characters that can make them appear to be real people with real internal struggles, struggles we as readers may be able to identify with. Stories that include internal character arc not only deepen our understanding of people and the trials they face within, they can also help us cope with knotty issues we may struggle with deep inside ourselves.

We’ve all heard the term narrative arc or story arc, which is the sequence of events in the plot that makes a story rise toward its climax, plateau, and then descend back down to the resolution or denouement. When you graph it out, it looks much like a bell curve. An arc. What goes up must come down. All the story energy builds toward whether or not the protagonist will get their heart’s desire, the question is answered at the climax, and then the energy deflates like a balloon, sending the protagonist back down to earth and the world they know, hopefully the wiser after their turbulent journey.

Hold up! There’s another arc happening in most stories we may be less aware of, but it’s a powerful tool writers use to create compelling characters. It’s called an internal character arc, and it charts the emotional progress of your characters as they ride the balloon to the turbulent heights of your story. Wheeeeee!

Just as a story has multiple external plot events going on, realistic characters that experience those events have feelings and internal reactions to them. In fact, in the most powerful stories, writers use external events as a foil to expose the deepest emotions of their characters, often forcing them to face their greatest fears, to strip away the protective shields over their emotional scars, or to stand fast for their beliefs as they are challenged in a trial by fire. After all, it’s in the heated crucible where gold is proven by its sheen, or where fool’s gold is revealed by turning black. How we react under pressure and the choices we make reveals who we truly are. Why wouldn’t it be the same for our fictional characters?

So, before we set our characters on the road of our plot, or into the basket of our hot-air balloon, let’s examine why it’s important to give our readers a quick look under the hood early in our stories. For an emotional transformation to take place in our characters, our readers need a hint at their beginning baseline.

Real People Have Real Problems

I recently watched an interview with a famous singer where she confessed she had been a drug addict for many years and honestly didn’t know how she had been so productive during the height of her success. As the interview concluded, she was asked if she’d like to change anything in her life. Her response? “I wouldn’t change a thing. No regrets.”

I’ve listened to many celebrities make the same statements in interviews, and I am always shocked. Surely there’s a few things in life they wish they hadn’t said or done. I know I wish I could change more than a few things, and I bet you feel the same. And yet, I hear celebrities make this statement over and over again. Maybe this explains why so many of their marriages and relationships became train wrecks, and why they spent fortunes moving in and out of rehab centers: because they never changed a thing. Who knows, and I don’t want to judge. But it always shocks me when celebrities make statements like this.

The truth is, we all make mistakes. And if we aren’t emotionally disabled, we all can admit we’ve said and done things that have hurt others, and others have said and done things that have hurt us. Some of these things are minor, some are major. The big ones can leave us or others with deep emotional scars. Scars that can handicap us in life, holding us back from achieving what we personally define as success, perhaps even sabotaging us from enjoying happy relationships and joy in life if we can’t rise above the damage that was done. There are traumatic and even clinical emotional issues that can never be solved by saying, “Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Hopefully, that’s not one of the things we’ve said to someone suffering that we now wish we could change. Just as we’d never want to be cavalier about this with people in real life, we want to be sensitive about how we write our fictional characters, too.

Isn’t it true we hope people we know and care about will learn from life’s struggles? If we become aware someone we care about is having their life destroyed by a vice, don’t we hope they’ll find a way to overcome it, both for the good of themselves and the people around them? When we see another’s child cowering before bullies, don’t we hope they’ll find a way to stand up for themselves, or get the courage to speak to authority figures so the bullies will back off and leave them alone? If woman has a physically abusive mate (and it works the other way, too), does not our heart go out to them, hoping they’ll find the internal emotional power to make a break from the relationship and change their circumstances before something worse happens?

We all have a heart. We may have even experienced similar traumatic events ourselves. Just as we hope for positive change for those we care about that are struggling through trials, we can feel that same way about fictional characters, becoming emotionally bound to their struggles. This, too, is the deep magic of storytelling. Recognizing this fact about our humanity and weaving realistic emotional scars and struggles within our characters is a way to bind our readers to them. And if we can set a beginning baseline with the forces our characters struggle with internally, we then are able through the course of our plot to expose their wounds or flaws or misguided beliefs, and reveal an arc of change by the end of the story. The struggle is real. So is the desire to see people work through their issues and find their way to a better future for themselves. If not that, at least the ability to cope, even if it’s by not being so hard on ourselves and others— by coming to the realization that we are all a work in progress.

The Span of Your Character’s Emotional Journey

Let’s go back to Back to the Future. The emotional journey, the internal character arc, really isn’t Marty’s. It’s his father’s, George McFly. Great care is taken at the start of the movie to establish George’s baseline. George has been bullied by his rival, Biff Tannen, all his life. Biff is now his boss, and even when Biff trashes the family’s car, George is a wimp and cowers before him. George allows Biff to walk all over him, and as Biff leaves with a beer stolen from his fridge, George looks at his crestfallen son. “I know what you're gonna say, son. And you're right, you're right. But uh ... Biff just happens to be my supervisor, and I'm afraid I'm just no good at ... confrontations.”

See the baseline? We have no idea yet what traumatic events damaged George McFly earlier in his life that turned him into a soggy piece of milk toast, but we know through this introductory scene he’s damaged goods. George knows he should do better, he admits as much to his son, but he’s obviously allowed himself to get bullied into a man that would rather accept abuse than stand up to it, even when it harms the wellbeing of his family. This guy is pretty low on most people’s expectations of what a man with a family to look out for should act like. He’s not a bad guy, but is he the stuff we expect our heroes to be cut from? Certainly not.

But what if you could transform him through the course of the story from accepting such a low opinion of himself, and help him find the power to turn himself into a man we can respect and admire? That’s a huge internal character arc, and the bigger the span, the greater the emotional journey for the viewer. In fact, consider George’s internal arc and the effect it had on you when George finally meets that transformational moment in the past and chooses to stand up for what is right. Did you cheer inside when George clenches his fist and takes Biff down with a knockout punch? I’m sure you did. Like me, you hoped he could rise above his fears and do the right thing; it was emotionally satisfying when he did. And, as we later found out when Marty went back to the future, George’s overcoming his fears and standing up for himself and others early in his life changed his density, I mean, his destiny. For the betterment not only for himself, but for his whole family. Respect.

So, here’s the graph of the internal arc. Baseline set at the start of the movie revealing to viewers the low point in George’s self-esteem. Exploration of the cause, and then the coping mechanisms George developed in his late teens to try to deal with it. Then, the crucible, a test of direct confrontation with his greatest fear. Then, triumph as George made the choice to stand for what’s right. Defeat of the adversary, proving he had conquered his fear. And even a denouement, showing how confronting his fear and triumphing over it brought boons to his life and those around him, his family. George is now the teacher, the one sharing knowledge gained through his trial by fire to help others. “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Simple psychology, but hearing the George formally known as milk toast say this? Heavy.

George McFly was taken on what is known as a positive internal character arc. His baseline self-esteem was low. George was damaged goods. But by the end of the story, the emotional journey George went on landed him in a better place internally. George ends the story with healthy self-esteem, he now has the courage to tell Biff to stop hustling him and get that second coat of wax on the car, and he has a family that now has its act together. Positive change. It’s not the only way the internal character arc can be played, and other internal arcs can be discussed in a future article. But for a feel-good movie, a positive internal character arc gives the movie a feel-good ending.

And Marty happily got back to the future, and because of his successful efforts to straighten out events he messed up in the past’s timeline, he actually got himself a home-life upgrade. Now, he’s even got a shiny new four-by-four truck to take Jennifer to the lake with. Life is good, better than ever.

What could possibly go wrong?