Wulf Moon's SUPER SECRETS:
Internal Character Arc: Descending Into the Dark Side

By Wulf Moon

In the last two Super Secrets of Writing articles, we discussed the positive or ascending internal character arc, we discussed the neutral or flat internal arc, but (aside from hybrids) there’s one more! The negative or descending internal character arc— the descent of a character from the murky gray into the dark side.

The dark side? Why would we ever want to read or watch stories about people breaking bad, as they say in the South? Many of these characters are villains, people  that decent society remove from their society in order to make their neighborhoods and countries and world a safer place. And yet, tracking a seemingly innocent or impassioned character that spirals from virtue into corruption populates tales old and new, from the Biblical account of the fall of humankind, to the plethora of ancient Greek tragedies, to Shakespeare’s MacBeth in Elizabethan times, to Gothic novels like Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to today’s The Silence of the Lambs and popular shows like the one featuring a chemist that becomes a drug kingpin, Breaking Bad .

Why are tales of misuse of power, greed, corruption, and even psychopathy popular grist for the storytelling mill? Why feature characters that become the polar opposite of what most of us expect as defining outcomes for heroic characters? The answer lies in human nature.

In writing, what makes people tick is the name of the game.

The Duality of Human Nature

It’s often said there’s a duality to human nature, that we have both light and darkness within us. George Lucas made a powerful play on this concept in the Star Wars series with the light side and the dark side of the Force and its power tempting his characters from within. Anakin Skywalker, failing to curb his pride and fear of losing Padmé Amidala in death, spiraled down that slippery slope to the dark side, finally becoming Darth Vader. We wonder in the early episodes how such a tragic outcome could have happened, and Lucas delivers in the cause and effect of Anakin’s decisions in the subsequent prequels.

Why is the descent so fascinating? As the saying goes, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”

Humans have both the propensity to do good to themselves and others, and they have the propensity to harm themselves and others. Sometimes overtly, often covertly, sometimes knowingly, often unknowingly. One human’s belief in what’s good for all can in reality be another human’s concentration camp. So defining such terms as “good” and “bad” or “virtuous” and “evil” can be quite relative to the viewpoint and morals of the individual, tribe, culture, or country making the judgment. Disputes and wars are often fought demonizing the other side, when in truth both sides have some of the divine and some of the devil in them. Give them the chance to go to war and it will become readily apparent. The victors not only write the history, but they also write who was in the right, who was in the wrong, who was the good guy, and who was the bad.

In Western culture, there’s a broad belief that both good and bad rests within each of us, and it’s the choices we make and the actions we take that determine who we are and the type of person we will become. We’ve all heard the story of the Two Wolves. It has many variations, but a common one is a grandfather passing wisdom to a youth about the battle between the positive and negative natures within oneself. To make his point, the grandfather uses the metaphor of two wolves locked in battle.

The youth asks, “Grandfather, which wolf is stronger?”

Grandfather answers, “The one you feed.”

A culture will naturally place actions that enhance and upbuild the members of their culture in a positive light. Actions that demean members of a culture and cause their members harm are cast in a negative light. Stories told by members of a culture normally reflect that culture’s values. Whether we as individuals believe in the varying shades of those values, there generally are absolutes on the positive side of the coin that most cultures will consider virtuous, and there are those on the negative side that most cultures will view as abhorrent, even wicked. While good and evil may have many shades of gray between them in today’s world, there still are defining end zones.

Stories that reveal a character striving to become better and finally achieving their goal for themselves and others can be immensely powerful. They feature a desire to ascend toward enlightenment and to enhance the greater good. That’s a positive internal arc. But stories that show a character failing to learn, failing to become enlightened, or even succumbing to corruption and their darker nature can also be incredibly powerful. Why?

The reason descending internal arcs work in stories are manifold. Let’s explore.

The Reason Why Negative Internal Arcs Work

First, there may be no issue of morality involved at all. One cannot argue that sometimes the appeal of following a character down a dark and sticky rabbit hole could simply be curiosity. Humans are curious by nature, and we can wonder what could lead a person born of woman like us to commit heinous crimes.

Take cannibalism. I remember on a flight back from New Orleans many years ago, I found Robert Asprin of the Phule’s Company series sitting next to me. As we talked of favorite books we had read, Robert told me how mesmerizing Thomas Harris’ writing was in Silence of the Lambs . He said it was so real it was as if he was in the actual presence of a serial killer that ate his victims. Frightening. Repulsive . And yet he, like millions of readers, had been fascinated by the tale and had —forgive me— devoured the vivid style of writing. Not my cup of fava beans, but to each his own.

The chill can be a thrill for many.

But a great power of the negative internal arc is that moral lessons and warnings can be shared through the telling of these character’s stories. Consequences of yielding to negative traits can be passed on as lessons, reinforcing the consequences of negative actions such as avarice, pride, and depravity. Think of how the Greeks used their tragic characters to teach their young through cautionary tales like that of Icarus. Here was a son that failed to listen to the wisdom of his father Daedalus in a life or death situation. Imprisoned in a tower, Daedalus constructed wings for him and his son to escape using feathers and beeswax. But he warned his son not to fly too close to the sea below lest his wings get clogged with moisture (complacency), nor fly too high lest the sun melt the beeswax and cause him to fall (hubris). We all know the tragic result, and to this day some repeat the lesson by saying, “He flew too close to the sun.”

Another appeal of negative arcs is that they satisfy our sense of justice. When a serious, violent wrong is done to others, we hope the perpetrator will somehow be made to pay for their crime. Many horror stories feature characters that feed their dark side, causing them to carry out increasingly depraved and wicked acts. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of these tales. In seeking to abolish the negative side of his dual nature, Dr. Jekyll actually feeds the dark side through transforming into the amoral Mr. Hyde. As Dr. Jekyll continues to experiment with a drug that aids him in exploring his dark side, eventually his dark nature consumes him— Jekyll dies as the deformed monster he hoped to avoid. In the end, these type of characters get their horrific due.

Justice served.

On the DreamCasters’ Podcast episode #36 ( you are a member, aren’t you?), eight times Bram Stoker Award finalist Scott Edelman stated, “There are often horror stories in which a person pays for their sins at the end or someone has a bad end that didn’t have any sense to begin with.” Yes, bad decisions and even stupid decisions have their price, and these stories can remind us of the consequences in the real world. When perpetrators “pay for their sins” for injustices served upon their victims, we feel a sense of relief. We don’t like people “getting away with murder.” It’s an affront to our sense of justice.

If that’s true in the real world, it’s a good point to remember when we write in our fictional worlds. Readers like seeing bad people pay the price for their crimes. Negative internal arc stories with a “got their just desserts” ending satisfies this intrinsic need in humans. We are, after all, writing the human experience, and most humans like to see the bad guys get their comeuppance.

I recently listened to Emmy Award-winning actor Jeff Daniels on CBS Mornings (May 2, 2024). He was promoting the new Netflix series A Man in Full where he played a protagonist with a negative internal character arc. One of the interviewers asked him why incredibly popular shows often feature rich and powerful and often nasty individuals at the center of their stories, and yet we as the audience are fascinated by them.

Jeff Daniels responded with an answer that distills to its essence why we enjoy such stories. Here it is: “I think part of it is because we want to see them fall. I think it’s Shakespearean. You know, as celebrities, as famous people you know that once they build you up, they want to take you down. And so, especially if you made the climb up on the backs of other people, you know, pushing people down and all that, now you’re like, ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me.’ You want to see that guy go down. And you want to watch him go down as slowly as possible as he spins out. I think that’s part of it, you know? We’re pretending to be a hero but we all know you’re not, and we’re waiting for it [the tragedy] to happen.”

How to Play in the Dark

A word of caution. As readers, we’re waiting for the tragedy to happen because smart writers signal the tragedy to come at the end. In the opening of the tale, they hint at the downward spiral to come through foreshadowing . Fail to do so, and the reader is likely to get upset at the tragic outcome for the protagonist and shout, “Why didn’t you tell me they were going to die/ become a drug addict/ lose their one chance at true love?” Wait. Scratch that last. Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while. The point is, when as a child did your parents ever end your bedtime story with, “And they all lived unhappily ever after?” No way, that’s not how it goes! You’ve been programmed from birth to wait for some semblance of the positive ending: “And they all lived happily ever after.”

Even with flawed characters, it appears our human nature always holds out hope that they’ll find their way through their troubled lives and somehow change them for the better. We’ll hold on to this hope all the way to the bitter end of a story, even when the chips are down, even when the cards have been dealt, even when it’s obvious there’s no way a person can play their bad hand and win. When the odds are a million to one, how do we think? “So you’re saying there’s a chance.” Every lottery on earth bets on this aspect of human nature, and wins.

As Alexander Pope said in his Essay On Man , “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Humans are optimistic beings, and that optimism has led individuals, groups, and even nations to victorious outcomes in their darkest hour because they held on to hope when all hope should have been lost. Your readers have optimistic hope built into their DNA— likely, it’s been critical to their own success in life, maybe even their survival. So, you’re going to need to shake your reader out of their optimistic tree, get their feet back on the ground, and tell them up front this is not going to be one of those kind of stories.

One of my favorite examples of foreshadowing —a word which here means a flashing sign at Grand Central Station saying “This Train to Hell”— is in the book A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket. Here is the opening of chapter one:

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Okay, if a toothpick represents typical foreshadowing, that’s a two-by-four. But it certainly controls reader expectations. It makes the point: DON’T expect your happy opening, DON’T expect your happy little triumphs in the middle, and DON’T complain at the end of the series when you DON’T get your happy ending. I warned you. This is a TRAGEDY.

It works the same way with negative internal arcs in your characters. Readers need to be told to let go of their intrinsic optimism, it’s not happening here. Granted, perhaps not as bluntly as Lemony Snicket —a word which here means the pen name of Daniel Handler— but there should be cues the train for this character arc is not going to follow hopeful tracks.

How do you control reader expectations with subtlety? Here's an example of how I did it in the tragic fantasy story “The Saltmarsh” published in the 2023 anthology GAME ON! by Zombies Need Brains LLC. The tale opens with a Nereid —a word which here means a sea nymph in Greek mythology— that journeys from the Mediterranean to a distant shore searching for a new home to raise her offspring. Natania finds a saltmarsh far away from human habitation that appears perfect for her needs. She uses a scrying device to “phone home” with the news to her betrothed, a young Triton lord named Nemses.

Nemses chastises her for traveling so far without telling him and says, “We don’t know those lands. We don’t know what dangers lurk upon those shores.”

Natania brushes him off. “What dangers? There’s hardly anyone here.”

When she refuses to immediately return home, Nemses says, “You have always been impetuous. You dive before you look. It will get you into trouble, Natania.”

Boom. There is her fatal flaw, exposed in the opening scene. Natania is impetuous. She takes risks without considering the outcome. The reproof by her betrothed to warn Natania is not just for her— I’m warning the reader that this negative character trait is going to get Natania into trouble. Foreshadowing. It’s important. It adjusts reader expectations. And sure enough, in the same scene, Natania gets trapped on that beach by a goblin chieftain. She must choose whether to play a dangerous game known as Goblin’s Gambit. A game she knew no one in history had ever won, but she’d show this grisly creature just how wily a Nereid could be…

And so, her descent into the deadly game begins where her morals get tested as she becomes consumed with besting this goblin. As we witness her downward spiral, we might wonder how far we’d be willing to go to achieve victory, and whether the victory would be worth the price paid.

The foreshadowing in this story was subtle, but just enough to warn the reader that dear Natania was going to be tested and the outcome would probably not be the one they would normally expect. Did it work? The editors told me when they read the story, they immediately placed it in their purchase file, they didn’t even compare it against other submissions. It also won a Best of the Year readers’ choice award where thousands of readers vote each year. But what really told me the negative internal arc worked? An e-mail from an unknown reader: “Ooooh, just finished The Saltmarsh . I think I'll be having nightmares based on that for a while. Very well crafted.”

Mission accomplished.

Yes, we love our heroes that face their fears and cast aside their false beliefs, rising through the trials faced in the plot to become better people, making a positive impact upon their world. And we love our steadfast heroes that have no need to change, ideals of truth, justice, and self-sacrifice. But there’s another type of hero, sometimes referred to as the anti-hero, that the majority in a society would view as no hero at all— the protagonist that fails to grow and even descends into the darkness of villainy or even madness. Their stories also need to be told, because they are a part of the story in the real world around us as well.

Step over to the dark side. Well, not completely— I don’t want you to be consumed like Victor Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll or Darth Vader. But being tempted by base emotions and corrupted desires is a reality of the human experience. It is important to warn society that there can be tragic consequences. Unravelling these characters can also be a fascinating study and thrilling to readers… as long as we ourselves are not tempted and fall into their same tragic end. There is power, after all, in the dark side, and there but for the grace of God, go I.

May the Force be with you.