To me, plot and character arc go hand in hand. Plot provides the opportunity for the character to change, and the character’s development affects what choices she makes to make the plot go forward. As I said, I believe that in women’s commercial fiction at least, character arc is more important than plot, because readers want to be pulled into the emotional life of the heroine and to feel satisfied at the end that something has changed.

In a lot of Mills & Boon books, there’s hardly any plot; the emotional journey carries the reader through. I wonder sometimes if people who say M&Bs are formulaic are missing this particular aspect—they’re looking at the external plot, which tends to contain the same sorts of things (courtship, arguments, lovemaking, marriage, misunderstandings, etc), instead of the emotional character arc, which is unique to each character and author.

In theory, at least, you could have a bigger book with very little plot and the focus almost wholly on character arc, but I can’t think of that many. You just need a bit of plot to give a bigger book pace. Anybody Out There, by Marian Keyes, I seem to remember, has very little plot, mostly focusing on the emotions of the character to one pivotal event. But maybe I just don’t remember it very well. I tend to remember character arc much better than plot in any given book.

Anyway, all of this leads to the next bit:

How do you create character arc?

Well, rather, how do I create character arc, because I’m sure it’s different for every writer. Right now I’m in the planning stages of my next book, and to me, that’s all about character arc. I’m not a plotter, but I am an arc-er. I do it in steps.

Step one: create inner conflict.

Usually, when I begin to plan, I identify my main character, who she is, what her problems are. I’ll do a bunch of brainstorming around her to figure out what her main (internal) issue is, and why. So say, for example, I decided my heroine will have trust issues. I’ll then spend a lot of time working out why she has these issues, how it’s affected her, what decisions she’s likely to have made because of these trust issues. For example, she’s likely to have a shaky relationship with her parents and family, she’s likely to work alone and live alone, though maybe she’s at the top of a ruthless corporate ladder; she may not have any close friends, or maybe she just has one or two close friends who are the only people she lets into her life. She may have developed a bad habit of betraying other people before they get a chance to let her down; she may, on the other hand, be immensely charming and yet superficial because she’s afraid of being hurt. There are a lot of possibilities, and part of planning a book is deciding which ones to use. The bigger the book, the more complex you can make this conflict, and you can give a character more than one related conflict.

This main conflict will affect her career, her family, her friendships, her behaviour, her way of dressing, her speech patterns, her reputation, her favourite cuddly toy—in short, everything about this character will be determined, in some way, by her inner conflict, even if this particular aspect might seem contradictory.

So, for example, I’ve got Fil in Girl from Mars, who has low self-confidence as one of her inner conflicts. She thinks she’s unattractive, and socially inept. Yet she dyes her hair bright look-at-me colours. You’d think that would convey confidence, but as a matter of fact it’s because she’d rather people noticed her hair than her. So late in the book, when she changes her hair colour, the reader can see it’s significant in showing how she feels about herself.

Step two: play with the conflict to create the character arc.

Once you know a character’s problems, then you can also figure out how to solve them, at least on a basic level. A character who’s afraid to trust needs to learn to trust. A character with low self-esteem needs to gain confidence. Et cetera. This is the easy part. And, by extension, their solving their conflict will lead to changes in their lives—they’ll get the hero, or find a better job, or reconcile with their mother, or whatever it will take to make them happy. (Sometimes I don’t really know the exact outcome or changes before I begin. I’ll know the character has to trust, for example, but I don’t know yet how that will lead to her having a job she’s happy with, or what that job will be. For me, those are details, and they fill themselves in as I write.)

Once you’ve figured that out, you have both the start point and the end point of your character arc. The problem is, of course, how to get from one point to the other.

A good character arc is never smooth. Characters don’t want to change. A character who doesn’t want to trust, for example, isn’t just suddenly going to start trusting because we’re on page 257 and we need to end the story soon. She needs to be challenged, and fail, and she needs to learn from it—perhaps several times. Maybe she needs to be forced to trust, and it doesn’t work out. Maybe because she doesn’t trust, something awful happens. Every little event is a step forward or back, but generally, events and emotions are sweeping her forward towards the great change that will happen near the end of a book.

When I’m designing a story, I think in the most general terms of character arc—something like this (which is simplified):