So far, we’ve looked at character arcs on a macro level—characters changing over the course of a story. At the beginning of the series, however, Deb pointed out that characters can also have arcs within a single scene, where they go from one emotion to another, possibly opposite, emotion.

Character emotions are always delicate things. It’s so easy as a writer to push the emotions a little harder than we should, so that they end up unnatural—especially in a delicate transition. Now, of course it’s always possible to use the events of the scene to create a very natural change in a character’s emotion—but it’s not the only way.

Jack Bickham delves into both kinds of changes in his book Scene & Structure. The first kind of change relies on external actions and scene structure. The basic structure of any scene, Bickham says, is Goal – Conflict – Disaster.

The Goal is the POV character’s goal at the start of the scene, for just that scene. (For a story and characters that feel purposeful and driven, have the character state the goal near the beginning of the scene.) The Conflict is what happens as the character pursues the Goal and meets resistance—dialogue, movement, pursuit, etc.

The Conflict builds to the climax of the scene—the Disaster, when the character’s goal is frustrated. Naturally, when the character is frustrated, s/he will have an emotional reaction—for example, she might go from hopeful or determined at the beginning of the scene to discouraged at the end.

So external events can obviously help to bring about a micro character arc. But there’s another way to show emotional change within a scene that we’ll look at tomorrow.

What do you think? How have you handled drastic emotional changes in scenes?

Photo by Tony Case