Creating Our Own Character Arcs
As human beings, our brains love labels…without us needing to exert even the slightest conscious effort, the second our mind encounters something new, it immediately goes to work finding a place for it within the information we’ve accumulated up to this point in our lives. Research from neuroscience and neuropsychology suggests that we group information because categorization allows us to simplify our complex world, enabling us to react quickly and effectively to new experiences. While this is highly adaptive from a survival perspective, it’s less helpful and, in fact, often harmful when it comes to navigating the world we now live in.
Labels can certainly be supplied by others, but for this post, I’m going to focus on the labels we assign ourselves. If I asked you to tell me five things about yourself, chances are at least half of your answers would fit within some kind of category or act as a type of label. See if you can spot the categories or labels associated with five facts you might not have known about me:
- I’m an introvert
- I love yoga
- My favorite place in the world is the Sahara Desert
- I don’t really like putting my head underwater when I swim
- I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a ranch in Texas
Just from these five statements, you’re already starting to form a mental image of who I am, placing me into categories (extroverted: NO, introverted: YES; cold weather: NO, hot weather: YES) and assigning labels (traveler, Southern, non-swimmer, etc.). Labels aren’t always bad or harmful, but they can be bad or harmful, and it’s important not to take your brain’s categorizing or labeling as truth, even when it’s about yourself. The things we tell and call ourselves can linger far longer than we’d like them to, but the good news is that labels can also change!
Let’s look at two examples of characters changing their self-assigned labels.
In my YA fantasy novel, Reign Returned, my main male character is Sebastian Sayre. We meet him just as he’s completing an assassination contract. His closest business associates are a corrupt crime family. He lives in a cave he begrudgingly shares with a dragon (because even an assassin knows better than to get on the wrong side of a dragon) and shuns any social interactions that don’t involve work or filling his bank account. He loves books and weapons and that’s it. One reviewer described him as “broody and morally grey,” which still makes me inordinately happy.
Now, obviously, if he remained that way throughout the entire book, it wouldn’t be much of a story, and over the course of his character arc, we seem him going from sullen and isolated to curious and working towards shared goals with someone else. While he chose the labels he starts out with, his experiences show him that he doesn’t have to keep those labels for the rest of his life, and slowly he begins to change, to the point that at the end of the book, he’s in love, part of a new-in-this-lifetime relationship, and starting to think he might need to reconsider his career choices.
Unfortunately, changing labels doesn’t always mean swapping out bad or negative labels for good and healthy ones. One of my favorite villains EVER is Robert Goddard from Neal Shusterman’s incomparable Arc of a Scythe series. If you haven’t read it, go do so, and then come back and finish this blog post.
* SPOILERS AHEAD *
Carson Lusk starts off as a hard-working high school student desperate to leave the colony on Mars where his parents work. He wants to attend college on Earth and places a strong value on education. He has friends, goals, and dreams and is part of a larger community. Over the course of his character arc, however, he changes the labels he’s used to define himself thus far and goes from friend to murderer, hard-working to deceitful, considerate to selfish, eventually doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. He effectively gives himself the ultimate new label when he changes his name from Carson Lusk to Robert Goddard. It’s a sad but brilliantly told tale that serves as a reminder of the power of our choices.
Consider taking some time to think about the labels you give yourself. Are they labels you actually want or are you just used to them? What labels would you like to have associated with you and what are some steps you could take towards making those descriptions a reality? You spend more time with yourself than anyone else on the planet, so how you define and think about yourself is incredibly important. When it comes to labeling yourself, choose wisely, as we create our own character arcs every day of our lives.