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This process of thinking about the character arc is really helpful in aiding us to understand the relationship between the plot and character development. Aristotle said in his Poetics that when it comes to a great story, what comes first is the plot and what comes second is character, but character is very close behind. So they're almost tied and I think that today, we hear people talking about plot-driven movies and character-driven movies, and in either case we’re missing the point. A great story really needs both in order to be fully successful. 

The way I relate this to my own life—I find this useful to help me understand what effect I'm trying to create in the story—is that we’ve all gone through this experience of growth, and sometimes can be a little painful, not because the process itself has to be painful or that we have to react to it with suffering, but because as human beings we often respond to change with reticence, and events present themselves in our lives and we evolve. We grow. We become a better person hopefully, but we become certainly a different person. When we look back, we can understand that growth process, but when we look forward, we don't see it unfolding. We can only feel our present, right? So we live in this state of believing that we’re really in equilibrium, that is, that we live this balanced life and this harmony in our day-to-day existence, when in reality and when we look back, we realize we've been constantly stretched from event to event in our own lives, as we encounter obstacles or encouragement or discouragement. We're constantly stretched between who we were and who we’re becoming. The present is always between the past and the future. 

So this illusion of equilibrium that we feel in our lives, compared to the tension between who we are leaving behind and who we’re becoming, is the kind of state we have to constantly see the character living in. Your character needs to walk into a scene completely unconscious of the character arc they’re going through, and yet feeling that tension of being pushed forwards or pulled back by the plot. This is what I mean when I say that the character starts the story in a space of feigned equilibrium. They believe they live a balanced life. They don't understand, maybe they're blind to some of the faults or flaws or fears or ghosts of their past. As they confront the episodes of the story, they're invited to wrestle with who they are, and sometimes to wrestle with their past, and in doing that they can overcome, little by little, those hurdles. Every time we push forward through that process, the character is growing through the character arc.

What does that mean when we get to the end of the story? The resolution after the final climax is kind of this moment when the character has this ability to look back and see who they were and who they’ve become, and think, “Wow, what a journey.” We don't always enjoy it when we're going through that process in life, but when we get there and we see why it was worthwhile we can look back and say, “Wow, I wouldn't want to do it any other way. I needed to be stretched in that way.” Going back once again to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics instead of the Poetics this time, it’s been really helpful for me to understand the character arc with respect to what Aristotle writes in the Ethics. He says character is always a choice and it's a habit. It's the ability to choose time and time again to reflect upon what's right when we encounter an event in life, and to reflect upon what might be a lesser decision, and to make the right choice. That's what every scene of your film does. Every scene of your story is presenting your character with a moment of choosing. Maybe a small one, maybe a big one. The building blocks, the plot beats, are the large moments of choosing, but don't miss the tiny moments of choosing that happen in between. There's always tension in your scene, and that tension is always causing your character to confront a choice to stay who they are, or to push forward into who they're becoming. That process of becoming, that process of leaving behind the famed equilibrium of embracing the discomfort of growth and of establishing a new equilibrium is what the character arc is all about and that’s how character relates so closely to plot. The two are really integrated, just like in our own lives.

So I know I often say that there's a relationship for me between my life as a writer and my life, you know, in my day-to-day activities. That's because I don't really see any divorce between who I am when I'm writing and who I am when I'm going to the grocery store. How do I process that? How do I try to come to terms with my own character arc, if you like, as a writer and as a human being? The key for me is journaling. It's about capturing the ways that, you know, I’ve been challenged to grow, and then also really wrestling with the ways that I might be reticent words that growth process. We all go through that. I mean, for me, writing is a constant challenge. I can be sitting, working on a scene, I can wake up in the morning and it will just unfold. There's this specific scene that I wrote within the last few months at a train station in Paris during the second World War, and some Jewish people are being deported to the camps, and I was shocked at how quickly it sort of came out and unfurled, and I realized that that was in part due to a lot of processing I've done since I was a child growing up in France, and seeing these memorials to the people who died in the war or to the Jews who were deported. 

But at other times it could be as simple as trying to figure out how two lovers are going to get back together, and it can take me weeks, slogging through the process to get there, and I have to realize that for me, that can be related to my own challenges, you know, in life and in love. So in working through the challenges my characters go through, I'm often working through things I have to process in my own life. Journaling helps accelerate that process. If I had to put it really simply, I'd say that for me, that's what it means to write what you know. It doesn't mean write life exactly as it has unfolded to you. It means capture in your scenes the tensions that you feel as a human being, and in that sense, writing makes me more self-aware. It makes me realize why the choices I make in the tiny, tiny day-to-day decisions matter in the grand scheme of things, and it also gives me this ability to sort of zoom out and realize that any difficulty I'm confronting right now is part of a bigger story. It's part of my screenplay that's unfolding. So there's this great balance, I think, and tension between the time I spend working with my characters and the time I spend processing my own life, and I would encourage you to do the same.

It's what keeps me going when the going gets tough, and it makes that process of writing memorable. There's a little bit of me that goes into every story I tell. Even working right now, teaching you this course, there's a little bit of me that goes into that. I imagine, I know what you're thinking, you’re thinking, oh, it was never hard for me. It's so hard for me! I experience writing block all the time. My first semester at Princeton, I worked myself into such a tizzy that I would start writing papers and then I would tear them up because I didn't think they were good enough. So I came back after Christmas during reading period. I had to 14 days to write four papers. It was a total nightmare. I, like, cried all the time. Learning is a constant battle against oneself. For me in that moment in grad school, I learned the dangers of the quest for perfection. The perfect truly is the enemy of the good, and I would encourage you not to tear up the story you're working on right now, and not to give up on the characters you've set in motion. I mean, if you really truly have a better idea right now, by all means fine-tune it. But you're always going to be tempted to see a field that’s greener on the other side of the fence, and it's really important to remember that the best kind of screenplay, the best kind of novel, is a done screenplay and a drafted novel. Once you have that out, you can make the clay shape into something better. 

So I want to encourage you really to wrestle through the challenges you encounter in the writing process, much like your character has to wrestle through the events in the story. That's what's going to encourage you to grow not only as a writer, but also as a human being, and it will probably get you hooked on the process of writing itself. Can I go a long time without writing? I cannot. I get cranky. I mean, I think my friends want to say, “Hey, why don't you just go home and write?” That's probably what Horace meant when he said nulla dies sine linea and what Sartre was getting at when he quoted it: “not a day without a line.” If you are writer, you will feel that urge to write, or you will not feel like you’re yourself. So that's probably what Joss Whedon means when he says, “You either have to do it or you shouldn't be doing it at all.” Follow that urge. Beat the quest for perfection. Good can be great if you allow it to be.

© SJ Murray, 2018