Arc and Theme

Choice, Change and the Argument of a Book: The Full Treatment

The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition), Reference — Chapter 12. Part III: The Architecture of the Whole.

This chapter is new in the second edition, so its Reference layer is this single file rather than a corrected original. It extends the reader’s version in Core, Arc and Theme, and can be read without it: the definitions it relies on are restated in section 1. Illustrative passages are quoted briefly for the purposes of criticism and study, and full citations appear in section 10. Where a work is read in translation, the translator is named.

Contents

1. Scope and working definitions
2. The theory at length: Aristotle on character and choice; Forster’s flat and round; Egri’s premise and its descendants; the arc models compared; theme as a question; the evidence
3. The extended catalogue of arcs: the disillusionment arc, arcs across an ensemble, the arc held across a series, and a summary table
4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns
5. The diagnostic procedures, with a blank criterion log and answer map
6. Further analyses: Project Hail Mary, The Kite Runner, Paddington 2
7. The household arcs in full
8. The limits of the model
9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms
10. Sources

1. Scope and working definitions

A character’s arc is the course, across a whole book, of the rule by which that character resolves dilemmas. The rule is the criterion, a term from Chapter 2: a rule about which cost is more bearable, applied whenever a character must choose between two options each of which costs something. Most decisions are made on a criterion the character already holds. The hinge, also Chapter 2’s term, is the decision at which a dilemma is resolved on a criterion the character did not hold before; the old rule is usually outranked rather than refuted. An arc is therefore read by setting a character’s largest decisions side by side and comparing the rules behind them.

A theme is a question a book tests rather than a proposition it asserts, as Chapter 16 puts it for the ending. It differs from a topic, which names what the book is about, and from a thesis, which is one answer. Read from the other side, each character’s criterion is that character’s answer to the book’s question, and the book argues by arranging the answers and by where the protagonist’s hinge places the protagonist among them.

The governing claim is that arc and theme are one structure. An arc exists only at a decision that costs something the old rule valued, and a theme is argued by setting one character’s choice beside the others’ rather than by saying what it means; a change that is announced, or a meaning that is spoken, is an arc or a theme in description only. The claim is about where change and meaning are made, in decisions, and not about how much change a book should contain. A book whose protagonist does not change can satisfy it, provided the refusal or the steadfastness is itself chosen under pressure.

The chapter does not treat the single decision and its dilemma (Chapter 2), the allocation of minds through which an arc can be shown from inside (Chapter 13), thematic counterpoint between plot lines (Chapter 14), the completion of arcs and the closure of themes at the last pages (Chapter 16), the midpoint’s change of mode or knowledge (Chapter 11), the reader’s change of understanding at a revelation (Chapter 15, The Reveal) or the arc of a character carried across several volumes (Chapter 17, Series and Genre).

2. The theory at length

2.1 Aristotle: character in choice

The Poetics is the oldest source for the idea that character is shown in choice. In S. H. Butcher’s translation: “Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids.” The words are ēthos and prohairesis, and the second means deliberate choice, a decision taken with a view to an end. The consequence Aristotle draws, that plot ranks above character, follows from the definition: a person is known by what they do, and what they do is plot. A speech in which a character says nothing about what they would choose, Aristotle adds in the same chapter, does not express character at all.

The Poetics also supplies a term the chapter uses at one remove. Its recognition, anagnorisis, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, and in the best tragedies it coincides with a reversal of fortune. Recognition is not an arc in this chapter’s sense, since it changes what a character knows rather than the rule by which they choose. But the commonest staged arc in the novel puts a recognition before the hinge, and the refused arc ends on a recognition with no hinge after it, so the relation between the two is the axis on which several of the arcs in section 3 differ.

2.2 Forster’s flat and round

E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) gives the most quoted account of which characters change. Flat characters are “constructed round a single idea or quality”; round characters are “capable of surprising in a convincing way”. Forster defends flat characters, which are easy to recognise and remember, and reserves only tragedy of any length for the round. His test of roundness has two halves, and the chapter’s conditions for a change divide between them. Surprise is what the seed must not spoil and the scheduled arc loses; conviction is what the seed, the price and the enactment supply. A change that meets only the first half reads as the author’s convenience, and one that meets only the second reads as a plan.

Forster’s division has a corollary that the arc models in section 2.4 tend to forget. A flat character can be the agent of another character’s change, and a book can have a round protagonist who does not change. Neither is a failure in his terms.

2.3 Egri’s premise and its descendants

Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946), written for playwrights, begins from the premise, “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved; a basis of argument”, and gives Macbeth’s as “Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction”. A play is the proof of its premise, carried out by characters whom conflict forces to change, and the writer who knows the premise knows what kind of person can carry it to its conclusion. Egri’s book was written for the theatre and was taken up by screenwriting teachers, and the manuals that followed turned his proof into a sequence of stages.

Robert McKee’s Story (1997) separates characterisation, the observable sum of a person’s traits, from true character, which “is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature”. He restates the premise as the controlling idea, a value and the cause by which it is won or lost, and sets it against a counter-idea that the story must give its due. John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story (2007) gives the hero a weakness and a need, a desire, an opponent and a self-revelation, and calls the story a moral argument, conducted through the hero’s and the opponent’s actions rather than through statement. K. M. Weiland’s Creating Character Arcs (2016) builds the arc on the lie the character believes, and names five arcs by what happens to it: the positive change arc, in which the character gives up the lie for a truth; the flat arc, in which the character already holds the truth and changes the world; and three negative arcs, disillusionment, in which the character learns a painful truth, fall, in which a character who knew the truth abandons it, and corruption, in which the character is gradually enslaved by lies. James Scott Bell’s mirror moment, discussed in Chapter 11, places at the centre of the book the scene in which the protagonist looks at what they have become.

2.4 The arc models compared

The table sets the main models against the chapter’s terms. It is introduced here because the models use different words for overlapping things, and a writer moving between manuals can mistake a difference of vocabulary for a difference of method.

The models agree that change is made visible by choice under pressure and that its cause should be planted early. They differ on whether the change is in knowledge (Truby’s self-revelation) or in choice (McKee’s), and the chapter sides with choice: a self-revelation that is not followed by a decision is the announced arc. They also share the assumption that change is the value a story serves, which section 8 takes up.

2.5 Theme as a question

The manuals state themes as propositions: Egri’s premise, McKee’s controlling idea. This chapter states them as questions, for a practical reason. A proposition written down before drafting tends to produce characters who illustrate it, and the opposition becomes a figure the book exists to defeat. A question can be answered differently by several characters, and McKee’s counter-idea and Truby’s moral argument both require that it should be. The proposition remains useful as the answer a book reaches, found in revision by reading the decisions, and the answer map in section 5 is a way of finding it.

Four carriers of theme are distinguished in the Core chapter. The decision at the hinge is the book’s verdict, persuasive because the reader has weighed its cost. Variation, other characters answering the same question differently, is the argument the verdict is tested against. The motif, a recurring object or image, shows that the question persists and where its weight lies but cannot argue alone. Statement, a character or narrator saying what the book means, is the most explicit and the weakest as argument, and at the ending it borrows the authority of the last position that Chapter 16 calls privileged. The order runs from strongest to weakest as argument, on the reasoning that a carrier argues to the degree that the reader has felt a cost attached to it.

2.6 The evidence

Melanie Green and Timothy Brock (2000) ran four experiments on transportation, the reader’s absorption into a narrative world. Readers who were more transported held more story-consistent beliefs afterwards and judged the protagonists more favourably, and labelling the story as fact or as fiction made little difference to either. The finding supports the claim that a story’s events can move a reader’s beliefs. It does not test the difference between stated and enacted themes, and the chapter’s preference for enactment rests on the conjecture, consistent with the finding, that statement addressed to the reader interrupts the absorption through which the effect works.

3. The extended catalogue of arcs

3.1 The five arcs in brief

The Core chapter names five arcs by what happens to the criterion. In the conversion arc the criterion changes once, at a single priced decision, usually late. In the staged arc it changes in steps, or is recognised at one point and acted on at another. In the falling arc it is replaced by a worse one, usually through decisions each of which is defensible on the old rule. In the steadfast arc it holds under pressure designed to break it, and the change happens to others. In the refused arc the character reaches the hinge, sees the decision the new rule would make, and chooses by the old one. The Core chapter also rules on Chapter 2’s proposal of the hinge as a seventh beat: the hinge is adopted at the scale of the book, as the point where an arc is located, and rejected as a beat, since most decisions have none, it is inferred by comparison rather than seen, and two of the five arcs have none by design. The ruling concedes that arcs of erosion, such as Lydgate’s in Middlemarch, may have no hinge a reader can find.

3.2 The disillusionment arc

Weiland’s disillusionment arc, in which the character learns that what they believed is false, is a sixth form that the Core chapter folds into the staged and refused arcs. What changes in it is knowledge about the world, and the criterion may survive the change or break under it. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) is the classic case of a criterion that survives: Emma Bovary’s belief in the romance of novels is disproved by each lover in turn, and she goes on choosing by it until her debts close every move. The disillusionment arc is useful as a diagnosis when a draft’s protagonist learns a great deal and decides nothing differently. The writer must then choose: let the knowledge reach a decision, which makes the arc staged, or make the failure to decide differently the subject, which makes it refused.

3.3 Arcs across an ensemble

A book with several principal characters usually gives them arcs that answer one question in different ways, and the arcs are variations in the sense of section 2.5. Pride and Prejudice gives Darcy a counter-arc to Elizabeth’s: she learns that her judgement was prejudiced, he that his manner was proud, and each changes in a way the other’s change makes visible. The Godfather sets Kay’s arc against Michael’s, and her last position, outside the closing door, is the film’s measure of his fall. The ensemble’s risk is the arc for everyone in section 4.4: if every principal changes towards the same rule, the variation collapses into a single answer, and the cast has nothing unchanged against which to read the change.

3.4 The arc held across a series

A series hero’s criterion must survive into the next volume, so the series usually gives its hero a steadfast arc and moves the changes to the people each book introduces. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, whose Make Me (2015) Chapter 3 reads, is a clear case: each novel puts his rule under pressure in a new town, and the town changes. Some series give the hero a slow staged arc across volumes, with each book completing a smaller arc of its own. The arrangement is Chapter 17’s subject.

3.5 Summary table

The table summarises the catalogue, including the disillusionment arc, so that a writer can find the form a draft’s protagonist has and the risk that comes with it.

Weiland’s five arcs map onto the table as follows: her positive change arc is the conversion or staged arc; her flat arc is the steadfast arc; her fall and corruption arcs are both falling arcs, distinguished by whether the character once held a better rule; her disillusionment arc is the last row. The refused arc has no place in her scheme.

4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns

4.1 The five patterns of the Core chapter

The announced arc substitutes a realisation for a decision (exception: The Great Gatsby, where the retrospective narrator’s telling is the change). The free hinge changes the criterion after the plot has removed its cost (exception: Jane Eyre, whose return to Rochester is free and whose departure was paid in full). The scheduled arc is predicted from the first chapters and delivered on time (exception: The Kite Runner, section 6.2). The revoked arc returns to the old rule after the hinge because the plot needs it (exception: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose Evasion Leo Marx argued in 1953 jeopardises the novel’s significance). The sermon removes variation and leaves the theme to statement (exception: Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The patterns below extend the catalogue, each with the same four parts.

4.2 Replacement

Symptom. The character at the end is a different person: different manner, different wants, different voice. Readers say the change is total and unconvincing.

Mechanism. No constant survives, so the reader cannot read a development against anything. Replacement usually comes from revising the end of a draft without revising its beginning, so that two versions of a character meet in one book.

Remedy. Test 5. Keep one thing unaltered and visible in the decision that confirms the change: the want, a habit of attention, a way of speaking.

Exception. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91), in which the change is moved off the character altogether. Dorian’s face stays young and beautiful while the portrait records each act, so the constant is the face and the arc is in the painting. The device makes replacement visible as the subject.

4.3 The drifting theme

Symptom. The question the opening poses is not the one the ending answers. Readers find the ending satisfying in itself and unrelated to the book they began.

Mechanism. The writer discovered the book’s real question while drafting, and revised the ending to answer it without revising the opening to pose it. The hinge is then a verdict on a question the reader was never asked.

Remedy. Tests 7 and 8. Write the question the ending answers, and revise the opening and the answer map to pose it.

Exception. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), which opens as Ishmael’s account of going to sea to cure his low spirits and becomes Ahab’s tragedy, with Ishmael’s own question left behind until the epilogue returns him, floating on a coffin. The drift is part of the book’s encyclopaedic form, and readers who expect a single question are told early that they will not get one.

4.4 The arc for everyone

Symptom. Every principal character learns something by the end, usually the same thing.

Mechanism. The variation that should carry the theme collapses into a single answer, and the cast has no constant among it. The book becomes a sermon delivered by its whole cast.

Remedy. Test 8. Let at least one principal keep the old answer, at a cost the book acknowledges.

Exception. Richard Curtis’s film Love Actually (2003), whose ten linked stories mostly converge on one answer, that love should be declared. It holds partly because two strands do not: Sarah gives up a declared love for her brother’s sake, and Karen stays in a marriage she now knows is damaged. The film keeps two unconverted answers, and its own answer is tested against them.

4.5 The decorative motif

Symptom. A recurring object or image is noticed by readers and discussed by the writer, and it is never present at a decision.

Mechanism. The motif carries the theme without arguing it, since it is attached to nothing chosen. It becomes ornament, and the writer, sensing that the theme is not landing, adds more of it.

Remedy. Put the motif in the room at the hinge, so that the decision is taken with it or about it.

Exception. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which the striking of Big Ben marks the hours across many minds and attaches to no decision. The book is about consciousness in time rather than choice, and the motif carries what the book argues: that the hours are shared and the minds are not.

4.6 The untested steadfast arc

Symptom. The protagonist’s rule holds throughout, and the book never makes holding it cost anything. Readers find the hero admirable and the book inert.

Mechanism. A steadfast arc depends on pressure. Without temptation or loss the criterion is not held but merely possessed, and the change transferred to others has no cause the reader can see.

Remedy. Test 1, read as a steadfast arc. Offer the protagonist the world’s terms, with something to lose by refusing them.

Exception. Paddington 2 (2017), section 6.3, whose bear is never tempted to be anything but kind. The film puts the cost into suffering rather than temptation, wrongful imprisonment and a near drowning, and its comedy’s contract does not ask for more.

5. The diagnostic procedures

The eight tests in the Core chapter run on two documents.

The criterion log has one row for each of the five to eight largest decisions a character makes, in book order, and five columns: position, as a percentage of the book; the options; the choice; the rule, as a short imperative in the character’s idiom; and the cost. Fill the rule column last, from the choice and the cost rather than from the writer’s intention. Then read down it. Tests 1 and 2 read the column for change and for the decision at which it occurs; test 3 reads the cost column at the hinge and the rows before it; test 4 looks for the new rule in other characters’ logs before the hinge; test 5 compares the first and last rows for what stays the same; test 6 looks after the hinge for a situation from an earlier row repeated and answered differently.

The answer map has the thematic question at the top, written as a question with at least two possible answers, and one row for each major character: the character, their rule from the criterion log, and the rule rewritten as an answer to the question. Test 7 checks that the question can be answered differently; test 8 checks that the opposition’s answer succeeds or costs something somewhere in the book. The protagonist’s hinge is then located on the map: the new rule adopts another character’s answer, combines two, or finds one no character held.

A last procedure helps with test 6. List every situation in the first third of the book that a character meets and could meet again: a call not made, a question not asked, a door not opened, an object not touched. These are the available enactments, and a strong hinge is usually confirmed by one of them.

6. Further analyses

6.1 Project Hail Mary: the hinge after the recognition

Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (2021) opens with its narrator waking alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, and his memories return in fragments throughout the book. Ryland Grace, a former scientist turned schoolteacher, believes for most of it that he volunteered for a mission to save Earth from a microbe dimming the sun. Late in the book a returning memory tells him otherwise: he refused, out of fear, and was sedated and sent. The recognition changes his knowledge of his own criterion, self-preservation, and the hinge follows it. Having found the organism that can save Earth and launched it home, Grace learns that it will also destroy the fuel aboard the ship of Rocky, the alien engineer who has become his friend, and he turns back to save him, giving up his own return. The epilogue finds him years later on Rocky’s planet, teaching its young science. Weir has said of the late revelation that Grace “resisted the call, but the call overcame his resistance. He didn’t choose to go.” The book is a staged arc in which the recognition comes almost at the hinge, so that the reader learns the old rule’s full cost only when the new one is about to be chosen. The constant is the teacher, who is a teacher at the end.

6.2 The Kite Runner: the scheduled arc at full price

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) is the Core chapter’s exception to the scheduled arc, and it repays a longer look. The first chapter, set in 2001, has Amir receive a telephone call from Rahim Khan, his father’s friend, which ends: “There is a way to be good again.” The novel then returns to Kabul in the 1970s, where Amir, a wealthy boy, fails to defend his friend and servant Hassan from an assault by Assef, an older boy, and then drives Hassan and his father from the house. The arc is set from the first page: the wrong, the years of guilt in America, the call, and the return. When Amir goes back to Taliban-ruled Kabul to rescue Hassan’s son Sohrab, the man holding the boy is Assef, who beats Amir badly, and Sohrab stops him with a slingshot, as Hassan once threatened to. The symmetries are visible to any reader, and they meet Forster’s condition of conviction and give up surprise. What keeps the arc from the scheduled arc’s usual failure is the price. Amir’s hinge, choosing to go back at the risk of his life when his old rule was always to save himself, is paid in his body, and the aftermath withholds the cure the design seems to promise, since the rescued boy remains withdrawn and nearly silent through the last chapters, until a kite and Hassan’s phrase for you, a thousand times over on the last page.

6.3 Paddington 2: the steadfast arc

Paul King’s Paddington 2 (2017) is a steadfast arc on screen. Paddington, a bear from Peru living with the Brown family in London, is wrongly convicted of stealing a pop-up book and sent to prison for ten years. His rule, to be polite and to see the best in people, does not change; the prison does. He shares his marmalade sandwiches with the prison’s feared cook, Knuckles McGinty, and the kitchen and its prisoners are transformed around him; at the climax Knuckles and two other prisoners help to rescue him from a sinking brake van, and Paddington is cleared. The change has been transferred from the protagonist to the people he meets. As section 4.6 notes, the film’s cost is in suffering rather than temptation, since Paddington is never tempted to be other than he is, and the comedy’s contract does not ask for temptation. The answer map is simple and unambiguous: the question is whether kindness survives an unkind world, and the film gives the opposing answer to its villain, the actor Phoenix Buchanan, whose vanity is the only rule in the film that does not change.

7. The household arcs in full

7.1 The draft

The draft ending, quoted in the Core chapter’s opening, adds two paragraphs after the reading: Elena’s realisation that some things a family could only know together, and Nadia’s line “He was protecting us. That’s what this family does. We protect each other by not saying.” The paragraphs are recorded in Editorial/Canon.md as not canon. The early reader’s notes, that Elena finishes the book as she began it and that the last pages tell the reader what to think, are the announced arc and the stated theme.

7.2 Criterion logs

The logs below are built from decisions the earlier chapters have fixed, with the two decisions this chapter adds. Positions are estimates, as in Chapter 11, whose positions for the middle this chapter adopts.

Elena’s log shows one rule from the doorway to the convergence and a change at the convergence.

Nadia’s log shows a staged arc completed at the ending, with her counting as the constant.

Dov’s log is a falling arc halted. He protects by withholding throughout, as his father did, and at the convergence he discloses.

7.3 The answer map

The question is the one Chapter 3 first phrased: what do the members of a family owe each other in the way of truth? The other thematic statements the chapters have made (what the living owe the dead’s silences, ritual as a way of not quite facing loss, records outliving the people who keep them, counting set against unmeasured time) are aspects of it, and each is carried by one of the answers below.

The ending’s arrangement, three people reading one record, answers the question without stating it, and the map shows why the answer can be rejected: the father’s answer, the record kept alone, is the one the ledger embodies, and it is the reason the three can read anything at all. The book’s verdict is that his answer was right about the record and wrong about the timing. The mother’s row is empty by design, as Editorial/Canon.md requires, and the book’s refusal to fill it is what keeps the verdict from becoming a sermon.

7.4 The two passages

The first passage is a mirror moment at about 54 per cent, between the midpoint request at 50 and the signing at 58. Elena helps Nadia begin to clear the flat, and keeps her suspicion of Dov:

“Do you know why he wants it cleared?” Nadia was folding the tea towels into thirds and counting them as she went.

Elena had a box of receipts on her knees and the empty drawer in her head. “No,” she said, which was true.

“You’d tell me, though. If you knew anything.”

“I’d tell you.”

She would remember, later, how easily it had come.

It supplies the scene that Chapter 11 recorded as needed, in which Elena keeps her suspicion from Nadia and it costs her something, and it plants the new rule in Nadia’s mouth. The second is the hinge, at the convergence after Dov’s chapter. Dov brings the ledger to the shop, where Elena is:

Dov put the ledger on the counter and took his hand off it. “It’s all there,” he said. “From March, it’s mine.” She had wanted it since the drawer. She laid her palm on the cover, and the leather was warm from his arm, and she did not open it.

“Ring Nadia,” she said.

“She doesn’t answer me.”

“She’ll answer me.” She rang, and Nadia answered, and Elena told her to come to the shop, and why.

The reading in Chapter 16’s Version B follows, unchanged: They read it together, in the end — Elena at the register, Nadia on the stool, Dov standing because he said he’d rather.

7.5 What the revision settles, and what it does not

The revision answers the complaint in Chapter 16’s case that Elena “completes by presence rather than act”. Her act now comes a page before the reading, and the reading’s first sentence, They read it together, in the end, records it. The decisions it adds are proposed as canon item C22, for the author to confirm: the scene in the flat at about 54 per cent; Dov’s bringing the ledger to the shop; Elena’s declining to open it, ringing Nadia and telling her why. Neither passage changes an earlier chapter’s text, and neither lets either sister read the illness entries before the ending, so C10 holds.

Five things remain unsolved. The convergence, which Chapter 14 already found crowded with four discharges, now carries Elena’s hinge as well, and a reader may feel the architecture. Nadia’s answering at once, after a book in which she lets Dov’s calls ring out, may read as arranged. Elena’s new rule stops at the three siblings, and the book leaves open whether it would reach their mother: that keeps the mother’s silence unresolved, as the canon requires, and leaves Elena’s change visibly partial. The mirror moment depends on a retrospective sentence that may read as the narration underlining. And the warm leather is the third warmth the ledger has had (Chapter 6, Chapter 13, here), which may tip an echo into a tic; the sentence survives without it.

8. The limits of the model

The model describes books in which change is the value a character’s story serves, and it describes them well. It describes less well three kinds of book. The picaresque and its descendants send a hero through a world that changes around them and do not ask the hero to change, and the criterion log will report a steadfast arc without pressure. Much modernist fiction observes a consciousness rather than trying it, and the decisions the log needs may not be on the page at all, since the book’s interest is in perception. And long-running series, and the genres built on them, need a hero whose rule survives, so that the arc is suspended or spread across volumes. In each case the tools report the model’s assumption, and the exceptions in the catalogue show what such books put in the arc’s place: a constant that is itself the subject, a recognition that is the climax, or a world that changes instead.

A second limit concerns the theme. The answer map assumes that a book’s question can be stated in a sentence and that its characters’ rules are answers to it. Some books are built on several questions that do not reduce to one, and some on a question the writer cannot state without spoiling it. The map is still useful in such books, as a way of seeing which answers are present, but its verdict on whether the theme is argued should be weighed against the reader’s experience rather than taken as final.

9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms

The definitions below are for the consolidated glossary.

Announced arc. A failure pattern: a change reported as a realisation rather than shown in a decision.

Answer map. The chapter’s tool for theme: the book’s question, and each major character’s criterion rewritten as an answer to it.

Arc. The course, across a whole book, of the rule by which a character resolves dilemmas.

Characterisation. The observable sum of a character’s traits, as distinct from the character revealed in choice (McKee).

Constant. Something visibly unchanged in a character against which a change can be read (from Chapter 16).

Controlling idea. McKee’s term for a theme stated as a value and the cause by which it is won or lost.

Conversion arc. An arc in which the criterion changes once, at a single priced decision.

Criterion log. The chapter’s tool for arc: a character’s largest decisions in order, with the options, the choice, the rule and the cost.

Decision (carrier of theme). The choice at the hinge, read as the book’s verdict on its question.

Enactment. The confirmation of a new criterion by a situation the book has shown before, answered differently.

Falling arc. An arc in which the criterion is replaced by a worse one, usually through decisions each defensible on the old rule.

Flat and round characters. Forster’s terms: a character “constructed round a single idea or quality”, and one “capable of surprising in a convincing way”.

Free hinge. A failure pattern: a change of criterion made after the plot has removed its cost.

Lie, the. Weiland’s term for the false belief a character holds at the start of an arc.

Mirror moment. Bell’s term for the scene at the centre in which the protagonist sees what they have become; in arc terms, where the old criterion is seen to cost.

Moral argument. Truby’s term for a story’s argument about how to live, conducted through the actions of the hero and the opponent.

Motif. A recurring object, image or phrase that carries a theme by returning in changed contexts.

Premise. Egri’s term for a theme stated as a proposition the play proves.

Recognition. Aristotle’s anagnorisis: a change from ignorance to knowledge, which may precede a hinge.

Refused arc. An arc in which the character reaches the hinge, sees the new rule’s decision, and chooses by the old.

Revoked arc. A failure pattern: a return to the old criterion after the hinge, because the plot needs it.

Scheduled arc. A failure pattern: a change predicted from the first chapters and delivered on time.

Seed. The appearance of the new criterion before the hinge, usually in another character.

Self-revelation. Truby’s term for the moment the hero sees the truth about themselves.

Sermon. A failure pattern: a theme answered one way by every character and left to statement.

Staged arc. An arc in which the criterion changes in steps, or is recognised at one point and acted on at another.

Statement (carrier of theme). A character or narrator saying what the book means.

Steadfast arc. An arc in which the protagonist’s criterion holds under pressure and the change happens to others.

Theme. A question a book tests rather than a proposition it asserts.

Transportation. Green and Brock’s term for a reader’s absorption into a narrative world.

Variation (carrier of theme). Other characters answering the book’s question differently.

Want and need. What a character consciously pursues, and, in the manuals, what they must change; in this chapter the need is a criterion not yet held.

10. Sources

Aristotle, Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, in Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (London: Macmillan, 1895); chapters 6 and 11.

Bell, James Scott, Write Your Novel From the Middle (Compendium Press, 2014).

Egri, Lajos, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946).

Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).

Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock, “The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000), 701–721.

Marx, Leo, “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn”, The American Scholar 22 (1953).

McKee, Robert, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: ReganBooks, 1997).

Truby, John, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (New York: Faber and Faber, 2007).

Weiland, K. M., Creating Character Arcs (PenForASword, 2016).

Works discussed: Austen, Emma (1815) and Pride and Prejudice (1813); Backman, Fredrik, A Man Called Ove (2012), translated by Henning Koch (2014); Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (1847); Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678); Child, Lee, Make Me (2015); Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843); Eliot, George, Middlemarch (1871–72); Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857); Hosseini, Khaled, The Kite Runner (2003); Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day (1989); Keegan, Claire, Small Things Like These (2021); Melville, Moby-Dick (1851); Orwell, Animal Farm (1945); Robinson, Marilynne, Gilead (2004); Shakespeare, As You Like It and Macbeth; Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude; Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Weir, Andy, Project Hail Mary (2021); Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91); Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). Films: The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972); Love Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003); Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016); Paddington 2 (Paul King, 2017).

Second-edition lookups (2026-10-02), for the examples’ facts: LitCharts and GradeSaver summaries of Gilead (the photograph, Della and the son, the blessing at the bus stop); Wikipedia, A Man Called Ove (dates, translator, the attempts, Parvaneh, the cat, Sonja, the ending) and Bookmunch’s review (“a pleasant but predictable read”); eNotes on The Kite Runner (Rahim Khan’s line in chapter 1, Assef’s beating, the slingshot, the phrase); the Austen texts at Duke University’s cybertexts (Box Hill, chapter 43; the resolution to call on Miss Bates); Wikipedia, The Godfather (Michael’s position, the hospital, the restaurant, the closing door and the baptism); Inverse, SlashFilm and ScreenRant on Project Hail Mary (the refusal and sedation, Weir’s comment, the turn back, the epilogue on Erid); Wikipedia, Paddington 2; LitCharts on A Christmas Carol, stave 5; Wikipedia, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialisation, sales, homilies); the Springer article “Huckleberry Finn’s Conscience: Reckoning with the Evasion” (2020) (chapters 33–43, Miss Watson’s will, Marx’s argument); the Kenyon Review on Forster’s definitions; the Writers Store excerpt of McKee; Writers Write on Egri; Weiland’s site on her five arcs; Beemgee on Truby; SciSpace abstract of Green and Brock; the Monadnock Valley Press text of Poetics chapter 6.

Arc and Theme — Chapter 12, Reference: the full treatment. The reader’s version: Arc and Theme.