What is a Character Arc? Positive, Negative, and Flat Character Arcs Explained (Plus Examples)

  This post was first published in April 2019 and extensively updated in February 2025. You’ve probably come across the idea of a “character arc” before now … but what is it, and why’s it called that? A character arc isn’t the same thing as your plot. It’s the progression of your character as a person throughout your story. You might also think of it as your character’s “inner journey” or think of it as them truly becoming the person they’re meant to be. It’s called an “arc” because you can imagine it plotted on a graph. Character arcs will normally follow an upward trajectory – where your character increasingly becomes a better person – though some will instead trend downward, where a character goes from good to bad, or bad to worse. Character arcs can be divided up in a couple of different ways. The most common way to view them is as:

• Positive (the most common character arc for protagonists)
• Negative (associated with tragedies, or with antagonists)
• Flat (the character doesn’t really change — common in crime series)

A slightly different take is to divide character arcs into:

• Moral ascending (the character becomes a better person)
• Moral descending (the character becomes a worse person)
• Transformational (the character changes significantly, not necessarily by becoming morally “better”)
• Flat (as above, the character doesn’t really change)

Robert Reed Smith has a great piece outlining this approach to character arcs on the Dabble blog. I’m going to focus mainly on positive character arcs in this piece. This might be about your character’s moral journey, about their transformation from (e.g.) a “nobody” to a leader, or both. Essentially, it’s about them becoming the person they’re meant to be, fulfilling their potential in a positive way.

Do All Your Characters Need a Character Arc?

No. In fact, trying to give every single character a full blown arc would almost certainly be overkill. Minor characters don’t need to have a character arc. Your protagonist’s overbearing mother-in-law, or her annoying colleague, or that awful ex might all appear on and off throughout the story to drive up the conflict … but chances are, these people aren’t going to change. At the end, they’ll be the same difficult people they always were. And that’s fine – this isn’t their story! As we saw above, some protagonists will have a flat arc. This is very common in detective series: think Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, for instance. They don’t really change from book to book. In other cases, you might have a series where the protagonist changes very gradually. Sophie Hannah’s Culver Valley book series is a good example of this, with detective Simon Waterhouse on a gradual positive character arc as the series progresses. Characters in stories with a flat arc can still be fascinating. (Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot remain very popular!) In this kind of story, your characters are confident in themselves and what they value: there’s no need for them to go on an inner journey. Instead, the story’s interest lies in them being tested and staying true to who they already are.

Why Do Character Arcs Matter?

In many stories, the character’s inner journey is the whole point. Yes, things happen in the plot – mysteries are solved, battles are fought, baddies are defeated, the world is saved – but often what really matters to both the writer and the reader is the change that all of this brings about in the protagonist or main characters. A good character arc should help the reader believe that the character really deserves their success (or their failure, if their arc was negative). Character arcs are also, of course, intricately tied in with plot. Events in the plot affect your character; they respond to these events (potentially in a way that’s out of character for them); their response causes something else to happen, and so on. Character arcs are more important in some genres that others, of course. In a series of adventure or mystery novels, readers might be invested in the protagonist’s success, but they won’t generally be expecting the protagonist to really change during the course of the story. (In fact, readers might well protest if your protagonist changes too much.) Other genres are very much focused on the character’s inner journey, though: a lot of literary fiction falls into this category, as do “coming of age” stories. Fantasy novels will often involve a strong character arc, too, where your protagonist learns and grows significantly through the course of the novel. Note: Character arcs aren’t just for novels! I’m focusing on novels in this post, but film protagonists and TV series protagonists will also often undergo a character arc.

What Exactly Does a Character Arc Involve?

A character arc needs to span all or most of your story, and it can be a little tricky to figure out how to do it well. Sometimes, a specific moment in the plot can propel your character a long way in their arc … but done clumsily, readers may find this unconvincing. Let’s dig a bit into how your character arc might come across throughout your story. In a short story, a character arc might be quite simple, and involve a straightforward change – and in this case, it often does work for the change to be prompted by a single incident. For instance, we might see a character at the start of the story who has an obvious problem (e.g. they’re grumpy – and lonely) and then something happens to change all that (e.g. they meet someone who’s kind to them and helps them open up). In a novel, though, characters arcs will almost always be more complex. Let’s take a look at how this might play out for both positive and negative arcs.

Mapping Out a Positive Arc

Some plot events will be significant in moving your character forward in their upwards arc, but at other points in the story, it may seem like they’re not changing much at all … or they might even backslide. The changes in your character should have tangible plot consequences. Perhaps they finally stand up for what they believe in: they’re true to themselves, but this leads to even more conflict with others. Or maybe after some positive glimmers of change, they go back to their old ways … and someone they love is hurt by this. Another option is to have your character go on an initially negative arc, reaching rock-bottom before starting on the upward trajectory of their positive arc. For instance, they might side with the antagonist out of greed, before realising what a terrible person the antagonist is. Either way, your arc probably won’t follow a smooth upward curve. There’ll be moments when it seems like your character is getting it all wrong or making the same old mistakes again … but over the course of the novel as a whole, they’ll be growing into the person they’re meant to be.

Mapping Out a Negative Arc

In a negative arc, your character might start out as fairly neutral. They could even be a lovely person: kind, innocent, loving. (Think Anakin Skywalker.) But the events of the plot drive them onto a negative path. They might fall in with a bad crowd, or they might end up on a path of revenge after some personal tragedy. As with a positive arc, you can have moments where it seems that things may go a different way. Perhaps we see the character consider a different path … only to end up rejecting it. Negative arcs can be powerful, but they’re usually associated with antagonists rather than with protagonists. You absolutely can have a good protagonist who turns bad, and some classic works do (like Shakepeare’s tragedies and Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray). If you’re writing commercial fiction rather than literary fiction, however, you may find that a negative character arc doesn’t work so well for your genre. Further Reading: For lots more on character arcs, including loads of great examples and insights, check out K.M. Weiland’s excellent book How to Write Character Arcs. If you aren’t quite ready for a full book, then there’s plenty of great advice across a whole range of blog posts on her website, including a whole series of posts that starts here.

Examples of Character Arcs

Let’s dig into a few examples of characters who undergo a significant inner journey in their respective stories. I’ve chosen one from a novel, one from a film, and one from a TV series.

Example #1: Edmund Pevensie (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe)

In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Edmund starts off as – frankly – a not particularly nice boy. He’s rude and grumpy from page one, and he’s spiteful to Lucy after she tells the siblings about going through the wardrobe into Narnia. After he meets the White Witch, he becomes even worse, selling out his siblings to her. He’s also shown as fairly unintelligent, falling for her flattery and lies. By the end of the novel, though – after various misadventures – he fights to defend the Narnians against the White Witch and in fact is the turning point in the battle, when he’s both brave and intelligent: he goes for the Witch and smashes her wand to stop her turning anyone else into stone. This is a great example of a character arc that restores a character to “who they really were all along” – or, from Lucy’s perspective:

When at last she was free to come back to Edmund she found him standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look—oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face.

Example #2: Tony Stark (Iron Man)

When the first Iron Man movie begins, Tony is the crazily-rich womanizing owner of Stark Industries, a weapons manufacturer. He’s in Afghanistan to show off his latest weapons to the U.S. military. But after his convoy is attacked by terrorists, Tony is wounded and kidnapped. This is what prompts him to create a miniature arc reactor and a suit of armour – the Mark 1 – which he uses to escape from the terrorists. After seeing the destruction his weapons were causing in the wrong hands, wants Start Industries to stop selling weapons altogether. He continues to develop his Iron Man suits, and discovers that his business partner and mentor Obadiah Stane has been trying to oust him from the company. By the end of the movie, Tony proclaims to the world that he’s Iron Man. Plenty of things about Tony don’t change. He’s still an inventor at the end of the movie. He’s still rich, loves the limelight, and has a distinctly irreverent nature. But his eyes have been opened to the damage his company was doing … and he’s much less self-centred than he was before. He’s been transformed into a superhero and has a new role in protecting others.

Example #3: Sansa Stark (Game of Thrones)

At the start of the epic Game of Thrones series, Sansa Stark is a 13-year-old with a head full of fairy tales. She’s obsessed with the idea of marrying Joffrey (at this point, she hasn’t realised how truly horrible he is) and she’s focused on traditional “ladylike” pursuits like needlework. During the course of the series, she goes through some truly horrific experiences, starting with her father being executed in front of her. Gradually, she becomes a powerful, self-confident character who’s adept at playing lots of the adults surrounding her, including the supremely cunning Littlefinger. By the current Season 7, she’s almost unrecognisable from the naive, rather self-centred girl she once was.   Whatever sort of story you’re writing, your main character (at least) needs to go on some kind of internal journey. Maybe they’ll become much better people or overcome huge problems in their lives. Maybe they’ll stay essentially the same – but their resolve will be tested. You may find that your character arc emerges naturally as you write, or you might want to plan for it ahead of time. Don’t worry if you haven’t quite nailed it in draft one: the revision stage is a good opportunity to look at and tweak character’s arcs – making sure that the changes they undergo are justified and satisfying.

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For more on creating and writing characters, check out the other pieces which originally ran in a four-week series: #1: Five Different Approaches to Developing Characters (blog post) #2: How Much Should You Describe Your Characters? (newsletter) #3: Making Bad Things Happen to Good Characters (blog post) #4: Five Ways to Establish Sympathy for Not-So-Nice Characters (newsletter) #5: Seven Common Problems Writers Have With Characters (blog post) #6: When Should Your Characters Behave Out of Character? (newsletter) #7: What’s a Character Arc, Who Needs One, and Why? (this blog post) #8: How Can You Make Readers Care About Your characters? (newsletter)