My Trick for Creating Character Arcs

man it was not easy to come up with a title to this video that didn't sound like completely clique baby like it sounds one step removed from one weird trick for weight loss and doctors hate me for it I'm really sensitive to clique fading or making clique baby stuff so I assure you too but this is not that anyway character arcs hey this is Brooks with character design forge if you find it easy to create characters their physical attributes their bio personality backstory basically everything that's sort of static about the character but you do have difficulty creating stories for them or character arcs I have a device that I think is really useful at least as a jumping-off point in order to make a story that people care about you can't just have events happen you need characters to change or grow now we call this a character arc now the change isn't necessarily external but more importantly it's one that's internal they are perhaps maturing changing growing learning something becoming less flawed now this usually enables them to do something external to accomplish a task reach a place make a decision that they weren't able to do so before and things like that now in a negative character arc perhaps a villain or an antihero becomes less caring more callous more selfish as the arc goes on sometimes it's really easy to establish those external and static things about your character like say you want to make a knight character and you do all the world-building to make this sci-fi world around them but when it comes to actually making the character arc it's not so easy now part of that is that it's a little bit backwards if you do it that way in order to make a strong story you want everything to be kind of radiating off or drawing from the spine of your story which includes things like the theme and character arcs those are the things that people will actually really resonate with a lot more so than something like an action scene so I used to be a lot worse at this than I am now if you know anything about me at this point I love drawing characters and designing them visually and as much as I love storytelling - I was always Willy bad at creating good stories or even Kohi it ones my wife has like this natural talent for writing and creating stories me not so much so for the longest time I was almost like a student of the ocean 12 school of storytelling which if you're not familiar with the movie it's like the more mystery that you add the more esoteric and inaccessible you make things in the movie somehow the more value it had like the more you had to think the better it was but that's not the really the way that we ingest stories like even a really well made and smartly written story you still have to touch the heart first before we can engage it with our brains so there has to be this sort of human hook that we can latch on to before we start really investing ourselves in the rest of the story now in order to more easily craft character arcs I came up with a device that I call teach yourself a lesson now there's a secondary benefit to this - you've heard the advice write what you know and what this means is you're writing from a place of your own experience your own personal experiences it tends to be more honest this way and usually that results in a story that resonates more so first of all what you want to do with teach yourself a lesson is look at yourself find a quality some amount of personal growth you've gone through maybe a realization that you've had something that has made you a better person now or a more mature person now than you used to be next you're going to figuratively travel back in time to your younger self who doesn't know this yet who hasn't gone through this growth yet and teach it to them so the question is how would you go about doing that how would you sum it all up in a succinct statement so this is what you're also going to be doing for your character this change or this lesson represents the change or arc your character is going to go through now this doesn't need to be something that's preachy or explicitly stated in your story it can be the theme of your story but the character doesn't necessarily need to go through the same circumstances that you did or learn the lesson in the same way but what I love about this is it really gets you thinking about character arcs and the change in a character starting with a flawed character and slowly making them less flawed and because this is something that you've experienced hurts sort of a part of your life it's going to ring a lot truer so here's an example of this from a character of mine when I was trying to figure out sort of the arc that this character should go through what story to tell with the character I thought back to a time when my mindset was very risk-averse introverted very comfort minded all I wanted to do was get better at drawing get work drawing sit at home and not leave that comfort zone at all so I was trying to improve my skills but it was at the expense of socializing doing things for other people basically experiencing life so I feel like I'm a different person now one that strikes a better and healthier balance in those things so if I were to boil those things down into a theme for a story I would say something along the lines of sometimes you're going to experience chaos and conflict and experiencing those things makes you a better person and a better artist so that's the basis of a story that I've been working on starring this little guy named Koji and Koji is a bard who's good at certain aspects of being a bard the musical side of things but not so much when it comes to the storytelling and the theatrics and he's very comfort minded as a character he only ever ventures into a village that's not too far from his home so that's the place that he starts in now as the story progresses Koji gets roped into helping a fugitive character he meets a rival bard character with the opposite skillset of his so not so good at the musical side of things but really good at the storytelling aspect and so without getting into specifics or spoiling any more of the story these circumstances help coach you to grow now if this story seems a little meta about storytelling and stuff it's because it's a part of a series of stories that are about creativity that I'm working on and that's probably giving away way too much but I am looking forward to you guys being able to see some of this stuff soon now obviously there are as many approaches to writing as there are to creating visual artwork but I hope that this device of teaching yourself a lesson is a good catalyst for you especially if you've been struggling with creating characters that are dynamic and fluctuate in that way it is now August which sidenote means I've been made videos on this channel for two years now as of August which is pretty cool but if you're not already following me on instagram at bagel denizen i just started a august project it's a summer project of sorts that involve some hybrids like photography and creature design stuff and some people in my life that I care about you'll see me like putting this emphasis recently on personal work and like putting yourself in your work and it's because for the longest time this is a character arc of mine for the longest time I was focused on what looks cool and what's trendy with art and stuff and like thinking that if I put myself into it it was somehow a narcissistic but I encourage you to like develop your own artistic voice and and I think it's the only stuff we really care about it's something that comes from this human aspect of us anyway follow me on instagram at bagel dozen there's the first one looks like that go see more that's it for me today I'm making new videos every week at character design forge subscribing on YouTube lets you know when new videos are made available you like my stuff you can back me on patreon at patreon.com slash babel denizen you can get early access to episodes of character select there's also something I just started called lesson booster packs which are like this tangible version of videos with some reviews and worksheet kind of stuff homework you can do for yourself to improve your skills and there's other stuff on there - oh yeah downloads of my original artwork if you want that my course learn character design is a comprehensive character design curriculum head over to learn character design calm to learn more about that thank you for watching and have fun creating

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 145,369

Keywords: storytelling, writing, writing characters, character arcs, stories, story, character design, story design, characters, learn art, teaching, teach yourself a lesson

Id: PJmYYvo0gwg

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2017