A Portrait of the Artist as an Emotionally Damaged Protagonist

The Secret Ingredient is Suffering (But Like, in a Good Way)

Transcript: S1E3

When I was seventeen years old, my family bought a farm.

Or, at least, we bought something that had been, at one point, a farm.

It was a bit of a mess in more ways than one. The farmhouse was a tiny three-bedroom, and for a household of seven, soon to be nine, it was a little cramped. And in addition to being too small for our needs, the state of the house itself was, for lack of a better word, neglected. We were going to need to renovate.

And so, we set to work.

We tore into the walls, taking them down the studs. We put in new floors, we rewired, replumbed, resurfaced, resided, and in general rebuilt the entire house. We tore out the garage, built a new one, we added an addition, we put in a new septic system, drilled a new well, and planted flowers.

We got livestock, replanting the pastures with suitable grass. We cleaned out the forest of trash, we put up new fence, we planted gardens.

It took several years, and for about six months I lived in a garden shed, which we affectionately called “the cabin”.

It was a lot of work, and there was a lot of sweat, a lot of tears, and more blood than you might first guess that went into making that farm into something new. And by the end of it, the property and the house were nearly unrecognizable. Which is a good thing, because you don’t start renovating a house, generally, with the goal of things being the same by the time you end.

Being a writer is a bit like being an emotional renovator for your fictional characters. We build people up, give them dreams, flaws, hopes, and then — for reasons that would probably alarm a therapist — we tear them down the studs, so to speak, in order to be what we want them to be at the end.

Welcome back to Don’t Read Into This!, where we ruin our protagonists in the most narratively satisfying ways possible. Today, if you haven’t already guessed, we’re going to be talking about character arcs.

What makes a character arc satisfying? Why do readers love watching fictional people suffer and grow? And how do you, as the writer, pull it off without falling into cliché or melodrama?

Spoiler alert: it’s not about giving your character a tragic backstory and calling it a day. It’s about change; believable, inevitable, hard-earned change.

So grab your metaphorical sledgehammer, because we’re about to talk about how to ruin your protagonist… in a good way.

 WHAT A CHARACTER ARC ACTUALLY IS (AND ISN’T)

Let’s start with the obvious question: what even is a character arc?

A character arc is the emotional journey your protagonist goes on throughout your story. It’s the way they change (or don’t) in response to the events of the plot. Think of it as emotional puberty with better dialogue.

A story without a character arc can feel… flat. Things happen, sure, but the reader doesn’t feel those things because the protagonist never evolves. It’s like watching someone go through a haunted house without flinching. Technically something’s happening, but emotionally, it’s dead air.

So here’s the short version:

Plot is what happens to your character.

Arc is how your character responds to what happens.

If the plot is the outside world testing them, the arc is the inside world reacting.

Now, there’s a common misconception that a character arc just means “they change.” That’s not quite right. The important thing is why they change — what belief or flaw or fear drives that evolution.

However, change isn’t always growth, and growth isn’t always good; those outcomes depend on the kind of arc you’re writing. The key is consistency. The arc must feel inevitable, like every moment led to this transformation — for better or worse.

 THE THREE MAIN TYPES OF CHARACTER ARCS

Now, there are as many types of arcs as there are characters, but we’re in the business of generalizing at the moment, so to that end, it’s safe to say that most arcs fit into one of three classic categories: the positive arc, the flat arc, and the negative arc.

The Positive Arc: Growth and Self-Awareness

This is your classic hero learns a lesson story. The protagonist starts with a blind spot, a damaging belief, or a limiting behavior, and the plot insists that they face the consequences of that flaw until change becomes unavoidable. The arc works when failures accumulate and teach specific lessons rather than delivering vague wisdom. Show the initial misbelief in action so readers can watch how it produces predictable mistakes. Then escalate stakes through conflict, loss, and awkward confrontations that force the character to reconsider.

Make sure the learning is messy.

Partial insights, relapses, and failed attempts at doing better make the eventual growth feel earned. Use repeated moments or symbols to mark progress, like a phrase the character can finally say honestly, or a habit they try and fail and then slowly break. The external plot should mirror the internal shift so the reader understands why change matters. End the arc by showing the protagonist making a different, meaningful choice that could not have come from their original self. Positive arcs resonate because they offer hope that people can improve, but only if the journey convinces us the work actually happened.

The Flat Arc: Standing Firm in a Broken World

Flat arcs flip expectations by keeping the protagonist essentially the same while they change the world around them or reveal truth to others. The character begins with a core belief or moral clarity and refuses to abandon it even when everything pulls them toward compromise. Tension comes not from the protagonist changing but from outside forces trying to break them. The challenge as a writer is to keep the protagonist active and interesting. Give them desires, stakes, and pressures so their steadfastness requires real sacrifice. Let their actions influence the supporting cast so those characters do the evolving.

A flat arc is driven by contrast; the protagonist’s consistency exposes hypocrisy, cowardice, or corruption in others. Use relationships to show effect: a cynic becomes inspired, a corrupt leader is unmasked, a community learns to follow a better example. Keep the protagonist human by showing doubt, exhaustion, or private vulnerability without letting that become a wholesale change in belief. When pulled off, the flat arc feels like planting a moral flag and watching the world shift in response rather than reshaping the protagonist into someone else.

The Negative Arc: The Downward Spiral

The negative arc is the tragedy of refusing the lesson. The protagonist starts with a lie or a harmful certainty, they are confronted with evidence that they are wrong, and they double down until everything unravels. The power of this arc is dramatic irony. The audience often sees the train wreck coming before the protagonist does, and the narrative pleasure comes from watching the character rationalize each bad choice. Build the descent with believable justifications that get progressively worse.

Small compromises become dangerous gambits and short-term wins buy the illusion of control while eroding empathy, relationships, and reputation. Make sure consequences stick. Betrayals, losses, and escalating moral corrosion should feel connected to earlier decisions so the ending lands as inevitable rather than arbitrary. Keep the protagonist relatable enough that readers understand how they rationalized their path. Tragedy is more powerful when we recognize the humanity in the fall. A good negative arc makes readers uneasy and fascinated because it shows how someone can choose destruction over truth and how refusing to change can be more dramatic than learning to change.

Alright, so we’ve covered the three main types of arcs — the rise, the standstill, and the fall. But how do you build one from scratch without accidentally creating an emotional pancake?

Let’s break it down.

Step 1: The Lie the Character Believes

Every character arc starts with a lie — a core misconception they hold about themselves or the world.

It might be something like:

• “I’m not worthy of love.”

• “People only respect strength.”

• “If I don’t control everything, everything will fall apart.”

This lie impacts how they see the world and the choices they make. It’s also what the story will seek to challenge.

Think of it as the emotional version of gravity — it keeps them grounded, even when it hurts them.

When you’re crafting your protagonist, ask:

• What do they believe that isn’t true?

• How does that belief protect them?

• What would happen if they stopped believing it?

Because the moment they start to question that lie — that’s when your story begins.

Step 2: The Truth They Need to Learn

Every lie has an opposing truth. The story’s job is to drag your protagonist — kicking and screaming if necessary — toward that truth.

If the lie is “vulnerability is weakness,” then the truth is “vulnerability takes courage.”

If the lie is “I must be perfect to be loved,” the truth is “my imperfection doesn’t make me unlovable”.

Notice that the truth is usually terrifying to your character. It forces them to risk something — ego, comfort, safety, relationships — in order to grow.

The lie is safe; the truth is dangerous. That tension is where your story lives.

Step 3: The Wound That Started It All

No one believes a lie for fun. Usually, there’s a reason — a backstory wound that made it feel true.

Maybe your protagonist failed once and decided they’d never risk failure again. Maybe someone they trusted betrayed them, so now they trust no one. Maybe they were told they were worthless so many times they started to believe it.

You don’t have to show this wound in flashback (please don’t show every wound in flashback), but you should know what it is. It’s the emotional scar tissue that shapes every decision they make.

The wound is what gave birth to the lie — and healing that wound is the only way they can see the truth.

Step 4: The Tests and Trials

This is the fun part — the middle of your story, where your protagonist keeps getting emotionally steamrolled by your plot.

Every major event should challenge the lie in some way. If they believe “I have to do everything myself,” then give them a scene where trying to do everything alone nearly destroys them. If they believe “I’m not worthy of love,” force them into a situation where someone loves them anyway.

These moments create what I call cracks in the lie — the little emotional earthquakes that start to break the foundation of who they think they are.

If you’re doing this right, the reader will start yelling at your character about halfway through your story:

“JUST ADMIT YOU’RE WRONG AND HUG SOMEONE, DAMMIT!”

Congratulations. That means the arc is working.

Step 5: The Crisis Point

Every arc has a “mirror moment”; that point when the protagonist comes face to face with the

truth… and has to decide whether to embrace it or reject it.

This is often the climax of the story, or just before it.

It’s the point where the internal conflict and the external conflict collide.

For a positive arc, this is when the character finally accepts the truth — usually at great cost.

For a negative arc, this is when they double down on the lie — sealing their fate.

For a flat arc, this is when the world challenges their truth — and they stand firm.

It’s the moment that gives the ending its meaning.

Step 6: The Resolution

Finally, we see the consequences of that choice.

If your character embraced the truth, the resolution should show what that growth looks like in action — even if everything else around them has fallen apart.

If they rejected the truth, we should see the cost of that refusal — how the lie has consumed them.

If it’s a flat arc, we see the impact of their steadfastness — how they changed the people or world around them.

In other words, this is where the emotional math balances out.

We’ve spent the whole story watching the character earn this ending. The resolution is just you handing them the bill.

 COMMON CHARACTER ARC PITFALLS

Alright, now that we’ve built our protagonist’s emotional rollercoaster, let’s talk about what not to do.

1. The Instant Epiphany

Don’t make growth a single lightbulb. If your protagonist resists change for most of the story, then suddenly flips in the last two paragraphs and everything is solved, readers will feel cheated. True arcs are messy: victory tastes like ashes sometimes, and steps forward are often followed by setbacks. Build a sequence of small realizations, each one triggered by failures, consequences, or relationships. Let them try to apply a lesson and fail, forcing them to refine it. Let them internalize things gradually — a glance, a choice, a quiet admission — so the final transformation carries emotional weight.

Also remember that epiphanies rarely arrive fully formed; they germinate. Use recurring symbols, repeated lines of dialogue, or a stubborn habit that slowly loosens to show the internal work. Readers should be able to trace the logic: this choice led to that pain, that pain produced this insight, and that insight finally changed behavior. Instant epiphanies flatten character complexity and turn subtle change into a marketing slide. Make the journey earn the revelation.

2. The Flawless Hero

Perfection is boring. If your protagonist starts and ends without a meaningful flaw, you miss the chance to create tension, growth, and empathy. Flaws are the engine of narrative: they make goals harder, choices riskier, and relationships combustible. A protagonist who never screws up removes stakes — there’s no room for moral failure, no lesson to be learned, no humility to earn.

Even gifted or exceptional characters need vulnerabilities: stubborn pride, a crippling fear, an addiction to control, or emotional numbness. Importantly, flaws should complicate heroism, not merely decorate it. Let the flaw cause setbacks, make them lose what they value, or sabotage their wins so that change requires real sacrifice. Also avoid thin “flaws” like “perfectionism” used as shorthand for complexity — make the flaw manifest in scenes, not just in labels. Readers root for characters who try despite their messiness. Give your hero room to fail, apologize, and try again. That’s where real affection is built.

3. The Arbitrary Change

Change should arise from pressure, not plot convenience. If the story yanks your character in a new direction because the next scene needs it, the arc collapses. Instead, craft scenes where external events force the protagonist to face their interior problem: an ethical dilemma that mirrors their flaw, a relationship that exposes their blind spot, a consequence that strips away options. Each turning point should feel like the inevitable result of earlier choices and established character logic.

Think of arcs as causal chains: action A produces consequence B, which escalates until the character must adapt or break. Avoid deus ex machina growth — sudden bravery or wisdom that appears because it’s convenient. Also resist writing change as a checklist (confess, forgive, succeed) without grounding each item in lived experience. Let the character’s internal resistance be visible, and show how their coping strategies are worn down by circumstance. When change follows pressure and pays off earlier investments in character detail, it resonates.

4. The Static Supporting Cast

Your protagonist doesn’t live in a vacuum. If everyone around them stays identical while the protagonist evolves, the arc will seem isolated and unreal. Secondary characters should react, adapt, and sometimes catalyze the hero’s changes. A former ally may grow suspicious, a mentor might become disillusioned, or a romantic partner can shift from enabler to challenger. These reactions give the protagonist feedback, sometimes brutal, sometimes clarifying, that forces reassessment.

Supporting arcs don’t need equal page counts, but they should reflect the story’s emotional logic. Use them to illuminate facets of the protagonist: a character who mirrors a suppressed trait, or a foil who embodies the possible future the protagonist will avoid or become. Also watch out for supporting characters who exist solely to validate the protagonist’s growth with no agency of their own; that feels manipulative. When the world moves with the protagonist, each beat feels earned: victories are shared, losses are mourned, and betrayals sting because relationships changed.

5. The Wrong Ending

Endings are promises. Whether you close on triumph, tragedy, or ambiguity, the conclusion must feel like the natural endpoint of the arc you’ve been building. A negative arc shouldn’t be reversed by sudden redemption that contradicts everything shown before; that reads like authorial whimsy.

Conversely, a bleak arc shouldn’t conclude with a meaningless happy twist. Instead, decide which truth your story explores — sacrifice, the cost of ambition, the inevitability of compromise — and let the ending underscore that truth. “Right” doesn’t mean tidy; it means truthful to character and consequence. Look back at the protagonist’s journey and ask: which outcome follows logically from their choices and the story’s moral? Even ambiguous endings can be satisfying if they honor the character’s trajectory. Avoid tacking on epilogues that explain or soften outcomes just to placate readers; they evaporate the stakes.

The goal is an ending that feels inevitable because you earned it through consistent emotional and causal development, not because you needed a specific headline.

So, to wrap things up — let’s talk about what we’ve really been doing here.

Because when you strip away the plotting methods and narrative diagrams and the occasional existential screaming at your Word document, writing a character arc is really just this: you’re making someone change.

That’s it. That’s the secret ingredient. Someone believes something that isn’t true, the world proves them wrong, and by the end, they either grow from it… or collapse spectacularly trying not to.

It’s simple. It’s brutal. It’s beautiful.

And the reason readers keep coming back to it — the reason we’re drawn to these arcs like moths to an emotional bonfire — is because we see ourselves in them.

Every reader, at some point, has been the hero who needed to learn, the cynic who refused to, or the steadfast soul who tried to hold onto a little bit of truth while the world fell apart around them. Character arcs resonate because they remind us that change is hard, but it’s possible.

That’s the part that matters most. The arc doesn’t have to be big — your character doesn’t need to start as a criminal and end as a saint. Sometimes the most powerful arcs are subtle. Maybe someone finally lets themselves be loved. Maybe someone forgives themselves for something small but impossible. Maybe someone just… stops running.

If you’ve ever read a story that made you tear up a little for no obvious reason — that’s what’s happening. That’s a good arc doing its job quietly, like emotional subterfuge.

And here’s the thing — when you write those arcs, when you break down your protagonist and force them to grow, you’re doing something a little bit profound. You’re not just telling a story; you’re giving your readers a safe place to experience the chaos of change without the real-world consequences.

You’re saying, “Here — try this feeling on. You can take it off later if you want.”

That’s the magic of it. That’s the empathy machine we call storytelling.

Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, sure, but I’m not writing literary fiction. My protagonist is a dragon-slaying space pirate.”

Good news: character arcs still apply. Even your dragon-slaying space pirate should probably wrestle with their self-esteem once in a while. Because the laser sword and the emotional damage? They go hand in hand.

Even in the most outlandish stories — the epic fantasies, the thrillers, the sci-fi operas — readers don’t stay for the worldbuilding. They stay for the people. They stay because they care what happens to someone, even if that someone is made of pixels, paper, or stardust.

So, as you sit down to write your next story, ask yourself:

What lie does my character believe?

What truth do they need to face?

And how much are you, the writer, willing to make them suffer to get there?

Because good writing — and I mean really good writing — comes from empathy. And empathy comes from honesty. The kind that makes your protagonist cry a little, and maybe you too.

And if you can take a character from point A to point B — not just across a map, but across their own emotional landscape — you’ve done something incredible. You’ve written a story that matters.

That’s all a character arc is. Not a chart, not a rule, not a fancy diagram on Pinterest — just growth through pain, healing through change, and, ideally, a little humor along the way.

So go forth, my brave new writers, and ruin your protagonists responsibly. Tear them down. Build them up. Make them earn every single moment of redemption. Because that’s how you make readers care.

That’s how you write something that lingers.

If you liked this episode, share it with another writer who’s currently arguing with their main character in the mirror — we’ve all been there.

If you enjoyed this episode of Don’t Read Into This! then I have good news: there’s more to come. There’s also been more, at this point, so why not subscribe, and go back and listen to episodes one and two in the meantime? Oh, and if you could drop a five star, or thumbs up that’d be a massive help in getting this thing off the ground.

You can also check out my website to see the books I’ve written and some of the services I provide; you can find the link in the episode description.

You can also email me directly at dontreadintothispodcast@gmail.com and let me know what you thought about today’s episode, or what story arcs from fiction you’ve enjoyed the most? I’d be fascinated to hear your takes!

Until next time, I’ve been Elijah Curtiss – thanks for listening!