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Hope & The Negative Character Arc

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The book I’m currently writing features a dominantly negative character arc. If you’ve never tried such a thing, a negative arc is essentially the opposite of the traditional character arc. Instead of beginning at a bad point and overcoming flaws to become a better version of themself, in a negative arc, the character begins at one point and then becomes progressively more wicked or disillusioned. They leave one lie behind and either embrace a discouraging truth or a greater lie.

Why would anyone write such a thing? In my case, I’m trying to say something about the inherent monstrosity that we all possess. And the way(s) that we can leave that part of us behind to become something better. Thus, my theme requires a negative character arc – one in which I demonstrate how easy it is, over time, to embrace the darkest parts of our hearts and allow those parts to overtake us.

Negative character arcs have been done before. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte and The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde are both negative character arcs in Gothic literature.

In one sense, the structure itself is terribly different, which is a new and different process for me. If you’re looking for help with that, I recommend K.M. Weiland’s series on structuring negative character arcs:

The Three Types of Negative Character Arcs

Writing Negative Arcs – Act I

Writing Negative Arcs – Act II

Writing Negative Arcs – Act III

But in addition to that, someone essentially asked me, how can you write a book with a tragic ending and not depress readers?

I had to think about that. Unless your goal is to leave readers in a negative frame of mind – which is not my objective – it’s a crucial question. I think the answer is that in presenting the character’s descent, we, as writers, must also demonstrate how that descent could have been avoided. That may simply be implied, but readers should be able to see how we can all learn from the negative character and do differently.

Let’s use Wuthering Heights as an example and look at a few ways that the positive can be seen in Heathcliff’s downward spiral.

Warning: Plot Spoilers Ahead!!

Lack of Inevitability

Heathcliff was the adopted brother of Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw. When their father brought the orphan boy home one day, his actions brought to light the selfish and cruel nature of both of the Earnshaw children. Over time, readers see how unwelcome and inhospitable the family is towards Heathcliff.

(Hollywood would have you believe that this is a love story…and there is one in there, but it’s a very dark and destructive love story. One we’ll visit in more detail in a book review in the near future. All that to say, put aside your notions of this being a positive love story for now.)

From the very beginning, it’s clear that this poor child has simply passed from one bad state (orphanhood) to another (a family who, at least in part, doesn’t want him). In these circumstances, Bronte is setting up the initial reasons why Heathcliff chooses to become hateful and vindictive. That’s important. Readers need to see what the character uses as a rationale for his negative arc.

But…his descent can’t be a foregone conclusion. If Heathcliff hadn’t had any other choices, if he had to become evil, had to lose his mind and die loveless and alone, the story would have been depressing rather than instructive and insightful.

Instead, Bronte showed several instances in which Heathcliff could have chosen differently. For example, when Catherine realizes that she was wrong about Heathcliff and befriends him, it’s only Hindley who still dislikes him. Heathcliff could have accepted the truth – that the boy’s hatred for him was a byproduct of his selfish and hateful nature. Instead, he used it to fuel his constant sense of inferiority and competition, resulting in a lifelong desire to destroy both Hindley and Hindley’s future child, Hareton.

Heathcliff ultimately left to become a gentleman, in order to prove to Catherine that he was worthy of her. When he came home and discovered that she had married Edgar Linton, he could have counted his blessings, realized how far he had come from being a homeless orphan, and built the best life for himself that he could. Instead, he used his new status as a means of destroying both himself and others.

That’s the point. In a negative character arc, the character uses his circumstances as an opportunity to move towards a more negative state of mind or even become overtly monstrous. But, if you’ve shown readers that the character didn’t have to do so, there’s an implicit positive statement in there. In every bad choice, indicate what could have been the case.

Good Amidst the Bad

On top of that, it’s crucial to show that there are good things in the character’s life. Heathcliff had the love and affection of Mr. Earnshaw before he died, the subsequent love of Catherine as a child and even after she married Edgar, and an education and economic success that he had gained for himself. He had a roof over his head and even servants to support him.

He had good things in his life.

This says something about him. A lot in fact. But it says something to readers as well. In Wuthering Heights, Bronte presents a tale of a man who chose to become obsessed with this family. It wasn’t enough for Hindley to leave him alone. Heathcliff had to destroy him. It wasn’t enough for Catherine to think the world of him and be his closest friend. She had to leave Edgar and be with him for all of eternity. And Heathcliff had to ruin Edgar’s sister to take revenge on him for marrying Catherine.

Heathcliff overlooked every good thing and saw only the bad.

When we show readers that our character has positive influences in his life, maybe even people who love him, or who would help him, a positive mirror image forms in the readers mind. Even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, or can’t articulate it, they can see the opposite in conjunction with the negative character arc.

Shadow Character

Lastly, Bronte incorporates something more overt to illustrate the good amidst the bad: a shadow character.

In Wuthering Heights, there are two. Hareton (Hindley’s son whom Heathcliff brought up to be as rough and uncultured as he had been as a boy) and Cathy (Catherine and Edgar’s daughter whom Heathcliff took prisoner and forced to marry his dying son, Linton). Though Heathcliff attempted to destroy both of them as revenge against the Earnshaws and the Lintons, after Heathcliff’s death, we see a mirror image of Catherine and Heathcliff as children.

In a crucial final image, Bronte shows Cathy teaching Hareton to read. It’s clear that the two are rapidly becoming close friends and future lovers. Readers see Heathcliff’s demise, but they also come away with this picture.

Cathy and Hareton are casting off the former abuse that Heathcliff dealt them, and are beginning a new chapter. One without revenge or hatred. Something that Heathcliff refused to do. In them, we see what Heathcliff could have overcome and the kind of healthy life he could have had.

Conclusion

I’ve loved Wuthering Heights since I was in high school, so much so that I try to re-read it almost every October. (It’s an October book in my mind.) But it’s only recently that I’ve been able to identify this mirror story. In a way, the negative character arc is one in which the overt story is negative, but the hidden story is positive. At the very least, it can be. If that’s what the writer wants to say.

This kind of story won’t appeal to everyone. For some people, the heavy cautionary tale is too weighty, too somber. However, if the legacy of Wuthering Heights is any indicator, there’s a large market for a negative character arc. The key is to show readers the positive alongside the negative in such a way that they can see the beauty amidst the darkness.

 

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When & How Much to Research

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A few weeks ago I spent a long weekend in the mountains of Montana with some writer friends. There’s something about the isolation from everyday life and the uninterrupted concentration on our craft that always generates interesting conversation. This time the subject that came up was research. All of us write under the umbrella of Fantasy albeit in very different ways. My Gothic writing is technically Fantasy, but looks very different from my friend’s middle-grade and young-adult epic Fantasy, which in turn looks very different from our other friend’s very magical adult Fantasy.

One of the women asked, so how much do you research? And when do you research? It spawned an interesting conversation. Is there a right answer? I doubt it. It’s almost certainly highly subjective, like the craft of writing itself. But I’ll share what I’ve been learning about my own process.

For several years, a story has been growing in my mind. It’s an extensive (probably 12 books or so) Dark Fantasy series. I’ve worked on it off and on since before I left the corporate world. Within the next one to two years, I hope to begin writing it. In the meantime, I’ve been writing stand-alone Gothic novels and am planning a Gothic trilogy that I should be able to start writing in January of 2022. All that to say that my research process differs substantially when it comes to these different types of writing. However, I’ve identified some commonalities across all of them.

Before I honed my research process, it looked something like this: I would pull out all of the world-building books, templates and websites. Then I would spend hours laboring over every element of the society – the history and political structures, the economic system of trade and industry, the religious beliefs, the magic system, etc. I realized that I had a problem when, one afternoon, it dawned on me that I had spent at least an hour or two reading articles about castrating male chickens.

There are no chickens in any of my books.

This happens to me (and maybe to you?) because I love research. I love to read. It’s part and parcel of the writer mind. We love to know how things work, where things came from, and what they mean. We like to layer our own symbolism on top of the research and use it to inspire readers. That’s great. But, in my case, it has the tendency to lead me down rabbit holes that, despite how interesting the poultry industry might be, can be a huge waste of time.

Since that eye-opening incident, I’ve developed a different process. I’m sure it will shift and develop over time, but this is what currently works for me.

Up Front/ Before the 1st Draft

In order to write a first draft, I need to know enough about the world of my characters so that the plot I write is complete. When I’m writing something Gothic that takes place in a real-world historical period, I need to understand the state of the world at that point. What were the stresses for the people in my characters’ shoes? Was there a looming regional/global conflict? A change in the power structure? Financial uncertainty?

If I’m writing something more speculative like epic or dark Fantasy, I need to know the big things: the current politics, the history of the people, the development of the culture(s), the magic system. But I probably only need to know these at a fairly high level. What qualifies as “high level” is a particularly subjective thing, but the key I ask myself is: what do I absolutely have to know in order to write a solid first draft?

You can probably see that I’ve restricted myself to the global elements. The biggest things that determine how the people live and interact with one another and their different systems (magic, political, economic). Do I need to know exactly which types of carriages were used at that point in time? Do I need to know what a living room is called in Vienna in 1880? No, not yet. I wait on those things for two very important reasons that I’ll get to in a minute.

During the Re-Writing Period

After the first draft, I begin the re-writing process. This is my favorite part of writing. I love to re-write! To me it’s like working on the greatest jigsaw puzzle on the planet. All of the pieces are on the table, they just need to be re-worked, fashioned into something that awes the reader. I’m not talking about editing. I’m talking about re-structuring the novel where the bones are misaligned and layering in foreshadowing, several layers of symbolism, nuanced subtext and a compelling subplot or two (or more). This is where a good story idea becomes something truly compelling.

During this process, especially in the early part of the revisions, I might cut whole scenes and add in new ones. Or I might change the setting in a scene to make it more thematically relevant and to increase the tension. Despite the fact that I’m a planner, sometimes things don’t play out on the page the way that I envisioned while outlining. The last thing I want to have done is to have spent hours (or more) researching an element of the story that I decide to cut.

Or worse, to feel tempted to keep something in the book that really should be cut because of all of that time spent researching.

That’s why I wait to research the localized, smaller elements of the story until later. Instead, I leave a general comment or even a bracketed notation that reminds me to fill in the details later. That way, when I’ve decided to keep those parts of the book, I know I’m not spending endless hours researching something unnecessary. (Though, it pains me to use the words research and unnecessary in the same sentence.)

This process accomplishes one other crucial thing for me. It helps me to maintain momentum while I’m writing the first draft. If you’re an over-thinker, like I am, it can be hard to allow yourself to just write. To pour the story out and not worry about whether the subtext is perfect. To do that, I keep the research to the bare minimum until later. (I also set very do-able but aggressive daily word count goals. The kinds of goals that give me just enough room to create great scenes without any room for overthinking.)

As I said, this process will almost certainly change as I grow as a writer, but it’s the best method I’ve found to date. Could I spend hours/ days/ years building the most elaborate world system? Of course, but that’s the point. I don’t want to spend years doing so, even though it’s terribly enjoyable. I want to tell a great story, in a world that feels rich to the readers. And then move on to the next great story that’s dying to be told…in a world without emasculated chickens.

 

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The Relatable Side of Horror

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When I was eleven or twelve years old, I discovered the writing of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul. To be fair, it was my childhood best friend who introduced me to these. We both loved everything about their writing… perhaps a strange obsession for a couple of tweens. What can I say? My first movie obsession was The Lost Boys. Shrug. 🙂

Something about the Horror genre resonates deeply. Except when it doesn’t.

Once in awhile I read or watch something marketed as Horror and it has all the makings of a great Horror story – haunted houses, vampires, corn fields – but I just can’t get into it. The villain pursues the main character(s) and there’s a lot of tension, but… well, to be honest, it bores me.

And I know why.

Jessica Brody said this particularly well in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, so I’ll start with a quote from her book.

The prey that the monster is stalking (often our hero or heroes!) cannot be completely innocent. Someone is responsible for bringing the monster into being, invading the monster’s territory, or waking the monster up. And it’s usually either the hero, a counterpart of the hero, or even all of humanity who has committed this sin. Either way, this catastrophe is somehow our fault.

That resonated with me on a very deep level because it’s true. Horror is compelling because, like Gothic fiction, it deals with the things that we can’t prove. Things we can’t define empirically. It takes the intangible world – whether that’s a supernatural, spiritual one, or simply the hidden aspects of ourselves – and makes it tangible. Horror should run deep. It should tell a story about how the characters face their own flaws and learn to overcome them. But it does this in a more confrontational way than other genres do.

Think about it this way. Say you want to write a story about a family who moves into a new house only to find that it’s haunted. Yes, it’s been done before…a million times. And often it doesn’t work. I’ll show you why.

On one hand, the family buys or inherits the house, moves in, and is pursued by some ghost or demon for some reason. And there usually is a reason. But it’s very often divorced from the main characters. Perhaps the ghost was murdered in the house. The ghost is angry. Of course. He wants his own house. Why? Who the hell knows. Supposedly ghosts don’t like sharing real estate. The only hope is to help them find peace so they’ll move. Otherwise, your characters should start packing. Of course they won’t. They want the house too. So instead the ghost will chase, terrorize and generally attack them until someone wins.

I think you can see how boring that story is. Sure, the characters are flawed in some way. But the crucial point is: the antagonistic force is pursuing them arbitrarily, simply because they happened to choose the wrong home. The horror is unrelated to what’s going on within their own hearts. And when that’s the case, horror fails. There’s nothing about this story that has anything to do with me. Or any other reader. It’s not relatable.

Let’s try an alternate version.

Imagine a family with a couple and a school-age daughter. The couple have a rocky relationship. On the surface, readers can see that something’s off in the family. The mother-child relationship is strained. The mother-father relationship is cold. The father-child relationship is co-dependent to the point of being dysfunctional. Now, what might happen if the daughter begins to go mad and terrorize the family, especially the mother. Maybe the madness spills over and begins to affect the father, who also takes out his rage on the mother. Over time, readers discover that the mother tried to drown her daughter years ago, perhaps when she was an infant. She didn’t want the child. The father did. But her attempt to kill the child failed. There’s a lot of latent conflict there. It’s something that neither of them have dealt with. It’s that sin, that unresolved conflict that is manifest in the daughter’s – and later, the father’s – horrifying actions.

I think you can see how much more meaning the second story would have. And the possibilities are endless. Take any unresolved failing, any secret sin and give it legs. Let it take to the streets and terrorize those who refuse to face what they’ve done or who they are.

Then you’ll have the makings of a phenomenal Horror novel. One that speaks to people and causes us to think about the things that we haven’t addressed. The unreconciled areas of our own hearts that haunt us.

 

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Write What Haunts You

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One of the most frequent questions I receive is: where do your ideas come from? I suppose that to those who don’t craft 100,000 words into a cohesive story that says something about who we are as people, the idea of doing so probably seems daunting.

The truth is, like most authors, I see inspiration everywhere. I have a writing community made up of friends who send around regular prompts – a one-line idea based on which we each submit a short work of fiction. Sometimes these intrigue me more than I expect and I find myself sucked into the world of a character. A world and person that I long to explore.

Like all people, I have my own history of learning experiences, personal pain, and things that meant the most to me. I have dreams – the literal, nocturnal sort that come with all sorts of latent meaning. And many of these things spark a story idea in my mind.

But I don’t write most of them.

Why??

Because I’ve learned that the stories that I can craft into the most impactful fiction are the ones that come from a place of truth. They haunt me. And I welcome them to do so.

I’ll give you an example.

The book I just finished stemmed from a series of dreams that I had over several years. In each one, a girl would slip through a secret door or passage into a part of a house that no one else could access. In each case, she would explore her [sometimes very bizarre] surroundings. Sometimes she entered the secret areas because she was pursued by a malevolent person or entity. Sometimes she just wanted to hide away in a quiet place of solitude.

As is common in dreams, these meanderings never had any discernible plot or meaning. But I relished them. Something about the idea compelled me to learn more. At the time I was working on an extensive writing project that I still plan to complete in the future. However, these dreams wouldn’t leave me alone.

I began to ask questions: who is this girl? Why would she want to be in these secret places? I considered these things on both a plot level and a deeper, symbolic one. By that I mean – what surface story would require her to use secret passages in a house? And beneath it all, what are these passages to her? Are they something more – some part of her soul that she refuses to face? A past to which she is unreconciled? An aspect of her identity that she won’t admit? A secret guilt that she harbors? Maybe all of the above.

The answers came to me simply because I asked them to and because the story wanted to be written. By day and by night I felt it gestating within me. And that is, in my opinion, the best way to get to the story that you must write – ask it questions, but give it room to grow. Let the story come to you fully formed. Because if you’re meant to write it, it will reveal itself to you.

It will haunt you until you free it from the deep well of your soul.

 

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