Types of Character Arcs - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #6.5 (2025)

0:00 BRANDON: Hello. This is our web exclusive Q&A on character, a companion video to Brandon Sanderson's Lecture Series this year for 2025. We have taken questions from you that were put in the comments section of the lecture on character. So if you haven't watched that lecture, you should. And you should watch the other character lectures because these are going to be questions that I didn't already answer. Questions that you might have might have already been answered. So this is a companion piece, web exclusive. Thank you for your questions. We have selected 10 of them and I'm going to get to them here. QUESTION 1: Brandon touched briefly on the idea of common arcs in this lecture when he brought up the "apprentice arc." I'd be curious to hear him speak about some other common arcs, maybe their defining characteristics, like a little cheat sheet for common character growth directions. BRANDON: What an excellent question.

0:54 If this method of storytelling helps you, and it does help me, I recommend that you start keeping a list of things that you notice so that you can be like, "Oh, this seems to be a common sort of character arc. What are its defining characteristics? What makes it work? What do I like about it?" And that's probably the most important part. Which sort of character arcs do you most like? And the apprentice arc is one of them.

1:20 The apprentice arc is, obviously, apprentice and master, kind of apprentice follows in the master's footsteps. And the fun interplay in the apprentice arc is where does the apprentice decide to deviate from the master and where do they decide to follow the master? What can they accomplish that the master can't? What could the master accomplish that they can't, and how do they have to approach it in different ways? This is really great for kind of separating two characters apart that might have the same skill set, as you see one learn from the other and make it their own. And that's why I love the apprentice arc because it really can highlight a character and show how they have to approach the world differently from how a mentor might have approached the world.

2:01 But there are lots of different sorts of character arcs that you can do. One of the kind of primary ones is the idea of you up front show a character being bad at something and then they need to learn to fix it. Right? This is kind of your classic character arc. A character is shown to be prideful, and how do they get over their pride? Your just very classic. Usually with these arcs what you really want to do is you want to show up front how this impacts their lives.

2:36 Most things that can be a flaw in a character can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Hubris can also just be self-confidence. So you want to establish early on, look, this is how the way the person acts is causing them to miss opportunities, causing them to miss growth, causing their relationships to fall apart, or something like this. And through the course of the story, then if it's a downward arc, you show them learning this lesson but then still refusing at the most important moment to put it into actualization. It's not just about someone is constantly arrogant and then that causes them to fail. At the end it is they know by this point that this is their tragic flaw, and they will not let go of it at that important moment. Or you go the reverse. You show them learning the lesson, and then you have that decision point, and you show why they would make the different choice. And that's the important thing.

3:34 Where this gets pain-by-numbers is you're just like, "Oh, I have to have them fail to do this thing three times and then succeed." That's not interesting. What's interesting is the why. Who have they become? How have they changed? Why do we now believe that this is the person that they have become? Why would they make this decision? And that arc can be really, really satisfying for a character. But there's so many different things. I really like the move from ignorance to knowledge. This is, you know, your classic sort of mystery arc done as a character, where they learn about themselves while they learn about a mystery in the world. There is information they need to have. They need to learn to be a better or different person in order to actually put that information into place. Spoiling an Agatha Christie novel, Hercule Poirot's final story is about him learning that there are villains out there that are smart enough he cannot prove that they have committed the crime. He can know because he's smart enough to do that, but he cannot find the proof. And that character arc is a really interesting one for a detective, realizing that there are cases that you can solve but not prove that you've solved, and what that does to him and the choices that he makes. This is, you know, again, a mystery being solved while a character learns something about themselves.

5:02 So there's just a few of them for you. But be watching for these. Have your book. I always joke that authors have a little black book, but it's not a name of people that they have dated. It is interesting character flaws in the people that they've met that they don't tell them about but that they watch for and watch how people overcome them so that they can make use of those in stories. QUESTION 2: How do you make a character’s arc in the first book of a series feel complete and satisfying when a character has a lot to work on other parts of themselves, but which they’ll do in potential sequels?

5:33 BRANDON: So, this is a good question. And for this you’ll need to, number one, define if you are writing an iconic character or not, or a character that becomes iconic. And iconic character is one that you have decided has primarily external arcs, or they have small internal arcs that do not necessarily make big changes to who they are book to book. A lot of your iconic heroes are people that large series have been written about that you can read out of order.

6:12 If you’re not writing that—and those are perfectly valid sorts of stories to write, there’s some very excellent stories written about iconic heroes. If you’re not writing about that, then what you’re going to want to ask yourself is, are there different things the character needs to work on about themselves? And are there ramifications from the first book that cause further complications? The thing that I don’t like, and I find that readers don’t like, is when you have a character backslide too much. You can maybe get away with this once, where a character’s made a decision, and in a future book the scope of what that decision makes them live with is bigger than they thought. The classic example of this is Spiderman 1 and 2 in the Sam Raimi trilogy. You know, in Spiderman 1, Spiderman decides to be a hero. Spiderman 2 he has to live with being a hero and that makes him question. Spiderman 2 is the strongest of that trilogy, and that’s in part because 1 is expected, and 2 is a really deep look at what it actually costs someone to have to do this, and it makes him question. You can’t do that again. At least I feel like if you do that again it becomes a problem. And indeed, most people who have a character backslide do not do it as well as Sam Raimi and his writers did with that trilogy. And so I recommend looking and saying what’s the next step? A good example, again, of this from film that is not a character arc but can help you understand is Star Wars, the first movie, introduces Darth Vader as a villain. But it doesn’t really have Luke face him. The second film has Luke face Darth Vader and fail. And the third film has Luke face Darth Vader and his greater mentor together with an escalation and then succeed. This is, if you can look at a character arc in this way, what is the thing that you can get a small victory on in the first book? Luke defeats Darth Vader by out-flying him and having better friends than him, basically. Luke defeats Darth Vader because Han shows up at the last moment. And Luke learns to use the Force. He has defeated Darth Vader and blown up the Death Star. But obviously, the bigger challenge is still there. And having a character have a victory but also have this looming sort of “I know there’s a lot that I still have to learn that I have to deal with” and whatnot for a future book, is relevant. And the longer you go in a series, the more you may want to be able to move external conflict to replacing that. A character arc does not have to be, you know, completely internal. There can be lots of things involving the external arcs. And indeed, at the same time, you can also have characters, you know, learn small things in the same way that an iconic character does, go through experiences, become a different person.

9:10 James Bond is a different person at the end of every book. It’s just that you don’t need to have all of that meaning to put context to everything. I really do like how the Daniel Craig movies did this. They have just enough continuity that the earlier books are meaningful. But Bond doesn’t have to go through an arc explicitly in each of them. He goes through one in a couple of them. So anyway, there’s some talk about that. I’m glad you’re asking this question. When you are working on sequels, this is one of the more important things to be considering. You want to avoid having the character learn the same thing every time. But also you want to avoid having the character always have to be going through some very difficult arc. You sometimes want them to do different things. So good question. QUESTION 3: How do you balance out a character taking risks with the readers just calling them idiots when something goes wrong?

10:04 BRANDON: Excellent question. QUESTION 3: Especially when the stakes can be really high. For some more context, I have a character who is very competent, but I want to have them take a risk and miscalculate how dangerous it is because they’re trying to act quickly. Specifically, they’re trying to save a kid and fail to protect themselves, which can have known catastrophic effects. The reader doesn’t know the exact effect, but being first person, the character is realizing the disaster as they’re feeling.

10:29 BRANDON: I think you’re probably going to be OK with that one. I will just tell you. This is a good question. You do want to balance the character’s incompetence and their likeability in general at the beginning of a story. Having a character be incompetent in a few areas and competent in few other areas, having them take risks and having those risks have consequences is good. I think you’ve already kind of got it here. Right? A character has to act quickly. They cannot make their decision. And particularly if you’ve foreshadowed this is a character who’s bad at making decisions quickly. They’re really good at making decisions if they have the time, and maybe over the course of the story they are learning how to make, you know, how to not freeze up. Or maybe it’s just a bad situation and there’s no character arc here. Sometimes you make the wrong call.

11:19 A lot will depend on how other characters respond to this character. And initially having other characters be like, “You screwed that up. I can’t believe you screwed that up.” But then having somebody kind of wise and more knowledgeable be like, “This happens. We have to make judgement calls last minute. Sometimes they’ll be wrong. But if we don’t make a call it’s always wrong. So you did your best.” And kind of having that or having the character come to that decision is one way.

11:46 Again, control the reader’s focus by what the story focuses upon. If you get bad feedback, or if you get good feedback on this that is good feedback but says that people are really thinking this character is dumb, well, then either add some more foreshadowing that this could possibly be a problem. Again, hang a lantern on it so to speak, so that the readers when it fails say, “OK, I saw this coming. It was foreshadowed. Let’s see how the character handles it.” That is a way to take off the edge on some of that. Making sure the character is competent in other areas so that when they fail in an area like this it doesn’t hit quite so hard. Or hinging your whole story around this big failure and having the character earn back our trust through the course of it. These are all perfectly valid ways. This reads like one that’s going to work to me.

12:35 What you want to avoid, the big danger with this is having a character make a big mess for everyone else at the beginning of a story in a way that turns us off to liking them. That’s a danger. And you’ve got to be careful about those things. It’s the reason why a lot of the things that characters flub at the beginnings of stories don’t directly impact characters we love, and that the stakes aren’t too high, and the costs aren’t too high. But, you know, there is a question here. One of the issues I have with the way Shadow and Bone was handled, which as I recall was not handled this way, quite the same way in the books, is, you know, the main character makes a very big mistake in the first or second episode, and it’s explicitly kind of for selfish reasons. This is a hard thing to work back from. You totally can, and I think Season 1 of Shadow and Bone is really excellent, and I think that they do, but that was a very dangerous move. And, you know, there are things you could have done to that show to just not make it seem so selfish. Basically, she insists that, you know, a certain thing happen, and then a disaster happens because of that. If they would have made it so that she insisted upon that for reasons that didn’t feel quite so selfish—watch for that selfishness. A character being selfless and things messing up we’re going to take way better than a character being selfish, even if that’s a character flaw.

14:05 If it is a character flaw, own it and then recoup it as the story progresses. You can do dangerous things. You can do things that early on people would say this is a mistake, because if you own them and you make your story about them, they will then be hallmarks of your story. Don’t try to write a story that everyone is going to love. Write the piece of art that you want to write. But do be aware that that’s a danger that, you know, you want to do intentionally, not accidentally.

14:33 QUESTION 4: When writing multiple viewpoints, how do you know when a scene should be written from one perspective or another? How do you decide which viewpoint is better suited to a scene? BRANDON: Generally, rule of thumb, Character taking the actions. Character that has the most investment and emotional stake. Character going through the most pain. Watch for those things when picking your viewpoint character. You can’t always do that. And sometimes it is interesting to have an external viewpoint. But watch for those external viewpoints on interesting things happening. Try to, if you’re doing multiple viewpoints and they’re all viewpoint characters, put us in the head of the person acting. This, again, is a rule of thumb. One out of 10 times you’ll want to do it the other way for artistic or storytelling reasons.

15:16 QUESTION 5: Sometimes you talk about setting being its own character, like Arrakis or the town in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Does this happen intentionally, and does it follow the same rules? BRANDON: I can’t speak for Gabriel García Márquez or Frank Herbert. When I do it, it’s intentional. Setting is usually its own character. But usually you’re deciding whether you’re bringing it to the forefront or kind of leaving it in the background. And how much are you making the setting having conflict, causing conflict for the characters? How much is it having its own quirks and its own flaws and limitations and handicaps and all of these things? How are you using the setting and how is it impacting the characters? When I say the setting is its own character, in the same way that the character influences the decisions of others, how is the setting influencing the decisions of others? I do this intentionally. And it follows some of the same rules, but not the exact same rules. Right? I imagine setting as a character in the same way that I might imagine a character who is external to the main character, who’s not going to get a viewpoint, who causes a lot of conflict and problems for the character that they must overcome. And I want to make sure that there’s quirks to them. I want to make sure that there’s advantages to living in the setting as well as just disadvantages. Right? I want to be able to see, you know, how the characters navigate living in this setting and making use of the setting, or responding to or against the setting, whether it be Arrakis, or whether it be the religious climate, or whatnot of the place they live in. QUESTION 6: How do you manage dialog in scenes with multiple strong-willed characters, specifically the people might be aligned on the overall goal, but all of them have slightly different motivations and each one believes themselves to be the leader of the group? BRANDON: These are fun. What you’re describing here is very fun. When you can make characters’ motivations manifest through dialogue and the way that they speak with others and the friction points between how they want to accomplish what they want to accomplish, that is often where your characters become most clear and most manifest. And I recommend it being something that you practice. Because generally dialogue is a better place to do this than narrative. You’re going to do it in both.

17:32 But dialogue tends to be a stronger show versus tell. And being able to write great dialogue scenes where people back and forth, you know--. How do you do it? How do you manage dialogue in scenes? Well, I tend to go into a scene with goals. I tend to go into a dialogue scene saying, “Here’s what I want to accomplish.” And now—all writing is improv. All writing is discovery writing at some point. I go in with a bullet point. “Dalinar is going to discuss with this monarch about joining his coalition.” That’s my bullet point. Here’s what’s going to happen.

18:13 You know. I’ll have the bullet point saying, “He’s going to get rejected. It’s not going to go very well because this character’s like this.” And then I’ll sit down and be like, “All right, what makes this scene interesting and dynamic? What can I reveal about Dalinar? What can I reveal about the other character? Is there foreshadowing I want to accomplish in this? Are there side characters there that I can show glimpses of that can also be entering the conversation, and what is their conversation showing about them and their motivations?” And I bullet point a lot of this as I sit down to write the scene. These aren’t in my outline. It’s in what I kind of call a floating outline, where I just take a list of bullet points and I say, “OK, I’m going to try this. These are my goals. This is what I want to accomplish.” And then I’ll sit and I’ll freeform it. I’ll improv it and see how the scene goes. At the end of the scene, after writing it, I might have had things that didn’t go as well as I wanted. I’ll usually bullet point those at the top of the scene for revision later. Sometimes I’ll go back, and I’ll fix them right then. Usually I’ll bullet point them, as long as they’re kind of small things, for things to try on a reread.

19:14 QUESTION 7: What is the role of iconic characters when they are something other than the protagonist? Can iconic characters who’ve already learned their lesson help the protagonist learn and grow? And how does that relationship work in fiction? Are there roles that iconic characters are very well suited for in a story? BRANDON: Wow, that’s really cool. I’m glad you’re thinking about that. The answer to all of that is, of course, yes. But let’s dig into it a little bit. What is the role of iconic characters who’ve already learned when they are something other than the protagonist? Iconic characters do make excellent villains. Right? You generally are not going to be showing viewpoints from your villain.

19:50 Generally meaning, like, 60% of the time. 40% of the time you will be. But they won’t necessarily have something to learn. And if you treat them like a character, like I kind of talked about, you can have them kind of learn the lesson but then refuse at the end, and that’s part of what makes them a villain. But they can also be somebody who, you know, has had their chances and is now determined to accomplish what they’re going to accomplish.

20:18 And you can go both directions. Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films in particular, you know, is struggling with an arc. He’s less iconic, but he eventually makes that fail decision. But I would say that in The Dark Knight, Joker is an excellent example of an iconic character as a villain. He has made his decisions. He’s already come up with his life philosophy. He already has his flaws. Batman manifests those flaws to him through their conflict, but he does not change.

20:51 And that, you know, that’s where his downfall happens. He laughs about it and says, “Oh, we’re just going to keep doing this because we won’t change.” But through the course of that story Batman does change. Batman does learn and he doesn’t. So that contrast is really cool. Can iconic characters who’ve already learned their lessons help the protagonist learn and grow? I mean, you are outlining what the mentor character usually is. It depends. Obviously, in Mistborn, Kelsier is not an iconic character and things like that. But, you know, in a lot of stories, Gandalph is iconic. Right? Gandalph is not changing. Frodo’s on a downward arc through the course of Lord of the Rings. He is being corrupted by the Ring. He is doing his best, but it is slowly destroying him. And Gandalph has already made that decision. He does not accept the Ring. He’s refused it. He continues to be Gandalph. His evolution of a character happens kind of to him rather than because of him. He fights the Balrog and is reborn because Ilúvatar sends him back, and things like this. So Gandalph is there for wisdom and for learning. He’s learned a lot of things. He knows a lot of things.

22:01 And you’ll find that your mentor figure is often an iconic character. But, you know, a lot of your sidekicks are iconic characters. The Mission Impossible films is a really interesting film series because I feel they get better and better as they go along, which is odd. You don’t usually have a series running that long where your strongest entries are, like, films, you know, 7 and 8, or whatnot. I reserve judgement on Dead Reckoning until I see the second half of it. But until Dead Reckoning I feel that each film got stronger, with perhaps a little dip for film 2, as much as I love John Woo. But in that series, I would say most of the team do not have arcs. They are iconic characters whose job is to be there, to do their schtick, to make us laugh now and then, to give us some emotion, because the majority of the time is spent on Ethan Hunt, and usually one villain and one secondary main protagonist, who often are going through some interesting arc. And I think those films are excellent because of that. And you can see that the role of the side characters being to offer some continuity and just some fun.

23:21 So there’s three reasons why you might want to use iconic characters other than your protagonist. QUESTION 8: Any tips for troubleshooting when your main character becomes less interesting/loveable than your supporting characters? BRANDON: Oh, man. This is a problem that you will run into. This is in part because you’ll be giving these weird quirks to your side characters, and oftentimes you forget to do so with your main character. QUESTION 8: I suppose I could I reconsider whom I choose for my main viewpoint character.

23:48 But I find I repeatedly end up loving my supporting characters more in most of the stories I’ve written so far. BRANDON: All right. So this is a good problem to be having. It means you can write interesting and quirky characters. I would say that I encountered this in the early draft of the Wax and Wayne novels, where Wayne was more interesting than Wax was. This is in part because of things that make Wayne a good sidekick that it’s kind of the Jack Sparrow problem. If Wayne had headlined the books—I actually tried writing the first book about Wayne when it was a short story—the weirdness is too much. And it’s one of these things like rich milk chocolate, getting it in small doses actually makes them a stronger character. Having one or two Wayne viewpoints per book really makes him pop as a character and lets him have arcs that are interesting. But if it were all Wayne all the time, I think you would just get tired of him. And so I wrote the first book and Wax was kind of bland by comparison. What I realized was I had not given Wax a really strong motivation for being there. I had not, you know—like, this is when I sat down, and I put in what happened. A lot of the things in Shadows of Self are things I came up with to add as foreshadowing in Book 1 because I knew I needed more for Wax. That’s when it became a series, when I was doing the revisions. And because of that, I added a much bigger arc about why he left, why he came back, what he’s hoping to accomplish, who he is. And I’m like, “What are Wax’s flaws? What is he working on? What are his problems?” And I had to work on this idea that, you know, Wax approaches problems too analytically sometimes. He forgets the people involved. And this let me have him have a flaw that he could work on, and let me have him have an arc, which made him really much more interesting. And it gave him investment and stakes in what was happening. And, you know, it let him have some quirks. Let your main characters have some of those quirks. Like I said, a character like Wayne, sometimes they can headline. But sometimes they’re better in supporting.

26:15 But learn the lessons from what you’re doing with your side characters. This is a problem when someone decides, “I want to make a character strong. I want to make a cool, strong character.” They make them an absolute badass and then don’t make them flawed in any interesting way, and so they become bland. You know, it is the Harry Potter problem, less about him being awesome and more about him being, you know, he’s the viewpoint through which we see the story, but then his other characters, his two friends are more interesting than him. Well, he can have some more flaws, some more quirks. So look at that. See what you’re doing with those side characters that is working. QUESTION 9: How can you avoid repeating a character’s name too often, especially when I have a scene with two male characters? I find I need to name them frequently to avoid confusion. Can this be avoided by improving characterization or using traits in place of names? BRANDON: Just use the name. Don’t stress this. The name is largely invisible except as a marker to the reader. Don’t worry about it unless you’re getting a lot of complaints. But if you have pronoun fluency, you’re going to be using the name often, because any time you use a pronoun you need to make sure it’s referencing back to the most recent noun that it could be referencing. And if you don’t do this, your writing will just be unclear. And so I would say, don’t stress this unless you’re getting just a ton of feedback that you’re using the character’s name too often.

27:42 And if you are, I mean, in that case, you may look at your dialogue sequences that are just between characters. And when they’re between two characters you can cut the attributions more often. You can look at starting paragraphs with the character’s name and then using a pronoun for the rest of that paragraph. But just make sure you’re fluent with your pronouns. You don’t want to be confusing people with those. My gut is don’t stress this. QUESTION 10: Can I talk about how Robin Hobb uses characters to guide her story and why this is so effective? She puts them through so much and they make bad choices, but so many love her characters. How does she get that kind of dimension? How do you get that kind of dimension?

28:23 BRANDON: I mean, Robin Hobb is one of the greatest living writers. And so how do you do it like Robin Hobb is a bigger answer than I can give right here. But maybe a few tips. One of the things that Robin Hobb focuses on in her books is really authentic, real life living for her characters. She doesn’t skip that a lot of us skip when we’re writing action stories. She goes into the daily life. And so you have signed up for that by reading one of her books. You have self-selected to be a crowd that is OK, that you’re going to see daily life, and the struggles of daily life. It’s not boring because the character’s having conflict and problems and things like this. But you’re getting a lot more of that, so that as the struggles happen you’ve bonded to these characters because they are so real.

29:11 And I think that authenticity and realism is the thing that makes her books shine. When people put down a Robin Hobb book is because there’s so much of that that they don’t feel that the story is moving the way that they would want. And, you know, every book is going to have things that appeal to some readers and not others. But if you like Robin Hobb’s writing, and I do, and I think she is fantastic, I would say make us feel that the things are authentic. She does put her characters through a ton. They do make terrible choices. But because they’re motivations are so well established, and who they are is so well established, and those motivations feel real, then they feel like our friends who are making mistakes rather than a character in a film who’s doing something stupid. If that makes sense. So yeah, you can definitely spend a lot of time studying Robin Hobb, and I would recommend you do so, particularly kind of the later Fitz and the Fool books, and just kind of showing how a character grows up and changes, and how daily life can be fascinating. She’s very good at that. So there you go. There’s your Q&A on character.

30:24 Thank you so much. I realize there’s a bunch of them we didn’t get to. But hopefully this will give you some springboards into finding some of those answers on your own. Because, of course, the answer to most questions is practice a whole bunch, see how professionals have done it, try it yourself and work your way through it, and hopefully that will bring your answers. And again, writing advice isn’t one size fits all. I have one perspective. I try to give lots of perspectives. But it’s all going to be clouded by the way that I write books. So if you have advice to people that has worked for you on any of these points, please put them in the comments.

31:00 Get us a different perspective. Let us know what’s working for you, answers to these questions that might give a different perspective from the one that I’ve given, so that people who ask the questions can dive in and see what is working for other authors who are writing like they are. We will do the Worldbuilding Q&A next. So if you haven’t left your questions on the last Worldbuilding lecture, go do so now, and we will pick, say, 10 of them and do another one of these.