Character Arc Template: How to Track the Way Your Character Changes

A character arc is the path a character travels from the start of a story to the end, and the ways they change along it. It describes what a character believes and wants at first, which events they go through, and how those events change them.

This guide takes a quick look at the three shapes an arc can take, then shows how to record a character's changes chapter by chapter. If you only decide the start and the end, it's easy to lose track of where a character stands halfway through a serial. The example is Clay Rowen, the lead of They Say I'm a Dark Mage, but All I'm Good At Is Digging Dirt, the web novel from TypeTak's Write a Web Novel, Step by Step course.

At a glance

1. An arc comes from the distance between what a character wants and what they actually need
2. There are three basic shapes: the character changes, the character stays the same and changes the world around them, or the character gets worse
3. Don't write only the start and the end. Add a line for each chapter where something changes, along with the event that caused it
4. In a serial, the chapters where a character slides back are part of the arc too, so write them down

An arc comes from the gap between want and need

At the start of the story, your character wants something. As the story goes on, it turns out that what they actually need is something else. The distance between the two is the length of the arc.

Clay is a commoner boy who can only do earth magic, and the whole academy believes he's a dark mage. (In Korean, the two sound alike. That's the whole joke.) He wants a license and a steady job. Underneath, he wants to stop being looked down on for being a commoner. But the more recognition he earns at the academy, the clearer it gets that all of it is recognition “as a dark mage.” The gap between the recognition Clay wants and the recognition he actually gets is where this story's arc comes from.

The easiest place to look for want and need is the Want and Need fields of a character profile template.

The three types of character arcs

Different characters in the same story can have different arcs. The lead might have a positive arc, the mentor a flat arc, and the rival a negative one. Not every side character needs an arc. A character who appears in only a few scenes can stay exactly as they were when they came in.

What goes wrong when you only write the start and the end

Most people write an arc as two fields: “Start: a timid boy → End: a mage who protects everyone.” For a short novel, that can be enough. Once a story runs as long as a serial, these problems show up.

• You're writing chapter 30 and can't tell where this character is between the start and the end
• The character suddenly changes in a single chapter, because nothing in the manuscript leads up to it
• While revising an earlier chapter, you can't remember whether they had already changed by then

That's why it helps to build the arc up chapter by chapter. Each time the character changes, add a line for when it happened, what caused it, and what's different now.

A character arc worksheet: track changes chapter by chapter

An arc table gets one row for each change. Five columns are enough.

1. Chapter: the chapter or part where the change happens
2. Triggering event: what moved the character
3. Belief: what the character believes from this chapter on
4. Relationships: whose relationship with them changed, and how
5. Want: if the goal they chase has changed, what it is now

You don't need to fill every column every time. If this change only touched a relationship, fill in just the Relationships column. Just keep the rows in chapter order. Open any chapter, and the rows above it describe the character as they are at that point.

Character arc template to copy

Copy the box below as it is. There's no sign-up and no email. Fill in the top part once, and add rows to the bottom part as you write the manuscript.

[Fill in once]
Character:
Arc type (positive · flat · negative):
What they want at the start:
What they believe at the start (the mistaken belief):
What they actually need:
Where you want them to end up (leave blank if you haven't decided):

[Add a row each time they change]
Chapter | Triggering event | Belief | Relationships | Want
 |  |  |  | 
 |  |  |  | 
 |  |  |  | 

You can start with “Where you want them to end up” blank. In a serial, the ending often gets decided as you write, and once the rows below pile up, they can point you toward one.

Example: Clay Rowen's character arc

Here's Clay's arc with one row for each of the course story's three arcs (Early misunderstanding and admission, Settling in and rising status, Traces of real dark magic). As the manuscript grows, the rows add up by chapter instead of by story arc.

With this written down, when you write a chapter in the settling-in arc, you can start the scene from where Clay is: he has begun to believe in earth magic a little. In the course, Clay's abilities were also planned to grow in a set direction, from fixing everyday problems to repairing facilities, reshaping terrain, disaster recovery, and finally healing rotten land. Put the stages of his growing power next to the stages of his changing beliefs in the same table, and the two are less likely to drift apart.

Character arcs in serial fiction

Unlike a standalone novel, a serialized web novel goes on chapter by chapter while readers react to each one. The arc doesn't move in one straight line either.

• Write down the chapters where the character slides back. Sometimes a character changes, then falls back on an old belief in front of a crisis. That goes in the arc table as a row too. With the slide on record, the next change reads as bigger.
• Read the table at the end of each story arc. When you finish an arc, read the arc table from the top and decide where the character needs to go in the next one.
• Time-loop and reincarnation stories have two starting points. The character before the loop or the past life isn't the same as the character after it. Write that earlier life above the first row as “Previous life,” and it becomes clear what the character is trying to change.

To see how relationships shift across the whole cast, use the Relationships column alongside a character relationship chart with a period on each relationship.

Tracking a character arc in TypeTak

TypeTak is an AI writing editor where you write alongside an agent. Characters become nodes in your World, your own lore dictionary that doubles as a graph, and an arc builds up inside the node in two forms.

• Changes you'd write as sentences go into Progression. Under a section such as Personality, add one line at a time, in story order, for what the character became, gained, lost, or found out. Click the chapter number in front of an entry to go back to the manuscript where it happened. (Progression)
• Short values get a start and end. Values you compare in a table, like affiliation or status, aren't overwritten. Each value notes the manuscript page or board card where it starts and ends. (Start and end)
• Changes in the manuscript come in through Organize World. Press Organize World, and the agent adds what each character became, gained, lost, or found out in each chapter to the section's Progression.

Before it drafts or answers, the agent finds and reads the lore it needs in your World. That way, when you're writing chapter 30, it carries the scene on with Clay as he is at that point in the story. The devlog post Stories Move: Lore That Knows When It's True covers how TypeTak handles lore that changes as the story goes on.

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