Character Arc Tracker
Characters aren't fixed: they journey. Trace how a character changes across a whole novel, the methods that show it, and why the writer put them on that path.
Argue it out before you write it
A free interactive activity to open a lesson and get the thinking started.
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Character Arc Tracker
A great novel puts a character on a journey, and the examiner rewards you for tracing that arc rather than describing who somebody is. A strong answer tracks three things, and it is always the same three: • what the character is like at the start • what drives the change, and at what cost • what they have become by the end Movement is the point. We will work on Scrooge, because no character in the syllabus moves further, but the skill fits any novel.
Describing or tracking?
Most answers on character are describing when they think they are analysing. The two read very differently, and the difference is visible in the first half of the sentence:
Which one tracks?
Which sentence TRACKS an arc, rather than describing a character?
- Scrooge begins by refusing to give a penny and ends by giving away more than he can be thanked for
- Scrooge is a mean and lonely old man who does not like Christmas
- Scrooge is visited by four ghosts over the course of one night
- Dickens calls Scrooge "solitary as an oyster", which is a simile
What each visitor does
- Marley's Ghost
- The Ghost of Christmas Past
- The Ghost of Christmas Present
- The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
- Arrives in chains he forged himself, to warn Scrooge that the same fate is being prepared for him
- Reawakens feelings Scrooge had buried, by showing him a boy left alone at school and a woman who gave up on him
- Shows him the warmth in houses poorer than his own, and the child in one of them who may not survive
- Says nothing at all, and shows him a death that nobody mourns
How a writer shows change
Track the methods, not the plot. An arc is built out of choices, and these are the ones you will find yourself writing about most:
What actually changes him
A transformation needs causes, not just events. Put the things that work on Scrooge into the order Dickens applies them.
- He is shown a warning: a man punished for living exactly as Scrooge still lives
- He is shown his own past, and remembers that he was not always cold
- He is shown the present, and sees what his coldness costs a family he could easily help
- He is shown a future in which he dies and nobody is sorry
- He acts, because memory and fear together have made him want to
Put both ends in one sentence
Here is the most efficient sentence you can write about a character, and it takes about fifteen seconds to plan. Take the character at their worst, take the same character at the end, and put them in the same sentence, joined by "becomes" or "ends by". The sentence then does three jobs at once: it evidences both ends, it demonstrates the movement, and it saves you a paragraph of narration. The test of a good one is that neither half can be deleted. If the sentence still makes its point with the first half gone, you were describing the ending rather than tracking an arc.
The new Scrooge
Pick the TWO things that show the CHANGED Scrooge at the end of the novel.
- He becomes a second father to Tiny Tim
- He goes to his nephew Fred's Christmas dinner, having refused the invitation
- He dismisses Christmas as a humbug
- He asks the charity collectors whether the workhouses are still in operation
The morning after
This is Scrooge on Christmas morning in Stave 5, in Dickens's own words. Tap the simile that compares him to a CHILD.
- I am as light as a feather,
- I am as happy as an angel,
- I am as merry as a school-boy.
- I am as giddy as a drunken man.
Why the change matters
An arc is never only about one character. Ask why the writer built it, and for Dickens the answer is never far away. He published the novella in 1843, angry about the treatment of the poor and the 1834 Poor Law that made the workhouse the price of relief. He could have written a pamphlet, and he had written them before. Instead he wrote a story in which the coldest man imaginable becomes generous. That choice is the argument. If Scrooge can change, then nobody comfortable gets to say the problem is somebody else's, and no reader can finish the book believing that a hard heart is simply how some people are made.
Why redeem him?
Dickens chooses the coldest man in the book and redeems him. What does that choice let him argue?
- That anyone can change, so nobody with means is excused from responsibility for the poor
- That ghosts are real and ought to be feared
- That Christmas is the only time of year when generosity matters
- That poor people are largely responsible for their own poverty
Build the contrast
A contrast sentence puts both ends of the arc side by side. The man who called Christmas a humbug and asked whether the _____ were still in operation becomes the man who is a second father to _____. Setting the two against each other inside one sentence shows the _____ travelled, which is what an arc answer needs, rather than two separate _____ of the same character.
Track the arc
Exam practice. In about 60 words, trace how SCROOGE changes across A Christmas Carol. Include:
- what he is like at the START (a method and a short quotation)
- the turning point: what drives the change, and why that particular thing works on him
- what he becomes by the END, and Dickens's purpose in changing him
Journey traced
A character arc is how a character _____ across a whole novel, and tracking one beats describing what somebody is like. Show where they start, what _____ the change, and where they end, analysing the methods that reveal it rather than retelling the plot. Then tie the arc to the _____ purpose: Dickens redeems his coldest character in order to argue that nobody is beyond _____.