Today’s post is by author and coach Jackie Alcalde Marr.
The characters we create are begging to be treated as real people. And our readers want to see themselves in the characters that fill our pages. They want to recognize the foibles and frustrations, the mistakes, and the triumphs that characters in our stories experience.
Life coaches help clients gain insights that uncover how they are shaping their own life stories. So I suggest you borrow the toolkit of a life coach to design what drives your character.
People come to life coaches for many reasons, but in my years of coaching clients from executives to artists, one theme is ever-present: people are striving to achieve a goal but are trapped in a cage of their own patterns, until they gain an insight that sets them free. That’s when they chart a new path that gets them what they’ve wanted. More importantly, they’re transformed by the experience. Sound familiar?
As I’ve coached writers, life coaching tools snuck their way into our conversations. These tools give writers a new lens with which to craft their characters.
Clearer character arcs: GOAL model highlights misguided loops
My coaching client, “Tara,” is vying for that promotion. “I’ve been trying for this promotion for four years, but nothing I do makes a difference.”
The GOAL model—which stands for Goal, Options, Action, Learn—guides us to uncover what she wants, the options she sees, the choices she makes, and what she learns. But she’s stuck. She sees limited options and makes predictable choices that hinder her progress instead of moving her forward.
It’s a vicious loop, until we dive underneath it all to discover her killer misbelief: she thinks her ideas aren’t savvy enough. Once she realized that wasn’t true, the insight shifted her perspective. She started speaking up in meetings, sought out tough projects, and proposed a bold plan for her organization. Yes, she got the promotion.
Or, when your best friend says, “Of course you should take the job. It’s everything you’ve said you want. You know you always shrink when you’re on the verge of a big success. What’s up with that?” (Coaches and BFFs have a way of holding up a mirror!) After the two of you finish a long walk, you may get to it—that misbelief that has caged you.
Remember the movie When Harry Met Sally? Harry’s misbelief that men and women couldn’t have deep and lasting relationships kept him trapped in a misguided loop of shallow encounters. But his epiphany on New Year’s Eve changed everything. “When you realize that you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
As you create misguided loops for your character, allow her to only see the options that align with her misbelief, until you decide to drop that big scene into the plot—the scene where your character gains the insight that sets her free.
Try this approach:
- Describe your character’s misbelief in one sentence.
- Create three misguided loops she makes because of her misbelief.
- Craft the plot event that gives her the insight she needs to drive her new action.
- Write the scene where she realizes what she’s learned and how she’s forever changed.
Beefier backstory: life’s crucible moments shape beliefs
Once you’ve laid out your character’s misguided loops, it’s time to dig into the backstory that created them. That’s where crucible moments come in. Misguided or not, where do our deepest beliefs come from? Sometimes, a client like Tara will reveal her sense of identity, even without my probing. “I’m a person who…” “I believe that…” It’s an invitation for me to pull a backstory from her. Like our characters, Tara doesn’t know why she has her belief system, and she’s usually oblivious to how it impacts her choices.
A walk through her Life’s Crucible Moments Map helps us identify the events that Tara thinks were significant in her life—the highs and lows. Then we dig deeper: “So, when you withdrew from college, what did that mean to you?”
Tara reveals that the experience made her question her ability to succeed at long-term goals. And even below that, we uncover how she sees herself now—as a person who doesn’t have valuable ideas to share.
We know not every important life event rocks our world, but some do—even events that others would deem innocuous. These life-shaping moments are meaningful because they test our values and challenge what we believe about ourselves. Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and author of True North, describes events of great adversity that shape who we are. He calls these “crucible moments.” For Tara, who had always been a stellar student, withdrawing from college shattered her previous identity, that of an intelligent achiever.
Crucible moments create big meaning for us and shape who we become. As writers, we dwell in crucible moments. In our character’s backstory lurk the crucible moments that form their identity and the belief system, including the misguided beliefs that drive choices.
Writers sometimes make the mistake of a wishy-washy backstory that doesn’t give the character a firm belief system or identity. The past crucible moments must be strong enough to guide your character’s convictions and also keep her stuck in her misguided loops. Which one has left an ugly scar? Which one has made her pound her fist and scream, “Never again!”
The inciting incident in your novel may be the first new crucible moment for your character, challenging her deeply held beliefs. But the crucible moments in her backstory are still the ones that have shaped her so that she reacts to the plot in her signature ways. As you write forward, each plot event provides the tension needed when it forces your character to bump up against her sense of self. It’s only when you give her a big, new crucible moment in the third act that she will dig deep to recover who she truly is, or she’ll bust free from her old scars and forge a new belief and identity.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen’s crucible backstory moment was when her father died in the mine. She became a survivalist who must take care of her mother and sister, Prim. When the inciting incident hits, she stays true to that solidly forged identity and volunteers as tribute to save Prim. But her new crucible moment is when Rue dies in the games. In that moment, Katniss realizes how the tributes’ lives are exploited for sport. She’s transformed into an activist for a greater purpose, a rebel against the Capitol.
Use the Life’s Crucible Moments Map to create a backstory that matters. If an important event you bring forward wasn’t truly crucible, crank it up. Show the meaning your character drew from it and the identity it forged. And as you write forward, the new crucible moment will be the lesson that shifts your character’s current beliefs or values and transforms her identity once again.
Try this approach:
- Plot the highs and lows of your character’s life before we meet her.
- Select the event(s) that rocked her world: what meaning did she derive from it, and how has that shaped her identity?
- Determine the scenes in your story where she’ll rely on that identity and the beliefs that go with it.
- Write the scene where she faces a new crucible moment that will forge a new version of herself.
Richer scenes: worldview ladder deepens interiority and conflict
Now that you’ve clarified what your character believes and why, it’s time to let that play out on the page. Each scene we build is an opportunity to bring the reader closer to our character and how those steadfast beliefs drive her actions.
Imagine that Tara and her boyfriend, Jim, go to a community meeting, excited to learn about a proposed park for their neighborhood. When they leave the room, she says to Jim, “Wow, this will be wonderful for the kids!”
Jim looks at her and replies, “What? Kids will hate it. What a waste!”
How can this be? It’s as if they attended two different meetings. But they sat next to each other through the entire meeting. They drive home silently, and Tara wonders if Jim simply doesn’t want kids after all.
This happens all the time—in corporations, in politics, in marriages. Coaches help clients like Tara recognize their set of assumptions—her worldview—that can lead to internal and external conflict. That’s real-life drama, and you want the same for your character. In every scene, your character’s worldview filters everything she sees and hears, and how she responds to it.
Researcher Chris Argyris offered a model to explain why we are left baffled when others see things so differently from us and how to work through difficult conversations. He called the model the Ladder of Inference. With writers, I call it the Worldview Ladder.
It’s true, Tara and Jim went to the same meeting. The problem starts at the very bottom of the ladder when Jim picked up different bits of information than Tara did. He heard that the park would be only half an acre in size, and he’s irked because kids should have lots of open space, just like he had growing up in rural North Carolina. On the other hand, Tara heard the park will offer water features and slides. She wished she’d had a park like this when she was young in San Francisco.
We can see that Tara and Jim traveled the ladder separately, picking up different information from the start, based on their worldview. And as they traveled up the ladder, they added more assumptions and drew conclusions that reinforced their beliefs. Jim will vote against the park, Tara will vote for it, and their relationship will shift a bit.
You can use this model to enrich your character’s interiority while amping up tension and conflict.
A client of mine was writing a romance in which her character desperately wanted a baby. Originally, she’d revealed the character’s desire through dialogue with her husband as they strolled through a farmer’s market. Fine. But what happened when we added the lens of the Worldview Ladder? Suddenly, the character noticed the woman by the peaches who cradled a newborn, and the giggles of two little girls chasing each other around the crates of tomatoes. Her environmentalist husband droned on about the regulations for organic farmers. Of course, conflict erupts when he’s annoyed that she’s not listening. She knew it—he’s too caught up in his career to have kids.
Once again, our characters are destined to become more entrenched in their worldviews until your plot event jolts them from their assumptions and forces them to see things differently. Once their belief system changes, they’ll notice new things, assign new meaning, feel new emotions, and take new actions.
Try this:
- Pick a scene that needs more intensity.
- Jump inside the skin of your character. What does she see and hear in that scene, and what does she ignore? Use that to deepen our understanding of what makes her tick.
- Reveal the assumptions she’s making, how her beliefs are reinforced, and how this drives her next action … and maybe her next mistake.
- Now write the scene that changes everything—the event that busts through her filter, challenges her assumptions, and creates a new belief that drives a new, bold action.
Life coaches have a challenging but rewarding role. Each of these models can help our real clients write their life stories by discovering their hidden misbeliefs, the crucible moments that have shaped them, and how their worldview filters their experiences and reinforces their beliefs—for better or worse. But as writers, we must create all of this for our characters. These tools help you see your character as a life coach sees her client—real, complex, behaving in ways that thwart her progress … until you help her see it all differently! Uncovering these hidden dynamics is the job of a life coach; creating these hidden dynamics is the job of a writer.
Note from Jane: To request templates of the tools that Jackie mentioned in this post, click here. Check “Other” on her Contact form, and tell her you saw this post!
Jackie Alcalde Marr is a certified leadership and life coach as well as an Author Accelerator certified book coach. She co-authored Social Media At Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance, and has authored several short stories for the Northern California Publishers and Authors and Badass Sisterhood anthologies. She is currently querying for Olives, Sugar, Cherries, a historical novel about the Spanish diaspora through Hawaii.
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