Two Great Ways To Create A Character Arc - Adam Argot

What is the relationship between the main character's Achilles heel and the moral imperative? — Okay, this is a big subject. So ultimately to boil it down to its basic essence, the Achilles heel is the flawed belief and the moral imperative is the external world that carries that lesson they can learn, you know. So um Jaws, uh that's it's an example I use in the book quite a bit. Um, you have this sheriff that he's responsible for the well-being and safety of everyone on Abidy Island and he's new. It's very important that he's new to the island. So, all of a sudden, he sees somebody that's been mutilated by a shark and he's horrified because it's nothing like what he's experienced before. So, his first thought is, okay, we this is a crime scene. He starts treating it like with the seriousness that it deserves. But a lot of people are like, "Well, hold on. " Like you have the mayor come in, you have like the local shop owners and they start saying, "If you yell shark, you know, say barracuda, no one cares. Say shark, you have a ghost town here. We depend on Fourth of July to make all of our money for the entire year. You can't just close the beaches. " So, at the core of it, you have uh Sheriff Brody who deeply believes, oh, I'm out of my depths here. This isn't like I'm new here. These people know how to solve the problem. So, he's like, I need to trust the institutions that are already in place because I'm the new person here. So, I don't want to overstep. I have the authority, but I don't want to overstep or abuse my authority. So, at the core of it, he has this deeply limiting belief, which is, well, everybody else knows how to solve this problem better than I do, so I probably don't really need to go out and like hunt down this shark or it's probably not that big of a deal. Everyone keeps telling me it's And then as he goes through the story, every single element, you know, he's the amazing scene where he's sitting on the beach and it's that Zali shot where it's like he's sitting on the beach and he's just like staring off and everyone's like, "What are you worried about? Oh, I know you're really upset about the shark and blah blah. " And then all of a sudden a child is attacked by a shark and everyone panics and rushes out of the water and it hits him for the first time. Oh my god, this I should have shut down the beach. But still, you know, it's um what's the name of the character? — The Roy Schneider character. — No, the mother. She comes up to him later and says, "I just found out that you knew that there was a shark in these waters and you still kept the beaches open. " And she slaps him and says, "My son is dead because of you, Sheriff. " And that's the midpoint. That's when he goes, "I'm letting this mayor talk me into keeping the beaches open. " And then he starts saying, "Gh, I need I okay, I need to take this into my own hands. I can't trust the mayor. " And the mayor is another mask of excuses. He's using institutions to try and solve the problem for him. And he's like, "Well, I'm not a shark hunter. I can't go kill the shark. Obviously, there needs to be somebody else who can go kill the shark. So, I'm going to count on, well, the mayor knows what's doing. The shopkeepers know what know what's up. " And then little by little, the biologist comes into town. And then you got the fisherman Quint and they're like, "All right, we're going to go out to sea. " And when they go out to sea, the whole epiphany is, "We're going to need a bigger boat. " That's when his arc is complete. That's when he realizes, "Oh, I know what the size of the problem is. It's this giant shark. " And he realizes, "No one is going to save me. I have to deal with this shark myself. " His whole arc is going from, "Hey, I'm the new guy. I don't really know how things work around here. I'm put in charge, but I'm just going to trust everybody. " Slowly, he goes through the process of realizing, "Oh, I'm the one that has to confront the shark myself. literally be like deep in the water pulling the trigger as I'm sinking, taking out the shark. There's no one between him. he's the only one that's going to be able to do it even though he has no idea that he's the one that's going to have to do it. So his Achilles heel is that his limiting belief keeps him from confronting the shark. The moral imperative is saying, "Hey, all these institutions you're depending on, they're not enough. Only you are going to have to face the shark. " So the moral imperative becomes the sphere the world that he has to negotiate in order to get to solving the problem. The problem is the shark is eating the people. The moral imperative says you need to lose

basically the story is about how a man loses faith in the institutions that are already set up to protect him to realize oh these when pressed when we're presented with a real uh predator these institutions are not equipped to protect me I need to protect myself and my family by being the person literally pulling the trigger. So both basically the Achilles heel is that limiting belief and the trying to solve the problem is the lure that pulls them into the moral imperative the world that's the threshold that we talk about with rights of passage. When you enter into a new world you're crossing the threshold into the rules of that world that universe and then that uh the conflict is as their values change to realize the lessons they need to learn to survive in that world. Now, after killing the shark, Sheriff Brody understands how this world works in Amity. And now he's equipped to be able to survive. He knows if there's another shark that comes along, first thing he's going to do is go get the boats and stuff together. He'll sto he'll go hunt it down. He'll close down the the beaches and take care of it. He'll address the problem the way it needs to be addressed. And the fact that he had these limiting beliefs, these Achilles heel, is what ultimately sabotaged him. So his arc is about overcoming that limiting belief. — Does the main character have to face three orals to reach their objective? — Great question. No, — they don't have to. Okay. They can. Yeah, there's four ordeals. — Uh there's no number like just like there's no like structure like uh one act structure, four act structure, you know, you can have a 22 episode or 22 minutes of an episode with three acts or you can have two hours of one act. I mean what it comes down to is the function of an ordeal is that it serves as kind of a judgment and a conflict. So the ordeal is where we get to um it it's designed in such a way that it produces the value. So for example um a knight uh is going to go slay a dragon, right? So they decide they're going to go off on this journey off this odyssey to go slay the dragon. The first ordeal might be, oh, in order to slay the dragon, you need to get past this person who's guarding this bridge. Um, now what that ordeal is going to be is, does the knight have what it takes to get past this guy? This guy's just guarding a bridge. He's not even a full dragon. So, the way he negotiates, say, for example, rather than say, I'm going to kill this bridge guardian. Maybe it's a troll. We'll just make it easy. A troll. There's a troll that's protecting this bridge. Rather than I'm going to go and just cut the head off the troll, I'm going to bait the troll out from under the bridge, get him to chase me away, and then set up a trap, maybe do a dig a pit, and then lure him, lure the troll into this trap. And now he's outsmarted the troll. We just learned a lot about the way the knight solves problems. We just learned that he doesn't just, you know, start hacking at whatever is in front of him. He starts thinking about what does the troll want. He uses bait. He sets up a trap. He um maybe digs a pit. So these elements reveal certain values that knight has. The function of the ordeal is you would look at that knight and say, "Okay, this knight is actually pretty well equipped because they're going to approach killing a dragon than different than any other knight would. " And the ordeal starts to say, "Oh, okay. This is what their values are. " Um that's why conflict is so key. Um conflict is ultimately that that thing those three elements that I talked about that are the definition of story are also the definition of conflict. Conflict is a protagonist wants something they the objective desires over here and the obstacles are right in the middle. So you have this like conflicting and the ordeal is a kind of setpiece that exposes the values of the character and what's the characters that we were interested in are the characters who solve problems in unconventional ways that expose what they really care about. The point of the ordeal is to get us to key into what their values are because you can, you know, um, another example I use is seven with Morgan Freeman. His character the whole time is saying, "I don't believe in police work. This is completely feudal effort. We're never going to catch him. This is, you know, meanwhile he's like, I'm just going to go to this library and spend all night studying every single thing that has anything to do with a clue. " He's a man that's obsessed. But the whole time he keeps saying, you know, it's useless. We're wasting our time. But every action he's taking is showing

that he actually believes that he's going to be able to figure out who the killer is and catch the killer. So even though the whole time he's saying, "I don't believe we'll catch him," he's showing that he does believe he'll catch him. and through his relationship with the Brad Pitt character, that's when he that helps him to realize, oh, I actually need to go the only way I'm gonna get him is to pursue him. And that's what's the function of the ordeal is it is exposes their values. That's why this conflict and the judgment are such a big part of it. So, as far as numbers, you can have one ordeal, you can have seven orals. It really comes down to what does the ordeal reveal about your character and um ultimately it tr how does it transform them? How does it change in their arc? — Thank you for watching the video all the way to the end. Here is a complimentary question from our book story questions.