Story craft series: What The Bromance Book Club taught me about character arc

In the last story craft series article, I shared how a story’s protagonist should have a fundamental misbelief that drives the narrative. The misbelief is also the internal problem that holds the character back from getting their goal until they decide to change. And the change is the crux of every character arc. 

The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams provides an excellent example of how that change operates in a story, especially because the protagonist learns how he has to change from reading romance novels. 

The premise of the book is that professional baseball player Gavin Scott suddenly finds himself served with divorce papers. At the start of the book, he’s vaguely aware that he’s contributed to the problem that’s led to this divorce, but he doesn’t fully understand the ways in which he needs to change to win his wife back and save their marriage. That’s when his friends reveal they have a bromance bookclub—a group of them get together to read romance novels in an effort to better understand their partners and improve their relationships. 

Reading the romance novel the club prescribes to him helps Gavin finally see his misbelief for what it is—a skewed view of the world that has negatively affected his relationship—and pushes him to not only show up differently than his marriage but also to change internally. 

It’s the internal change that makes Gavin’s character arc, and the story as a whole, so satisfying.

Why the protagonist’s internal change matters to the narrative

Once again, I’ll invoke Lisa Cron’s work in this series. In Wired for Story, she explains that “a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story...is an internal journey, not an external one.”

The human brain has evolved to pay attention to stories because they act as a simulation for us to test out challenging scenarios and imagine how we’d survive. 

When we’re reading, our subconscious is trying to crack the code—to figure out what we can learn from the characters in the book that we can apply ourselves to more successfully avoid conflict and problems. Now, in real life, we want to avoid conflict and change as much as possible, but as Cron says, what makes stories so deeply satisfying is that, “we get to try on trouble pretty much risk free.”

We hope to see the protagonist face struggles and overcome them because we are vicariously living through them. And the internal piece—the thoughts, emotions, and misbeliefs they experience along the way—is the point of connection. It’s the piece we can relate to, even when the story takes place in an alternate universe. 

So an internal change is not only the thing that allows the protagonist to achieve their goal, it’s also the element of a story that readers can connect to and invest in because we are all flawed and hoping to improve ourselves in some way. When the main character’s journey lets us experience that, it’s deeply satisfying. 

How change happens in The Bromance Book Club

The Bromance Book Club illustrates the importance of the internal change particularly well. That’s because Gavin is initially incapable of acknowledging the deeper issues in his marriage and in himself. Instead, he’s focused on his actions and the surface-level issues. If he can just help out with the couple’s twin daughters more, for example, he believes that his wife, Thea, will take him back. 

This only gets him so far, of course, in part because Thea has her own issues, mostly involving trust. Gavin must admit to himself that the change needs to go deeper if he’s going to break down Thea’s walls. 

The romance novel the club assigns him helps Gavin see the difference between the external and internal change, and how much more meaningful the external change is when the internal change comes first. It’s a difference between acting like a better husband and being a better husband. 

Once Gavin is able to acknowledge that he has his own trust and self-esteem issues, he is able to work past those things and regain Thea’s trust. 

How to create change in your own book

If you’ve already figured out your protagonist’s misbelief, you’ve established the “before” point of their character arc. The other end—the after—should be something fundamentally different, if not completely opposite, of that misbelief. 

For example, if your character had a terrible and humiliating breakup in the past, she may begin your story with the misbelief that men are bad news and she cannot handle further disappointment because of them. Through the course of the novel, she will come to find that she is stronger than she realized, so another man letting her down doesn’t have to devastate her. And she just may end the story with the belief that she can trust the right men, and she can trust herself to figure out who they are. 

From that example, hopefully, you can see that there will be some sort of triggering event that will force the protagonist to face their misbelief and come out changed on the other side. Their misbelief will guide their actions for the novel up to that point, but the conflict of the story will come to a head, so they must confront what they thought to be true. 

Using the same example, your protagonist will likely spend the majority of the novel avoiding men or acting suspicious of them. Then perhaps a man comes along who seems different and gets her to let her guard down. The climax comes when he turns to be just like the old ex who hurt her, but through the growth that she’s experienced throughout the story, she’s able to weather this disappointment better—and perhaps she meets another man who truly is different. 

This means that your character not only has to face a conflict that will get them to make the ultimate change but along the way to that conflict they have to be tested in ways that move them toward that change. If they are static for the entire story and then seem to turn on a dime at the climax, it won’t be believable. But if they face and overcome small obstacles along the way—ones that challenge their misbelief in the process—the change feels earned. 

Maybe in another area of her life, your protagonist’s trust is constantly being put to the test, and she finds that she’s a good judge of character. It starts to build her self-confidence and her ability to trust. So even when she slips into her old ways as the “different” guy comes along, when she’s finally betrayed by him, she has all of this evidence to point to and say, “wait, I’ve figured out when I can trust people—I made an error here, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t trust anyone.” And she’s able to change her outlook to achieve a better circumstance in the end. 

Ultimately, there is no story if there is no internal change. That’s the piece that draws in readers and keeps them turning the page. Keep this in mind as you’re planning and writing your story. Is each scene testing your character’s internal problem in some way that’s leading to their inevitable change? If so, you’re writing in the right direction!