How to Craft a Compelling Character Arc: Epiphanies, Lightbulb Moments, and the Right Ideas

Your character was Wounded. From that Wound, they got the Wrong Idea, and their life has never been the same.

During the events of your book, your character has answered their call to adventure, wrestled with long-held beliefs, and fought tooth and nail to make it to The End.

But for the character arc to be complete—or for it to end in a satisfying self-destruction—they need to have been introduced to the Right Idea!

In this three-part series, I explore Wounds, Wrong Ideas, and Right Ideas—the core building blocks of a character arc. We started with Wounds, then talked about Wrong Ideas, and now it’s time to talk about Right Ideas!

What Is a Right Idea?

You can think of the Right Idea as the lesson your character learns the hard way as a result of the journey they’ve taken throughout the story. They have an epiphany or lightbulb moment, and they realize they need to change. It’s the truth your character comes to believe and can be encapsulated by the theme.

Why do you call it the Right Idea, Megan?

It goes back to teaching, as so many things do for me as a former elementary ed major. When you’re trying to explain multiplication so that your third graders understand, you pull out all the stops—a simple definition, analogies, multiple step-by-step processes that look different but achieve the same result to cater to different learning styles, and even songs from Multiplication Rock. Whatever you need to do to hammer home the concepts, you do.

Imagine you are a teacher, and you’ve just reviewed a multiplication problem using coins as manipulatives. You would feel euphoric when the quiet student in the back of the room slowly raised their hand and squeaked out, “So when you multiply four times three, it’s like having four pennies in one stack, four pennies in another stack, and four pennies in another stack? That’s—four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—twelve pennies all together, right?”

“Yes, exactly,” you’d tell him. “Now you’ve got the right idea!”

That’s exactly what a story does. It presents to the character (and consequently to your reader) the exact set of circumstances they need to be in to grasp the Right Idea—the lesson they need to learn. Except instead of a math lesson, what you’re delivering as a writer is more like a moral or philosophical lesson.

Why Right Ideas are Essential to Crafting a Compelling Character Arc

Simply put, you need a Right Idea for your story to stick the landing. It is the most important puzzle piece. Without a Right Idea at its core, your story will feel unsatisfying at best, a waste of time at worst.

Let’s go back to elementary school for an example. A story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, your teacher says. Given only that information, here’s an outline for a “story”:

1. A girl hears she must grow up.
2. She runs away and has adventures with her brothers and some new friends.
3. She comes back from those adventures and goes about her life.

That’s not much of the story. It’s a loose sort of plot, and there’s obvious cause and effect, but it feels hollow. Shallow. You can intuit that there’s something missing.

But with a rethink and a rewrite, we can see an arc take shape and pluck out a lesson to be learned—a Right Idea—that makes the story worth reading.

1. Wendy Darling’s father informs her that she’ll be moving out of the nursery. This saddens Wendy, who insists she doesn’t want to grow up and believes doing so would essentially ruin her happiness.
2. Wendy and her brothers are taken to Never Land by Peter Pan, a boy who refuses to grow up. Seeing Peter’s Lost Boys need a mother, she takes on the role, but is frustrated when Peter won’t take on any responsibility and play his part as father.
3. After many adventures, Wendy returns home with the understanding that growing up is natural, the right thing to do, and has its own joys (like romance and motherhood).

What’s the Right Idea? Growing up is inevitable—and embracing it, rather than resisting it, leads to a fuller, more meaningful life.

When we’re children first hearing the story, we might tend to focus on the rivalry between Peter Pan and Captain Hook, or how interesting a fairy’s life might be. But when we revisit the story as adults, it’s easy to see how the lesson to be learned makes Wendy’s story both memorable and valuable.

But fun-loving, forgetful, callous, selfish Peter Pan refuses to grow up. He has a similar Wound—learning a child’s destiny is to become an adult, which is why he originally escapes out his window in the prequel, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens—and a similar Wrong Idea—that growing up is an awful thing that should be avoided. In order to avoid growing up, Peter must continuously forget his adventures and remain oblivious to grown-up concepts like romance. As a result, he won’t ever be able to fathom the fulfillment adulthood can bring, and he must repeatedly watch his friends die or grow up without him. He doesn’t accept the Right Idea, and that makes him a tragic figure, however whimsical he may be.

Wendy accepts the Right Idea. Peter rejects it. That contrast creates character arcs with emotional weight. Their arcs are what make the story so compelling to audiences young and old. It’s why we have continued to retell and reimagine J.M. Barrie’s classic story for over a century, and it’s why we’ll continue to do so for centuries to come.

Common Mistakes Writers Make with Right Ideas

Mistake #1: The Right Idea’s delivery feels like a sermon.

If you’ve ever read a novel and thought, “Wow, this is preachy,” then you found a writer who made this mistake.

In real life, the lessons we learn (especially as adults) are almost never stated outright at the time that we learn them; we put words to the ideas ourselves. When I realized a friend group I had when I was younger would only ever try to change what made me different instead of embracing me warts and all, I didn’t consciously think, “The Right Idea I need to take away from this is that I should not edit myself to fit someone else’s vision of who I should be.” I just made new friends who didn’t ask me to do that!

Similarly, a Right Idea must be subtly woven into the narrative in the same way you would weave in the Wound and Wrong Idea. “Show, don’t tell,” is often the name of the game in this case—even at the midpoint, when your protagonist is more formally introduced to their Right Idea. Show your character glimpsing the Right Idea in another’s actions or in the discomfort they have when they hear themselves give advice to someone else, and show your character living by the Right Idea at the end of the book.

Mistake #2: The Right Idea is not in alignment with what the writer believes.

When you write without intentionally crafting your character arcs with a Wrong Idea you don’t believe and a Right Idea you do, one of three things can happen:

• Your main character’s arc is flat in a story where it wasn’t supposed to be.
• Your main character reads as a Mary Sue or Marty Stu who already has everything figured out.
• You realize at the midpoint that you have no idea what the wise friend should say.

I go over the pitfalls of not intentionally choosing a Wrong Idea and Right Idea that go together in my Wrong Ideas blog post.

Mistake #3: The story focuses only on external goals, not internal character growth.

This was my big mistake as a new writer. I loved thinking about plot—all the stuff the characters get to do—and I did not much care why they’d do it. As a result:

• I lost interest in stories so quickly because I had no reason to care about the characters achieving their goals.
• Everything I wrote felt hollow to read, like they were missing the heart. (They were.)
• People who read the initial few paragraphs of whatever I was working on never mentioned the story again because—although the prose was good for a kid and those people loved me and wanted me to succeed—the stories just weren’t memorable.

It was only after I stopped neglecting crafting character arcs that I was able to write and complete meaningful stories. And now I help others do the same!

Tip #2: Pull a Right Idea from your own life and reverse engineer the Wrong Idea and Wound to create an arc.

This is again where that old chestnut, “write what you know,” actually becomes sage advice. The lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life are the ones that will feel the most true to you; naturally, they will also be the easiest to write about because you have first-hand experience!

I’m not suggesting by any means that you only write what you’ve personally lived through. We’re not all writing memoirs. (How boring the literary world would be if we couldn’t write about anything we hadn’t explicitly witnessed for ourselves!) I’m saying that you write more powerfully when you wholeheartedly believe the words you’re putting on the page.

Tip #3: Give your character a foil who never accepts the Right Idea.

A Peter Pan to your main character’s Wendy Darling, if you will.

We commonly see the tragic denial of the Right Idea come from the antagonist or villain in media. That’s the purpose they serve—as a cautionary tale of what happens when you let the Wrong Idea corrupt you. Not every story needs a villainous character, of course. But if you’re crafting the kind that does, thinking on what the consequences would be if someone never got the Right Idea is a great place to start.

Bonus Tip: Regularly refer back to the Right Idea.

The process of writing a story is long, and often longer than even experienced authors think it’s going to be. Trust me when I say that if you’re not reminding yourself of your characters’ arcs, you’re going to get off-message. Jot down your character’s Wound, Wrong Idea, and Right Idea and keep those notes somewhere close!

Now it’s Your Turn to Craft a Compelling Character Arc

If you’re ready to craft a compelling character arc that leaves your readers emotionally satisfied all on your own, go ahead and download my free Character Arc Sparker Worksheet. It’s the same one I use to guide writers through building powerful, transformative arcs during my story coaching sessions.

But if you’re feeling stuck, second-guessing every choice, or just plain exhausted from going in circles…

Let’s talk it out.

Whether you need a full story restructuring or just want a human sounding board who actually cares, I offer two ways to help you move forward: