By K. M. Weiland

Jump to Section:

4 Truths About the Truth Your Character Believes

The Lie Your Character Believes

Introduction

The best stories always rest upon the foundation of believable character change and thematic depth. In turn, these two vital elements pivot upon the fulcrum of the Lie Your Character Believes and the Truth Your Character Believes.

The Truth Your Character Believes is the transcendent theme of the entire story. It offers your protagonist the potential for positive inner growth and, by extension, the understanding and ability to conquer plot goals and end the overarching conflict with the antagonistic force.

The protagonist’s ultimate relationship to the Truth—and the specific Lie that keeps interfering—will define the entire nature of your story. Characters who end by embracing the Truth undergo Positive Change Arcs. Those who reject the Truth end up in Negative Change Arcs. And those who successfully model the Truth to a positively-changing world around them portray Flat Arcs.

4 Truths About the Truth Your Character Believes

You’ve heard me say it before: a story is never just a story. Whether or not it’s the author’s conscious intent, a story always says something about the world. And if it’s going to be a good story (i.e., one that resonates with audiences in any measure), then that message is going to have to offer at least a kernel of Truth.

This is why I fundamentally believe story is theme and theme, by extension, is the most important aspect of the storyform. To create a powerful storyform, plot and theme must be joined so closely, they are inextricable. The plot creates the theme, and the theme creates the plot. It doesn’t always work out like this, and humans (being humans) are still able to gain Truth even from less than perfect stories. But if you, as an author, can purposefully enter your story through the door of the thematic Truth Your Character Believes, you will have a much greater understanding of what your plot is really about and how to execute it to its maximum potential within the confines your story’s structure.

To get you started, here are the four most important principles about the Truth Your Character Believes, all of which are on display in Black Panther.

1. The Truth’s Evolving Relationship to the “Little” Lie

I know, I know. That header totally sounds like an axiom. But I mean it in a completely literal way. The Lie Your Character Believes will usually be something very specific to her and to her personal goals and challenges. But the Truth is infinite.

The Truth will have multiple facets, some of which will be linear portals through which your character gradually advances on her way to finding the one aspect of the Truth that finally and forever destroys her Lie.

Other aspects of the Truth will be pertinent to the Lie, but not directly related. These are often aspects that can be explored in subplots via related Lies, believed either by the protagonist herself or by other characters in the story.

The comparative size of the Truth is important in avoiding confusion about the relationship of the Truth to the Lie. Instinctively, when we consider a premise of Truth vs. Lie, we think of the two as essentially equals—e.g., it would seem that for every Lie there is an equal and opposite Truth. But this isn’t necessarily so.

A thematic premise can usually be boiled down to one specific element of Truth (such as Black Panther‘s “responsibility”), but within the story’s exploration of that principle, there will be many ways of expressing the Truth and many related thematic ideas that all contribute to the larger idea.

This can get tricky. You want to create a thematic storyform that is as cohesive and linear as possible—and yet Truth itself is often too “big” to be conveniently packaged. That’s where the Lie comes in. The Lie provides the throughline that interacts with every aspect of the conflict. Destroying the Lie may require many different (if related) elements of Truth, but you know you’re on target as long as overcoming that Lie is central to your story. The moment you branch into other Lies is the moment your story has likely wandered from the path of resonance and cohesion.

Black Panther’s Big Truth vs. Its Specific Lie

As he mourns the death of his beloved father King T’Chaka and prepares to become Wakanda’s new leader, T’Challa starts out believing a very specific Lie: that his father was the perfect king and that his ideas of leadership should be perpetuated—specifically the paramount ideal of protecting Wakanda’s wealth and resources from the rest of the world. Like all convincing Lies, this one presents itself as a good thing. Indeed, even viewers have no reason to initially reject T’Challa’s unquestioning devotion to his noble father’s ideals.

On its surface, this is also a very “small” Lie. It’s a Lie specific to T’Challa himself, since only he is the son of the king. Only he can carry on his father’s mantle and protect his kingdom. And yet, as the story’s progression proves, this small Lie stands in opposition to the much vaster Truth that responsibility requires a marriage of tradition and innovation.

Taken at face value, this huge Truth doesn’t have much to do with T’Challa’s “little” misconception about his father. And yet that little Lie will be the entry point to his character arc over the course of the story.

2. First Act: The Truth the Character Resists

Because the protagonist starts out the story with an extremely limited awareness of the Lie, his awareness of the Truth will be even more limited. In the beginning, the character won’t even know he has a false understanding of something in his world. Indeed, what he starts out with may not be so much a false ideology as a basic resistance to some aspect of the larger Truth. This aspect will be the first of the “smaller” Truths the character will encounter on his way to understanding the story’s “big” Truth.

In the First Act, the character will not yet have fully joined (or even be aware of) the main conflict. As a result, his existence within the Normal World of the Lie will be largely, if not entirely, unchallenged. At this point, the necessity of the Truth isn’t even on his radar; he doesn’t yet have any notion that what he believes isn’t the Truth.

In establishing the argument for the Lie in this early segment of the story, you should also be setting up the initial “entry” Truth, if only by implication. If the character believes that this (the Lie) is true, then what, by implication, is the smallest iteration of the larger Truth standing in opposition to this start-up belief?

The Truth T’Challa Resists in the First Act

T’Challa is a great example of how a Positive Change Arc can occur even in the life of a character who is already “positive.” T’Challa doesn’t undergo a dramatic change from a bad person to a good person. His intentions and personal values are always good. He doesn’t have to learn to be a good king; he just has to learn a few things about how to be a good king.

As a result, his Lie isn’t a monumental question of “good vs. evil.” This makes it much subtler and, in turn, allows his opening Truth to be much subtler. In the First Act, T’Challa desires nothing more than to live up to his father’s legacy. For good reasons, he clings to the age-old traditions that have protected the kingdom from outside depredations. When Nakia, the woman he loves, refuses to become his queen because she has “seen too many in need just to turn a blind eye,” T’Challa doesn’t deny her Truth so much as resist it by reiterating his father’s credos: “If the world found out what we truly are, what we possess, we could lose our way of life.”

3. Second Act: The Truth Becomes a Specific Antidote to the Lie

Once the character fully enters the conflict in the Second Act, her relationship to the Lie and the Truth begins to evolve. Throughout the first half of the Second Act, she slowly begins learning about the Truth, until finally she reaches the Moment of Truth at the Midpoint, where she can no longer deny that this Truth is the Truth.

This is a second aspect of the Truth. It is an evolution and a step up from “the Truth the character resists” in the First Act. At the Midpoint, the Truth becomes concrete. It is no longer just a vague idea the protagonist is resisting; it is a concrete ideology that makes total sense within the larger context of the conflict.

But it is still not the entire Truth. At the Midpoint, the character will accept that the Truth is true. But this doesn’t mean she has entirely seen through her Lie. In the second half of the Second Act, she is trying to balance the two. She is trying to accept the Truth without sacrificing the perceived “protection” of her Lie.

The Truth presented at the Midpoint is, in essence, a specific “antidote” to her specific Lie. It is not the entire Truth, in all its glory, but it is a pointed argument, scaled down as a counterpoint to refute her personal Lie.

The Moment of Truth That Begins Overcoming T’Challa’s Lie

T’Challa is shocked and horrified to learn a dark secret from his father’s past: “You ain’t the son of a king. You’re the son of a murderer.”

He learns T’Chaka killed his own brother to protect Wakanda’s secrecy, leaving behind his orphaned and angry nephew, Erik. When Erik arrives in Wakanda—first, to demand that Wakanda use its resources to punish the rest of the world and then to challenge T’Challa for the throne—T’Challa must confront the mistaken belief at the heart of his commitment to his father’s traditional ideas.

This section of the story is underdeveloped since T’Challa is presumed dead and off-stage for almost an entire quarter of the story, but we understand his evolution when he confronts his father on the Ancestral Plane and angrily insists: “You were wrong! All of you were wrong! To turn your backs on the rest of the world! We let the fear of our discovery stop us from doing what is right!”

In realizing his father was not the perfect king he always believed, T’Challa embraces the further Truth that following in T’Chaka’s footsteps won’t guarantee that he, in turn, will be a good king. Instead, he must begin taking responsibility for his own beliefs and actions.

4. Third Act: The World’s Larger Truth

By the time the protagonist rounds the painful reality of the Third Plot Point into the climactic Third Act, he will have confronted his Lie and accepted several entry iterations of the Truth. What remains is for him to understand the larger Truth, to claim it on a deeply internal level, and then to enact it in a way that conclusively impacts the external conflict in the Climactic Moment.

The Third Act provides the largest stage for your story’s largest Truth. This Truth will be one that directly confronts the character’s initial Lie. But it will also transcend that Lie. This is the Truth that has been represented collectively by all the little Truths found throughout the story, either literally or ironically: in the lives of the supporting characters, in the opposition of the antagonistic force, in the tone of the Normal World, in the tone of the Adventure World, and at least symbolically in the Thing the Character Wants and the Thing the Character Needs.

The Third Act demands your character definitively prove his relationship to the story’s Truth. Whatever proof he offers—whether it ends up being an acceptance or a rejection of the Truth—that is what proves your story’s theme. Done well, this never comes across as a “moral of the story,” but rather an organic growth within the character’s life that directly impacts the external plot.

T’Challa’s Larger Truth

Within the external plot, T’Challa’s final confrontation with Erik is about who will sit upon the throne of Wakanda. But more than that, it is a confrontation that will decide whose world view will triumph.

Will Erik’s vengeful belief that Wakanda’s vast resources should be used to “send vibranium weapons out to our War Dogs” prove worthy enough to win the fight?

Or will T’Challa’s traditional ideas that “it is my responsibility to make sure our people are safe, and that vibranium does not fall into the hands of a person like you” find balance with his new mindset that “in times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers”?

In the end, it’s not enough for T’Challa to simply reject his Lie. He must embrace the broadest Truth possible. In this instance, the Truth is that responsibility requires more than protecting the past; it requires a proactive sharing for the future. And, of course, he does embrace it.

***

No matter the type of story, what rings true in the end is always the Truth. In a Positive Change Arc, like T’Challa’s, that Truth isn’t just recognized or ironically referenced, it is celebrated. The protagonist triumphs because he learns to embrace a larger Truth.

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/truth-your-character-believes/

The Lie Your Character Believes

People hate change. We may sit around and wish our lives were different, but when the rubber really starts streaking the tarmac, we usually find ourselves wishing we could just hang out here in our safe and familiar haunts.

Characters are no different. They resist change just as staunchly as any of us—which is a good thing. Out of resistance comes conflict; out of conflict comes plot. This is just the first of many ways in which plot and character arcs are inextricable from one another. As Stanley Williams so aptly explains it in his book The Moral Premise:

 A good way to conceive of movie stories, like Die Hard and Love, Actually, is to think of the visible story as the metaphor for the invisible story.

In other words, the plot is all about the character’s inner journey, whether the connection is immediately evident or not. Plot, in its simplest manifestation, is all about the protagonist’s thwarted goal. He wants something, and he can’t have it right away, so he keeps right on trying.

The Change Arc, at its simplest manifestation, is all about the protagonist’s changing priorities. He realizes the reason he’s not getting what he wants in the plot is because either a) he wants the wrong thing or b) his moral methods for achieving what he wants are all wrong. In Dramatica, Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley point out:

 One of the most common mistakes made by authors of every level of experience is to create a problem for their Main Character that has nothing to do with the story at large. The reasoning behind this is not to separate the two, but usually occurs because an author works out a story and then realizes that he has not made it personal enough.

The Lie the Character Believes

The Change Arc is all about the Lie Your Character Believes. His life may be horrible, or his life may seem pretty great. But, festering under the surface, is the Lie.

In order for your character to evolve in a positive way, he has to start out with something lacking in his life, some reason that makes the change necessary. He is incomplete in some way, but not because he is lacking something external. A person in a prison camp can still be entirely whole and balanced on the inside, while someone floating in a Malibu mansion’s swimming pool may be one miserable son of a gun.

Nope, your character is incomplete on the inside. He is harboring some deeply held misconception about either himself, the world, or, probably, both. As we’ll see in next week’s post, this misconception is going to prove a direct obstacle to his ability to fulfill his plot goal. In some instances, it may start out seeming to be a strength, but as the story progresses, it will become your character’s Achilles heel.

Your character may not even realize he has a problem. In the First Act, his understanding of his deficiencies will be vague at best. He may not feel handicapped or even in denial about the Lie, until the Inciting Event and/or the First Plot Point (at the 25% mark) rock his world and begin peeling away his defenses. The First Act gives writers the time and space to introduce the Lie and demonstrate the character’s entrenchment in it via his Normal World (which we’ll also address more in a future post).

What Is the Lie?

Your character’s Lie could take any number of forms. For example, maybe he believes:

• Might makes right. (Thor)
• The only way to earn love is through servitude. (Jane Eyre)
• Kids aren’t worth taking care of. (Jurassic Park)
• The people you love will always lie to you. (Secondhand Lions)
• Your only worth is in being the favorite. (Toy Story)
• Money is to be treasured more than people. (Three Kings)
• The weak must always give in to the strong. (Green Street Hooligans)
• People will only pay attention to you if they think you’re crazy. (What About Bob?)

The Lie is a specific belief, which you should be able to state in one short sentence. It may include some qualifiers, as does Jane Eyre’s. Her basic Lie is that she isn’t worthy to be loved, but it’s qualified by her additional belief that she can earn love if she is willing to enslave herself to others, physically and emotionally.

Symptoms of the Lie

How do you find the Lie? The first thing you’re going to want to do is examine your plot to see if the Lie might be evident in the conflict. (We’ll get into that more next week when we discuss the conflict between the Thing the Character Wants and the Thing the Character Needs.) The second thing you’re going to want to do is look at the character’s actions—and especially his reactions. See if you can spot any of the following:

• Fear
• Extreme hurt
• Inability to forgive
• Guilt
• Horrible secrets
• Shame over something done or suffered

None of these are the Lie, but they’re often products of the Lie. Your protagonist may be aware of the symptoms of the Lie in his life, even if he isn’t yet able to recognize the Lie itself. More than that, he may be totally willing to shed the negative symptom, but he can’t because he can’t get past his fundamental belief in the Lie. For example, in my historical novel Behold the Dawn, the protagonist Marcus Annan’s Lie is that some sins are too great to be forgiven. His symptoms are guilt, shame, secrets, and a destructive lifestyle. He wants to be forgiven and to find happiness and fulfillment, but he just can’t get past the Lie.

Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi do a great job of of offering possible Lie symptoms (as well as some great character arc discussions) in their book The Negative Trait Thesaurus. If you find you’re having trouble coming up with some good symptoms (or even a good Lie, for that matter), take a riffle through their book for some inspiration.

Examples of the Lie the Character Believes

For this series, we’re going to take a look at one popular book and one popular movie (of varied genres), two apiece for each of the three different types of arc. For the Change Arc, we’ll be exploring the following:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Ebenezer Scrooge’s infamous holiday transformation is rooted in his mistaken belief that a man’s worth can only be measured by the amount of money he has earned.

Cars directed by John Lasseter: My favorite of all the Pixar movies is powered by selfish racecar Lightning McQueen’s ingrained belief in the Lie that life is a one-man show.

Questions to Ask About the Lie the Character Believes

1. What misconception does your protagonist have about himself or the world?

2. What is he lacking mentally, emotionally, or spiritually, as a result?

3. How is the interior Lie reflected in the character’s exterior world?

4. Is the Lie making his life miserable when the story opens? If so, how?

5. If not, will the Inciting Event and/or the First Plot Point begin to make him uncomfortable as a result of his Lie?

6. Does your character’s Lie require any qualifiers to narrow its focus?

7. What are the symptoms of your character’s Lie?

The Lie Your Character Believes is the foundation for his character arc. This is what’s wrong in his world. Once you know what’s wrong, you then get to set about figuring out how to make it right.

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/character-arcs-2/