In a story, we can think of character arc as the “engine of change” that creates transformative movement in the plot. In real life, this change can be initiated in many different ways, but in a story, we often use specific levers—some symbolic and some practical—to create catalysts of change that make sense to readers. One of those levers of change is the Impact Character.

When we think of necessary characters in a story, we tend to come up with obvious choices such as the protagonist, the antagonist, and maybe the mentor, love interest, and sidekick. “Impact Character” probably isn’t at the top of your list.

But it should be, because the Impact Character is a key mechanism for creating believable change. Impact Characters help create character arcs that feel realistic in no small part because they emphasize the relational aspect of change—in which other people inspire, provoke, or teach others to change.

What Is the Impact Character?

Dramatica by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley (affiliate link)

An Impact Character is a character whose worldview challenges the protagonist’s existing beliefs and catalyzes the protagonist’s character arc. If your protagonist is following a Positive Change Arc, the Impact Character(s) will represent or demonstrate the thematic Truth that conflicts with the Lie the Character Believes.

“Impact character” is the term coined by Dramatica authors Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley to describe what is just as accurately termed by editor Roz Morris the “catalyst character.” This is the character who slams into your protagonist, catalyzes them into change, and has a major impact on their life.

Character Arcs 101

In a Positive Change Arc, the story begins with the Lie the Character Believes—which references the comparatively limited belief or state of being in which the protagonist begins.

In contrast to this “Lie” is the story’s specific thematic Truth, which represents a comparatively more expanded way of seeing or being in the world.

Throughout the story, the protagonist will experience inner conflict between these two states, struggling to let go of the constrictive and increasingly ineffective Lie in order to embrace the more liberating and effective Truth.

Three ways to understand the Lie the Character Believes: as a mistaken belief, a limited perspective, and an ego identity.

However, as with most principles of “show, don’t tell” in narrative storytelling, information alone is usually not the most effective way to convince a character to change (or to convince readers the character has changed). One of the best techniques for dramatizing a protagonist’s change is to leverage relationships with supporting characters—chief among them the Impact Character.

How the Impact Character Catalyzes Your Protagonist’s Arc

In practical terms, the Impact Character represents a force that enables, empowers, or even forces change in others. What this often means is that the Impact Character functions as a Flat Arc character.

Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)

If you’ve read my book Creating Character Arcs, then you already know that in a Positive Change Arc, the protagonist is the primary character who changes, while in a Flat Arc, the protagonist does not personally change, but catalyzes change in the surrounding world and supporting characters. In essence, in a Flat-Arc story, the protagonist is an Impact Character who enables or inspires the Change Arcs of supporting characters.

What this means is that in stories in which the protagonist is following a Positive Change Arc, the role of Impact Character will then be represented by a supporting character (or characters).

What Type of Character Can Be an Impact Character?

As a specific character in your story, the Impact Character can take many forms. This character could theoretically be either an ally or an adversary to your protagonist. More on that in a minute, but for now, suffice it that the Impact Character’s actual role in the story isn’t what creates the qualification for whether or not the protagonist is impacted. So what does?

Impact Character vs. Antagonist: What’s the Difference?

If the antagonist represents the story’s outer conflict in a Positive Change Arc, then the Impact Character represents the inner conflict.

Similar to the antagonist, the Impact Character creates conflict. In at least some respects, the Impact Character will also be at odds with the protagonist.

Unlike the antagonist, however, this conflict isn’t necessarily the result of opposing goals. Rather, the Impact Character’s conflict with the protagonist represents opposing worldviews. Whereas the protagonist in a Positive Change Arc believes the Lie, the Impact Character represents the story’s thematic Truth.

How the Impact Character Creates Inner Conflict

Throughout the story, the protagonist’s continued faith in the Lie (i.e., a comparatively limited perspective) will continue to find opposition in the Impact Character’s Truth (i.e., a comparatively more expanded perspective). Although inertia and a desire to maintain a comfortable status quo may prompt the protagonist to avoid facing the Truth, it is the Impact Character’s persistent presence that keeps churning up the protagonist’s awareness of the Truth—and creating internal conflict.

For Example:

• Rochester keeps inspiring Jane Eyre (eventually to his temporary detriment) to view herself as his equal.
• The Ghosts of Christmas keep prodding Scrooge out of his inveterate miserliness.
• Mattie Ross (a Flat Arc protagonist) keeps dragging compromising lawman Rooster Cogburn onto the road to justice.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), Walt Disney Pictures.

The Impact Character may or may not be actively or even consciously trying to get the protagonist to see that Truth. Although sometimes the Impact Character may represent a dedicated Mentor character, this is not always the case.

Sometimes the catalytic influence on the protagonist is often just the Impact Character’s continued presence, which is enough by itself to inspire change. The Impact Character will appear at crucial moments in the story when the protagonist needs help seeing things from a different perspective.

Even though the protagonist won’t know it at the beginning of the story, the Impact Character has the answers the protagonist is looking for. Those answers will end up being pivotal, at least incidentally, in the protagonist’s ability to conquer the antagonistic force and the external conflict in the quest for the story goal.

What Type of Character Can Be an Impact Character?

Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated by Roz Morris (affiliate link)

As Morris explains in her book Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated, the Impact Character (or what she distinguishes as the catalyst character) can take just about any form within your story:

They might be mentor characters. These are figures who guide the protagonist into a new world, awakening the qualities they need to meet the challenges they must face. Typically they’re a coach or a father figure. They sometimes perish when they have fulfilled their role, or in a betraying twist they might turn out to be a formidable antagonist….

Note that just because the Impact Character understands the specific Truth needed by the protagonist, this does not mean this character has all Truths figured out. In some instances, the Impact Character can even be a generally benighted character who actually has way less figured out than the protagonist does—except when it comes to this one Truth.

Consider a few options. Your story’s Impact Character might be:

• The antagonist (e.g., in Treasure Island, Long John Silver’s charisma and moral ambiguity repeatedly challenge Jim Hawkins’s understanding of courage, loyalty, and adulthood).

Treasure Island (1950), Walt Disney Pictures.

• The Contagonist. (e.g., in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Tom Doniphon’s hard-earned realism forces Ransom Stoddard to confront the limits of his idealistic beliefs about law and civilization).

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Paramount Pictures.

• The mentor (e.g., Mistborn, Kelsier challenges Vin’s deeply ingrained distrust by showing her a radically different way to understand loyalty, belonging, and her own worth).

Mistborn

• The sidekick (e.g., in Red River, Nadine Groot’s loyalty and perspective help keep Dunson’s increasingly rigid worldview from going entirely unchallenged).

Red River (1948), United Artists.

• The love interest (e.g., in Emma, Mr. Knightley repeatedly confronts Emma with the uncomfortable truths about her own pride, privilege, and interference in other people’s lives).

Emma (2009), BBC One.

• Present for most of the story (e.g., in Rain Man, Raymond Babbitt’s presence steadily forces Charlie to reconsider his self-centered assumptions about family, responsibility, and connection).

Rain Man (1988), United Artists.

• Present only intermittently, but looming large in the protagonist’s mind (e.g., in Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi introduces Luke Skywalker to a larger understanding of himself and the Force, continuing to influence his choices even after his death).

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), 20th Century Fox.

• A collective of several characters (e.g., in Cars, the townsfolk of Radiator Springs collectively challenge Lightning McQueen’s belief that winning and individual achievement are all that matter).

Cars (2006), Walt Disney Pictures.

The “Negative” Impact Character

I’m often asked whether an Impact Character always has to positively influence the protagonist.

Not necessarily.

Although the Impact Character, as we’re discussing it here, is specifically a Truth-aligned character used by the writer to leverage change in the protagonist’s arc, you can also create “negative” Impact Characters who instead align with the Lie.

Similar to what the Dramatica system terms the Contagonist (a sort of anti-Mentor), a negative Impact Character will represent the seductive force of the protagonist’s Lie.

This is a character who (intentionally or not) attempts to influence the protagonist to either maintain the Lie’s status quo or, in some cases, to actually regress away from the Truth back to the more constrictive perspective of the Lie.

This role can be particularly useful when writing Negative Change Arcs, in which the negative Impact Character functions as a sort of “dark angel,” luring the protagonist away from their potential for positive growth.

Does the Impact Character Have to Have a Flat Arc?

A positive Impact Character functions in basically the same way as the Flat Arc character—as a character who grasps a more expanded version of the protagonist’s Truth and whose presence inspires growth and change in others. This always makes the Impact Character essentially a Flat-Arc character. However, if your Impact Character is a supporting character in your protagonist’s Positive Change Arc, this doesn’t mean the Impact Character must represent a full arc of any kind.

As supporting characters, Impact Characters can show up in many different ways. Sometimes they will represent significant relationships for the protagonist that continue throughout the story. Other times, they may only show up once or twice.

As we’ve seen in the previous examples, the Impact Character, as a story role, can also be represented by multiple characters throughout the story, all of whom catalyze the protagonist toward the Truth. In other stories, the archetypal role of the Impact Character can be merely symbolic or implied without being assigned to a specific character (although that’s often less dramatic).

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However you decide to portray the Impact Character in your story, just remember this character has the potential to be a pivot around which your protagonist’s entire arc turns. A character can’t change without something that impacts them by consistently and convincingly conflicting with their belief in the Lie. When planning your protagonist’s arc, consider who or what will keep opposing the Lie strongly enough that the protagonist can no longer avoid facing it.

Note: This article has been revised and expanded from an earlier version.

Want More?

Interested in going deeper into how Flat Arcs work? If you’d like to better understand this powerful character arc not simply as a story in which characters “don’t change,” but as a storyform of heroic integration, influence, and service to others and the world, I’ll be teaching a live class next week, September 22, 1 p.m. EDT: Flat Character Arcs: From Transformation to Integration.

This is a subject I’ve been wanting to explore in greater depth for a while. As we’ve touched on today, Flat Arcs are often much more complex than they initially appear.

In the class, we’ll look at what distinguishes Flat Arcs from Change Arcs, how they create meaningful transformation without requiring the protagonist to undergo the same kind of internal change, and how writers can use them to create resonant arcs of influence and integration.

The class takes place live on September 22 at 1 p.m. EDT. It’s pre-recorded, which allows me to joing you live in the chat to answer all your questions!

(I’m also teaching another class two weeks later on “Negative Character Arcs: The Hidden Pattern of Self-Deception.” If you’d like to go ahead and grab both classes, I’m offering a 15% discount for the bundle.)

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Who is the Impact Character in your story, and how does that character challenge your protagonist’s Lie? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).

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