For years, in my book Creating Character Arcs and elsewhere, I’ve taught the Lie the Character Believes as the central premise of character arc. The Lie the Character Believes is the limited perspective that prevents characters from embracing the thematic Truth until the events of the story force them to grow. In a Positive Change Arc, characters will move past the Lie to embrace the more expanded perspective of the story’s thematic Truth. In a Negative Change Arc, the characters’ failure to embrace that growth will cause them to devolve into a more constricted or warped perspective.
Creating Character Arcs (Amazon affiliate link)
Basically, the Lie references a state of being that characters must outgrow in order to positively change their circumstances.
The Lie the Character Believes Isn’t Really a Lie
But if we really look at what’s happening in transformational fiction, it turns out… the Lie the Character Believes really isn’t a “lie.”
Now, I’ve always liked the pithiness and accessibility of this terminology. We can all immediately understand how a character’s mistaken understanding requires a character arc.
- We see Jane Eyre’s explosive and inspiring growth from mousy, repressed orphan to fully sovereign woman, thanks to the unraveling of childhood programming that told her she was unlovable.
Jane Eyre (2006), WGBH/BBC.
- We watch the protagonist of Everything Everywhere All at Once awaken from the numbing belief that life is meaningless to discover that meaning is something we create through our choices to show up and show love.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), IAC Films.
- We see Feyre in A Court of Thorns and Roses gradually release her survival-based self-belittlement to embrace her power as a keeper of community in a larger world.
Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas (affiliate link)
But as I’ve come to recognize over the years, the Lie is not just a Lie. I’ve come to emphasize it specifically as a comparatively limited belief that exists in a continuum with a comparatively expansive Truth. Because here’s the thing: at the beginning of a story, the Lie starts out as the character’s Truth. To some degree, it was a Truth that worked for them up until the story begins.
For Example:
In Book 1, Feyre’s zoned-in focus on survival skills are exactly what supports her family for years… until she kills the shapeshifting wolf in the woods, is pushed into the larger world of the Fae, and must grapple with the fact that her perspective of herself in that world must evolve and expand if she is to adapt.
The Truth a character reaches in any one story is just the beginning. In life, we are constantly leveling up along this continuum. Yesterday’s Truth becomes tomorrow’s Lie–or, more accurately, yesterday’s expanded perspective becomes tomorrow’s limited perspective as the horizon grows ever broader before us.
For Example:
At the end of Book 1, Feyre learns love is worth sacrifice, but Book 2 quickly proves the limitations of this perspective as well. From there, she must expand that Truth to recognize that authentic love cannot require the perpetual sacrifice of one’s own identity.
The rabbit hole goes still deeper. Recently, I was once again contemplating the Lie the Character Believes and thinking about how I have engaged with this continuum of growth in my own life. What I realized was that many of my greatest revelations and expansions haven’t really felt like a dramatic shift from “something that wasn’t true” to “something that was true.” Rather, what they’ve always felt like is clarity. They’ve felt like coming into alignment with something that, at some level, always felt true, but that had been blocked in some way.
And so, I would posit that the Lie a character overcomes really isn’t so much a wrong belief they must correct (or at least not always and not at its deeper levels). Rather, it is a fissure in consciousness—a place where the conscious self is inhabiting an ego identity that has created separation between its surface-level understanding and the deeper Truth of our being.
Three Ways to Understand the Lie the Character Believes
Within this philosophy of the Lie the Character Believes, we have three different models of increasing complexity.
Three ways to understand the Lie the Character Believes: as a mistaken belief, a limited perspective, and an ego identity.
First, we have the Lie as simply a mistaken belief or even an outright deception that must be seen through.
Second, we have the Lie as a point within a continuum from a comparatively limited perspective to a comparatively expanded perspective. Both “Lie” and “Truth” are qualified here; they are not black and white, good or bad. They are just reference points for where characters may find themselves along the continuum at any point.
And third, we have this deeper understanding of the Lie as an ego identity or a comparatively limited consciousness. It is ultimately a separation between the conscious self and the unconscious self. When we zoom back from the minutiae of any specific character arc to look at the movement of human growth, what we are really tracking is the larger expansion that becomes possible as we release the limitations of our ego identities, allowing us to embrace our capacity for deep alignment with the truths of life.
The Lie the Character Believes as Separation
What does it mean to identify with the ego? The ego is a limited awareness of the self. It tells me I am my name, my job, my gender, my ethnicity, my trauma, my roles. It then reflects the world back to me in equally limited terms: simply, the world is what I perceive—whether I am idealistic or cynical. But none of these things are, in fact, true.
I am not K.M. Weiland—those are just letters and sounds my parents passed on to me. I am not a writer—that is just something I do. The world around me is neither good nor bad just because I perceive it so (not least because my certainties change with my moods).
I am not a genius just because I get a good review, any more than I am stupid just because my inner critic tells me so. But to the degree my ego latches on to the importance of either as an identity, it separates me from the larger continuum of my own greater consciousness and immediately creates a limited perspective. Worse (or not, since this is a writer’s bread and butter!), it now tells me I must defend that identity to the death. And, of course, the super-sneaky part is that we don’t even recognize this is happening.
In opposition to the Lie the Character Believes in a story, we find the thematic Truth. In a specific story, the Truth will also be something specific. If a character believes the Lie that she is only valuable if she wins a competition, then the Truth might be that her family will love her even when she loses. But underneath that specific Truth is always the larger Truth, which is “because our perspectives are always limited, our identification with those perspectives is often what is causing us pain.”
Different stories will choose which model makes the most sense for their thematic and psychological complexity.
For Example:
- In The Truman Show, Truman’s arc is built around the first model: he has literally been deceived about the nature of his world and must see through that deception in order to become free.
The Truman Show (1998), Paramount Pictures.
- In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s arc illustrates the second model: she is not overcoming an outright falsehood so much as expanding beyond a limited perspective to recognize a more nuanced understanding of herself and others. In fact, we see a layering here, in that her initial prejudice of Darcy (aka, her limited perspective) actually does cause her to believe Wickham’s specific falsehood about Darcy’s character.
The scene structure here answers its opening question with a resounding, “Yes. Elizabeth does encounter Darcy.”
- In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s deepest arc points toward the third model: although his journey challenges mistaken beliefs and expands his perspective, its ultimate movement is the gradual surrender of an identity rooted in self-reliance, allowing him to participate in something infinitely larger than himself.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), New Line Cinema.
How the Backstory Ghost Creates the Lie the Character Believes
Where does this limiting ego identification come from?
Within the theory of storyform, it originates with the Ghost in the character’s backstory. Often a wound, the Ghost is the specific catalyst that either formed the ego identity or created a defensive need to cling to it. By the time a character arc grows beyond simple Lies and Truths into an expansion of consciousness, the Ghost is often simply what we now recognize most commonly as childhood coping mechanisms. It is whatever created the first severances of inner wholeness in an attempt to meet early needs.
Habits of a Happy Brain by Loretta Graziano Breuning (affiliate link)
And as Loretta Graziano Breuning speaks about in her book Habits of a Happy Brain, our early experiences of such hormones as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and cortisol wire our entire perception of the world. How our brains develop creates our personalities, which in turn influence the stories we tell about ourselves and others, which in turn become our identities.
In short, we might just as easily recognize the Lie as a coping mechanism. Just as a Lie isn’t a Lie for your character until it stops proving effective, a coping mechanism is never something we question—until it stops helping us cope and/or starts creating more problems than it’s solving (i.e., more mad or sad hormones than happy or safe ones).
That’s the point at which the story begins. It’s the point at which characters begin the slow journey toward the consciousness that perhaps they are more than whatever limiting coping mechanism they’ve been identifying with all this time.
As character arcs bear out over and over, this is often a painful journey. Even when characters are moving toward a better, more expanded, healthier place of being, everything inside screams that this transformation is dangerous. The ego is built to help us survive, but its programs are limited. It doesn’t always adapt as quickly as life demands. And when life insists that what the ego believes will keep it safe is, in fact, a “lie,” the ego will exert all manner of painful tactics to return to the status quo.
The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd (affiliate link)
In The Gene Keys, Richard Rudd comments on this:
The suffering we feel, though real within the context of our physiology, is an illusion when it comes to our minds. And our minds hold the key to its release…. As we see at the shadow frequency, the mind automatically collapses into confusion when faced with the pain underlying life…. All it takes is willingness to feel the pain, and the miracle begins.
For Example:
- Jane Eyre’s childhood rejection teaches her to survive by making herself small and emotionally self-sufficient, until that very strategy prevents her from accepting the love she most longs for.
- Feyre Archeron’s years of poverty and neglect teach her that her worth depends upon sacrifice and survival, until those same coping mechanisms become prisons she must outgrow in order to embrace a fuller identity.
- Woody in Toy Story builds his identity around being Andy’s favorite toy, and every perceived threat to that identity triggers fear, jealousy, and defensiveness until he learns his worth apart from his status.
Why Character Arc Is Alignment Rather Than Transformation
Although I dearly love the idea of character arc as being about transformation, I think this expanded model reveals it might be more accurate to instead think of character arc as being about coming into alignment. It’s less about a change to the character’s fundamental self and more about the removal of the false self. It’s not the addition of a new perspective, but the stripping away of what isn’t true so the character may see more clearly.
In my class earlier this year Ego-Driven Character Arcs vs. Soul-Driven Character Arcs, I talked about how the soul-driven (or dharmic) character arc demonstrates an advancement from the ego-driven (or karmic) arc, in that these characters undergo transformation with less resistance. Even if they may struggle with the specifics of the change required of them, they at least embrace the understanding that this movement toward Truth is unavoidable and even beneficial.
This is why we may see arcs that feature more “advanced” characters—such as the Mage archetype—engaging in comparatively little plot conflict. They are willing to embrace the suffering of further initiation and understand that non-reactivity is a surer path. They don’t have to force the change any more than they want to resist it; it will come to them if they let it. Rudd puts it:
As your inner spirit decides to face who you really are for the first time ever, the mind tricks are witnessed.
Even characters struggling through extremely egoic Lies will (if their arcs are successful) eventually reach a moment when they recognize that embracing the Truth means being non-reactive to the Lie and the confusion it creates now that it is no longer proving effective. Instead, they must allow the Truth, as Rudd says, “to enthuse and fire your mind with inspiration.”
Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung (and others) (affiliate link)
In the multi-author book Man and His Symbols, Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz speaks of how:
…this creative active aspect of the psychic nucleus can come into play only when the ego gets rid of all purposive and wishful aims and tries to get a deeper, more basic form of existence. The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth.
For Example:
- In Kung Fu Panda, Po’s greatest breakthrough comes when he stops trying to become someone else’s idea of the Dragon Warrior and simply inhabits his own personal genius.
Kung-Fu Panda (2008), DreamWorks Animation.
- In The Matrix, Neo becomes “the One” by finally releasing his identification with the limits he believed defined him.
The Matrix (1999), Warner Bros.
- In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s final victory comes through refusing to continue fighting from within the rage-fueled identity the Emperor is trying to impose upon him.
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983), 20th Century Fox.
- In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn’s breakthrough comes when she stops reacting to the chaos around her and instead chooses compassionate presence, allowing love rather than fear to guide her actions.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), IAC Films.
- In Jane Eyre, Jane’s crucial act of transformation isn’t choosing Rochester, but rather refusing to choose him until she can do so without betraying herself.
Jane Eyre (2006), WGBH/BBC.
The Lie the Character Believes as Social Reality
When we consider the Lie the Character Believes to be this sense of separation from our deeper selves, we can see it played out at many different levels within the metaphor of story.
Characters may face Lies that are internal (identity), external (social), or both. In either case, the Lie always represents some version of the status quo that has grown stagnant and therefore malignant.
Ego identities are not simply personal. They are reinforced through collective social consensus. Society itself can be seen as an ego identity. In their seminal book, sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann posited that reality, as we think of it, is a social construction. Customs and traditions are dictated by varying societies. That America or Columbia or Italy are countries at all is a social convention. Indeed, the conventions of language are a social construction, with (mostly) agreed-upon rules.
Although we each, in our own small way, influence society, society bears a tremendous influence upon our own ego identities—not just in how we operate socially but also in how we understand ourselves internally. Arguably, the vast majority of our ego identities are inherited. We all entertain outer Lies (aka, limiting beliefs) about what we believe reality to be and inner Lies about what we believe our identities within that reality to be.
Many of these beliefs are useful. These identities are uniforms we wear that allow us to function in various roles in the world—as parents, children, construction workers, politicians, artists, neighbors, citizens, etc. This status quo holds our world together and wards off the chaos at the door.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell (affiliate link)
But it is also stultifying. It is what Joseph Campbell termed “the tyrant-ogre Holdfast, Keeper of the Status Quo.” Symbolically, it is the central antagonist in the Hero’s Journey and every other archetypal character arc. Although there is a time and place within character development to celebrate the integration of the status quo, every Positive Change Arc is ultimately a movement away from the confines of social reality toward the initiation of individuation.
As von Franz notes, individuation is a movement of the smaller egoic consciousness into relationship with the larger self:
Jung … described [the Self] as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the “ego,” which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche.
She went on to explain:
It even seems as if the ego has not been produced by nature to follow its own arbitrary impulses to an unlimited extent, but to help make real the totality—the whole psyche. It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system, allowing it to become conscious and thus to be realized. If, for example, I have an artistic talent of which my ego is not conscious, nothing will happen to it. The gift may as well be non-existent. Only if my ego notices it can I bring it into reality. The inborn but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same thing as a wholeness that is fully realized and lived…. Strictly speaking, however, the process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consciously makes a living connection with it.
The transformation at the heart of character arc is an awakening to consciousness (to whatever degree) and a movement away from the ego’s identification with social reality. It is this movement that allows the character to come into greater alignment with self-responsibility and accountability.
In many ways, the great Lie under all the smaller lies a character may believe is simply that circumstances dictate their lives—which allows for a great deal of irresponsibility. With awareness comes responsibility, with responsibility comes accountability, with accountability comes pain—but also freedom and the deep health of alignment.
That is character arc in a nutshell.
Character Arc as the Union of Consciousness and the Unconscious
Isn’t it interesting that the very elements that make a good story are the same elements that direct us into the deeper truths of life, growth, healing, and conscious expansion?
The hidden structure of story and character arc is itself a thematic arc toward truth. Not all stories will explore these deeper themes. But they don’t have to; the shape is always there.
Archetypally, character arc is the quest for union between conscious awareness and the unconscious self.
Also in Man and His Symbols, Joseph L. Henderson wrote:
[A] sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind.
As we’ve been talking about all year, this movement is exactly what allows us, as writers, to create myth from the inside out. Any story that resonates with this primal shape of the psyche’s journey taps the archetype for anyone who reads or watches it.
Rudd, in closing, once again:
All natural energy or life force has one inbuilt program: to grow and evolve. This is the nature of life.
Perhaps that’s why stories matter so much. Every Positive Change Arc reminds us of something we instinctively recognize in our own lives: that growth is really about finding out who we are beneath the fear, the defenses, and the identities we’ve accumulated along the way.
Want More?
If this post resonated with you, you might enjoy my Shadow Archetypes course!
If the Lie the Character Believes can ultimately be understood as an ego identity or coping mechanism, then the shadow archetypes offer a powerful way of recognizing how those patterns show up in our characters’ coping mechanisms, fears, defenses, temptations, and opportunities for growth.
Throughout this eight-week email course, we explore the passive and aggressive shadow expressions of the six character arcs in the Archetypal Life Cycle to show how they can help you create richer inner conflict, more resonant themes, and ultimately more transformative stories. If you’re interested in exploring the deeper psychology behind character arc and the limiting beliefs that create the Lie the Character Believes, this is a great next step.
Available as an eight-week email course.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do you think of the Lie the Character Believes in your own stories? Is it a mistaken belief, a limited perspective, or something even deeper? Tell me in the comments!
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Author: K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland