A story trajectory where the character ends up in a worse place than they started - morally, psychologically, or both.
A negative character arc traces a character's decline over the course of a story. Instead of overcoming their flaws and growing, the character succumbs to their worst impulses, clings to a destructive belief, or gradually loses what made them good in the first place. The arc can take many forms - a slow erosion of ideals, a dramatic fall from grace, or a quiet descent into obsession. What makes it "negative" isn't that the character is bad, but that their trajectory moves them further from truth, wholeness, or moral ground.
Not every character should get a happy ending or learn their lesson, and pretending otherwise makes your fiction feel dishonest. Negative arcs let you explore what happens when people make the wrong choices under pressure, which can feel brutally real and deeply compelling. They also give your story thematic weight by showing the consequences of fear, pride, or self-deception.
Walter White's transformation from sympathetic cancer patient to ruthless drug lord is one of the most celebrated negative arcs in modern storytelling.
Macbeth begins as a loyal, decorated warrior and spirals into paranoid tyranny after murdering his king.
Nick Dunne's arc reveals a man who becomes increasingly morally compromised, trapped by his own choices and willing to play the game.
Tom Ripley's descent from envious outsider to calculated killer unfolds with chilling inevitability.
Build in small compromises and rationalizations that accumulate. Each step should feel logical to the character, even as the reader sees the bigger picture.
The key word is arc - there needs to be movement. Show what the character stood to gain and what they lost along the way.
Give the character understandable reasons for their early bad choices. The audience needs to think 'I might have done the same thing' for as long as possible.
Write a scene where your character faces a moral crossroads - they can do the right thing at personal cost or the wrong thing for personal gain. Have them choose wrong, but write it so the reader completely understands why. Then write a second, later scene where that choice has become a pattern they can no longer see clearly.