From A Writer’s Path:
On a page, you are in control of time. Outside of it, you aren’t.
I have read and experienced many fascinating stories in my lifetime.
I have also experienced many poorly executed stories.
The deal breaker for me are a story’s characters. If, by the climax of a story, I do not care what happens to them, if I am not devastated by the possibility of an imaginary person failing or dying, then I cannot in good conscience call it a good story.
But more importantly, if a story’s main characters don’t transform from start to finish with great significance, I walk away disappointed.
. . . .
Someone writing their first story will not have yet mastered the complex process that is fully developing at least one character. It doesn’t mean they’re bad at writing… this is just something that takes many, many pages’ worth of writing experience to come even close to getting right.
. . . .
A typical character arc, as you know, begins with some kind of life-altering event. What was once normal is no longer tangible. Character development is the process of a fictional person essentially “growing up” as they learn from the string of events that originally set their story in motion.
But that’s the easy part. Throw in the fact that people turn up their noses at cliches and stories that are too predictable. Keeping someone interested in a story as you work through on paper how to get a character from point A to point X is one of the most challenging parts of writing a full-length novel.
Link to the rest at A Writer’s Path.
I’m a therapist and coach in Real Life (with a different name, too). I see character development in real time. I see people change – part of my job is to effect that change, or undo a negative change.
So writing characters who develop over time (change their mind, their values, actions and advice etc.) according to the challenges they meet is practically a no-brainer for me. But it has to be realistic. Something people can relate to. And it can go both ways.
I agree with the series exception, btw. That’s where character change has to be handled either very carefully, or doesn’t have to happen.
Character growth is an overrated simplification. Characters increase in depth as well as grow. Our beloved Captain Kirk does not grow much, if any, but our perception of him grows as we watch a succession of episodes that reveal additional facets and details of the same unchanging person. That’s why you don’t have to watch the episodes in order, and why some episodes are unsatisfying because the Captain is not himself. The same applies to many TV series, novels, and especially series novels.
Sam Spade does not grow in the Maltese Falcon. Much of the power of the novel is that he is exactly the person at the end as he was at the beginning despite the hi-jinks around him.
Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot do not change, that I can remember. Their actions are often surprising, but are consistent with their unchanging characters.
I will go so far as to say that most well-drawn characters do not grow unless they are in a genre that specializes in character growth, like coming-of-age novels, which can get tedious even while character grows like an invasion of knot weed.
There is more than one way to tell a compelling story. The objective is to get the reader caring about what’s going to happen next. Having them care about the characters is one way to get there, but it isn’t the only way and isn’t necessarily the best way, either.
A certain level of caring about characters is always necessary. For many readers, that level is actually zero. But a writer can overdraw the account. The moment a story tips over into a negative balance – the reader is actually bored or repelled by the characters and wants them to fail – the book is one slip away from being thrown against the wall.
The Eight Deadly Words are deadly even in the least character-oriented of pulp fiction. ‘I don’t care what happens to these people’ includes and entails not caring about what’s going to happen next.
What you’re talking about is the characters being a liability. The point is, there are more ways to make the reader happy and keep them that way than with characters that they fall in love with.
Hi, enabity! Nice to see you posting here again.
‘If, by the climax of a story, I do not care what happens to them’
If, by the end of a page or two, I don’t care about what happens to characters – out it goes. And that’s how I write. I can’t see giving up precious time to follow characters I have no reason to care about, certainly not as far as the story climax.
Not if you twist and dress it up enough so that they’re too entertained to care about the cliché.
Character growth is a relatively new feature in fiction and doesn’t apply to a lot of genre fiction, pulp, or serial fiction. A lot of beloved tv series don’t have it — we want Batman, Superman, Barnabas Collins, Captain Kirk, King Arthur, Guan Yu, Amos & Andy, Miss Marple, and Dr. Jonny Fever to be consistent and relatively unchanging. Single characters tend to remain single, male romantic leads tend to love them and leave them, nobody has children but sometimes nephews and nieces turn up.
Hey, Superman is married with a ten year old kid! Moved to the exurbs to make sure he could raise him in a healthy small town farming community.
And Bats is a single parent with a rowdy teenage assasin to fret over. 🙂
True, but I also think a little from Column A and a little from Column B goes a long way here. Last summer I binge-watched Go Lion (original Voltron). I was irritated at how often the Lion team kept falling for the same tricks and how often the bad guys kept using the same tactics, which failed over and over again.
Some growth in a series character has to happen or I will stop caring. I don’t want Miss Marple or Captain Kirk to stop being themselves, but I do like for characters to learn from experience. The absence of such growth is largely why I abandoned soap operas.
I expect Batman, for example, to consider that a current situation with the Penguin is similar to an earlier incident with the Joker, and conclude that this time he’s going to try a new approach to prevent / create whatever outcome. The experience “arc” is one thing that can keep a character or series from becoming a bad joke, not whether Miss Marple becomes Mrs. Poirot or Kirk transforms into a by-the-book admiral.
Guan Yu! I’ve always been more of a Zhang Fei or Taishi Ci guy.
And yes, their stories are not about transformative internal struggles. Outside of origin stories or the occasional big character changing arc (like Death in the Family for Batman).
“if a story’s main characters don’t transform from start to finish with great significance, I walk away disappointed.”
Maybe they do, but staggering numbers of readers don’t. Many, if not most, airport-book-store bestsellers have little to no character development during the story, since the characters are just there to progress the plot.
What about series books?
How many modern tough guy shoot’em up protagonists have a transformational narrative arc?
Those sell just fine as long as the body count is high and the executions are clever.
Different markets, different standards.