Change of heart
STATIC CHARACTERS MAKE FOR STATIC STORIES. BUT HOW CAN AUTHORS ENSURE CHARACTER ARCS FEEL BELIEVABLE ON THE PAGE?
BY JACK SMITH
If you’ve been a fiction writer for any length of time, you surely have a whole list of things you’ve picked up about character development – from your reading of good fiction and books on writing, from writing colleagues, or from conferences. The three big accomplishments a fiction writer strives for are:
1) Create a complex, multi-dimensional protagonist.
2) Create a sympathetic protagonist that the reader can root for.
3) Make sure your protagonist has an arc – that is, changes in some way by the end of the story.
Readers want a story, not just a portrait or a sketch. Every story has an occasion, a complication, and a central conflict, which develops as the plot unfolds. As in real life, characters struggle with problems of different kinds. What’s all this add up to? What does your protagonist learn? How are they different by story’s end?
To learn more about this matter of character change, we consulted several professional short story writers and novelists for their insights.
Ways our characters can change
In what ways might characters change in a story or novel? How extensive are these changes likely to be, and how fundamental are they in terms of a character’s essential nature or overall makeup?
Change can begin with or result in an epiphany – “the light going on in the head,” as prize-winning short story writer Robert Garner McBrearty puts it. “Once the light shines in, even dimly, there’s a glimmer of hope, the possibility of change. Often that’s the place I prefer to leave off, with the possibility of change in the balance.” If the character does come to some form of realization, it may not be fixed: “Maybe a character makes a seemingly breathtaking realization, only to reverse the realization moments later.”
That enlightened moment is something Steven Wingate, short story writer and novelist, shoots for. “I like to see my characters getting a glimpse of who they are. And often it really is just a glimpse, something they don’t even register but that, if I’ve done my job as an author, the reader will see clearly.”
This self-realization is substantially different in the novel, he says, since a novel has a much broader range and scope. “In the novel, with its expanded space and time, this sense of realization expands beyond the boundaries of the character. I want characters in a novel to come out of it with a broader sense of who they are in the world, which is possible because there’s more of the world at large in novels than there is in stories.”
For novelist Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams, what drives character change is a character’s desires or wants. She thinks in terms of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “The flawed hero of a story wants something (preferably of a physical nature), and the journey represents the obstacles or dangers that stand in the way of getting what she wants.” The endpoint may be either good or bad: “The hero may or may not reach her goal, but in going on the journey, she often discovers what she actually needs and returns home forever changed.”
The types of journeys in novels may vary. “She may set out on a journey to find a treasure, uncover a secret, confront a fear, mend a relationship,” says Henderson. “The list of potential wants is endless, as are her own character flaws and the other obstacles standing in her way.
“At the end of the journey, the change may be big or small, subtle or partial. She may be better or worse off. But both she and the reader have traveled somewhere, and in the best stories, both feel transformed by the journey.”
Character change is tied to the nature of the story’s conflict, whether internal or external, states Jessica Keener, author of two novels and a story collection: “A character who might seem passive can become proactive or vice versa. A character who may appear weak at the onset of a story may uncover inner strengths she didn’t know she had. A character who appears mighty at the beginning of a story may, in fact, turn out to be spineless.”
Characters with movement
Pamela Painter, an award-winning story writer who often writes flash fiction, questions whether “change” is really the right word to use when discussing character growth. “What about ‘movement,’ as the character moves through the story?” she asks. “I think of Meg Pokrass’s flash stories or Robert Scotellaro’s, in which the characters are what they are, and it is the story’s situation that defines and/or moves toward their definition.” In these flash stories, “we’re often right there with them at the moment of a ‘happening,’ a ‘realization,’” but this realization functions to reveal who they really are – “their definition,” as Painter puts it. It’s not a transformative change in who they are as people.
Similarly, Peter Selgin, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, distinguishes between changes in “ideas, opinions, attitudes, and beliefs” and more rock-bottom changes. In real life, we “essentially remain ourselves,” he says. “Great fiction not only accepts this reality, it makes a virtue of it.” He sees the fiction writer’s job as “less to put characters through ‘changes’ than to put them into situations that test and expose the virtues and limits that define them.”
No matter what path of change you choose, you absolutely should aim for movement of one kind or another in your fiction. Otherwise, you have what’s termed a “slice of life” story – a portrait or a cross-section of your character’s life at a given time and a given place. But most readers want change, or movement, versus stasis; they crave a story, not a character study. McBrearty, author of When I Can’t Sleep, a flash fiction collection, reminds us that while stasis might work for flash fiction, “the longer the story becomes, the less it lends itself to being just a slice of life. As stories get longer, we want to see more development and change, more of an actual storyline.”
The short story versus the novel
Is it likely that your protagonist will change more in a novel than in a short story? How much does the form itself determine the degree to which your character might change?
According to Keener, the form itself doesn’t determine how much a character will change. “As always, it’s the story, the central dilemma, problem, or predicament that shapes how a character changes and vice versa.” But “in a short story, there is less time and space, so the change may seem sudden. In a novel, the longer form allows for more interactions among characters or more things to occur to the character, so the change may build slowly or feel incremental.” But she emphasizes that she doesn’t believe “short or long dictates how much a character changes.”
Henderson agrees. “A novel allows you to tell a more complicated story with multiple subplots but, in either form, your hero still wants something and is changed as she goes about trying to get it.”
In contrast, McBrearty holds that form does make a difference. Short stories are “often limited to one major change. In novels, we are likely to have a series of minor and major changes.”
For McBrearty, it’s a question of space. “We might go on for many pages with our main character relatively clueless before making a real breakthrough of some sort [in a novel]. There isn’t time for that in the short story.” The short story requires much greater compression: “Problems and subsequent changes while confronting those problems need to be established quickly.
This isn’t to say that major changes can’t appear in shorter forms,” but rather “it might just be a little more challenging.”
For Wingate, too, the form makes a difference. “In a short story, I feel I have less time to show a change, so I focus on depicting more decisive moments of change from a more close up perspective. I want to catch the exact moment when the protagonist’s understanding of their own life turns, and I want you to feel it as it happens.”
But, says Wingate, a novel is much more sprawling, with “more room to take you through a wider variety of emotional changes in the protagonist’s life.” This extra space allows for more development in terms of the final character arc: “I hope, then, to give you a better sense of where they might be going because you’ve seen more of their twists and turns and can sense the patterns.” It’s different with a short story, he says, where you’re probably limited to not more than “one twist or turn.”
Convincing character change
In either form, short story or novel, what constitutes believable change for your protagonist?
“A convincing change comes from the creation of a believable character. A believable character comes from speaking the truth – one that emerges organically from the heart of that character,” Keener says – something that “requires knowing who the character is.” To achieve convincing change in her novel Strangers in Budapest, she had “to step out of the way of my characters and let them dictate the scenes, speak for themselves, and perceive events from their different points of view.”
For Henderson, a good study in believable motivation is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. “Ebenezer Scrooge walks right up to the line of unbelievable change because he begins the story as a miser who doesn’t feel empathy for the needs and sorrows of others, and in the end, we see a man who expresses desperate generosity.” This is certainly a substantive change, but it works, says Henderson, “because he doesn’t want to change, and because it takes being confronted by three different ghosts to sufficiently scare him into becoming a different kind of man before time runs out.”
In listening to your characters, you might find them changing or behaving in odd ways – and that’s fine, says McBrearty. “People do weird and unexpected things in real life,” he says, “but we have to believe that they would, in fact, do those particular weird and unexpected things in our stories.”
But what if your character’s change extends even beyond the strange or unusual? What if we need to transform ordinary characters into, say, thieves or murderers? According to McBrearty, understanding and showing a character’s interiority is often key: “In Crime and Punishment, we totally believe that Raskolnikov would commit a murder. Why? Because we are vividly privy to his deteriorating mind. So believability comes through our deep understanding of the character and our ability to convey our understanding to the readers.”
Wingate does caution against “wholesale, instantaneous character transformations,” for instance, “a con artist becoming a champion of the downtrodden or a decent family man becoming a raging criminal.
“Change that’s incremental is intrinsically more interesting to me as a fiction writer because I get to render it up close and because it’s truer to the actual changes we often painstakingly work our way through in life,” Wingate says. “I’m much more interested in exploring in greater detail the con artist who decides to help out one individual in need, or the decent family man letting his frustration drive him to a single act of quiet but violent rebellion.”
Huge changes generally come off as forced or contrived: “As a reader, whenever I see a wholesale change of personality traits or underlying psychic attributes, I suspect the writer has taken a shortcut for the sake of an arbitrarily determined plot,” he says.
Do be careful not to engineer things, echoes Selgin. “To be believable, change has to be earned, and it should be subtle.” The author shouldn’t set out “to make characters undergo change, any more than it’s an author’s job to put words into a character’s mouth when writing dialogue.”
Instead, the author needs to play with the possibilities, combining an observer’s role with a creative one: “We listen, we observe, we invent and put characters into situations that test their limits. But if we embark on a work of fiction having already decided that a character will ‘change,’ let alone when, how, and how much, we might as well be painting by numbers,” says Selgin.
Leaving character change open to interpretation
In establishing your protagonist’s overall arc, how much, if any, should you leave to interpretation?
“I thrive on ambiguity and ineffability as a writer,” states Wingate, “because most of the change I go through in my life as a human is ambiguous and ineffable. Why should fiction – if it aims to be truthful to human experience – be any different? Sometimes change in a person (real or imaginary) is so subtle that it’s a matter of the light feeling different or one’s sense of moving through the world feeling different.”
As a fiction writer, he sees his job as one of capturing this kind of change with clarity, “even if it’s an incredibly subtle change.” This kind of subtlety relates to feelings and vague sensations: “Usually when we feel change within, we get a small sense of turning, even though we don’t know what, exactly, we’re turning toward. If I can make a reader feel that on behalf of a character, I count it as a win.”
“I’m all for ambiguity in endings,” says Keener. “But I don’t look for that. I let the story convince me. As a reader, I will submit to an ambiguous ending if the story earns it – and doesn’t feel forced.” It can work well, she says, “if the events unfold authentically and take me there.”
Ambiguous or not, Painter notes that in fiction, “the movement has to be important and engaging, and the story’s end has to be satisfying.” She finds this to be the case in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” “It’s a truly wonderful ride of a story with a satisfying but ambiguous ending that just hangs there. But, oh, the buildup is sublime.”
For McBrearty, ambiguity can work well in a short story but not always as well in a novel. “While I prefer at least a hint of change in short stories, I think the change can be quite ambiguous or even ineffable. We may sense that there has been a change, even without being able to quite put our finger on what that change is.” Like Wingate, he sees this inexpressibility as typical of our daily experience in the world. “Life comes at us sometimes that way. There’s a sudden curious scent in the air or a ray of light breaking through a cloud, and we experience some sense of sharpening or altered reality, but if someone were to ask us what we were thinking just then, we wouldn’t be able to say.”
“In a novel, though,” says McBrearty, “I usually hope for less ambiguity. I’m speaking as a reader here, but I’d be frustrated to read 300 or 400 pages or more and be left wondering what it all meant.” This doesn’t mean that everything has to be tied up in a neat package, or even that he has to “fully understand the change – but I would expect the changes to be a least a little more obvious,” he says.
Characters resisting change
What if your protagonist resists change? What if they remain in a state of denial? Or what if your protagonist doesn’t change but retreats back to their starting point, to the so-called equilibrium before the complication that set off the conflict?
For Selgin, characters in literature, like real people, are by and large static in terms of changes in their basic self or nature. “Which isn’t to say that things shouldn’t happen to a protagonist,” he says. “Lots of things may and probably should happen; characters should be tested. They may fail or pass their tests – or a little of both. But even as they do, still, every cell in their body will in all likelihood resist change.”
The key question, for Henderson, is why a fictional character resists change. To answer that, we’ve got to understand the character fully. For instance, “Stevens, the head butler of Darlington Hall in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, has devoted his life to serving others. When faced with an opportunity to pursue the woman he loves, we feel his choice to continue to serve this great house like a punch to the gut. The reason his refusal to change does not feel static is because we see his journey, we see how painful it is for him to make the choice.”
On the other hand, what if your character is basically static – and without good cause? As a result, your story is going nowhere.
Henderson offers this piece of advice, a strategy that’s worked well for her: “If I can’t get my character to budge, if the change she makes seems too soft, I look for her breaking points.” Imagine a shy character, for example: “If I put this shy woman’s child into harm’s way, she may find courage like she’s never known before.” Characters are humans, and humans have flaws. Add pressure to these flaws, advises Henderson – and then increase it until your character breaks.
A persistent resistance to change can also be the stuff of tragedy, notes Keener. “Isn’t that what tragedy is: a character who is unable to change or adapt or find a different solution to a problem?” And sometimes writers also encounter a character who does a “full circle back to her original position,” an arc that “could [still] be satisfying and doesn’t hinge on whether a story is sad, happy, or ambiguous. It depends on how well the writer takes the reader along for the ride.”
If the character doesn’t change at all, we’re seeing “rejection of change, which in itself is a decision, conscious or otherwise,” says McBrearty. But, on the other hand, says McBrearty, you’ve got to consider reader expectations. If a character rejects change, make sure readers care about the “change not made.” You will be successful, he says, if you can tap into a theme most readers appreciate – that of missed opportunities. Readers feel a “sense of sadness [at] the road not taken, the ship sailing out of port without the last passenger.”
Conflict and change
Believable change – no matter how ambiguous, surprising, subtle, or dramatic – comes down to one thing: Knowing your characters. How will they respond when pressure is applied? How do they shift, move, adapt to the situations they find themselves in? Spend time with your characters and put them into situations that test them. Don’t force things: Simply allow your characters to evolve naturally on the page.
Jack Smith is the author of five novels, three books of nonfiction, and numerous reviews, articles, and interviews. His collection of articles on fiction writing, Inventing the World, was recently published by Serving House Books.
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Grumbus/Shutterstock
