Change
By Donald Maass | May 6, 2015 |
Flickr Creative Commons: Mauricio Lima
The surest way to stir emotion in readers can be summed up in one word: change.
Change is a universal experience. We’ve all gone through it. We cannot avoid it. The passages of life guarantee it. Change is necessary, difficult, wrenching and individual. When a character in a story changes we each recall the emotional earthquakes of our own lives. We feel for characters, or so we say. We’re really feeling for ourselves.
Changes can be small or big. In my post Stirring Higher Emotions, I described a method for turning a character toward virtue, the shift with the greatest reader impact. Change can also be momentary, though, as when in a scene a point-of-view character gains insight, makes an intuitive leap, asks the right question, reverses course or steps out of the box of our expectations and acts differently or looks at things in a new way.
Every change, big or small, knocks us readers off balance which in terms of emotional craft is good. Shake us out of our fog and our hearts open. We’re free to feel. What does change mean, then? How does it happen? How can it be built in a manuscript for maximum effect?
In general, what changes in people is belief, behavior, or both. The emotional impact of change lies less in the change itself and more in resistance to it. The effect of change can be amplified by involving other characters, who either validate the old beliefs and behaviors or who open paths to new ones. Change happens both inside and observably. Showing is good. Done right, telling can be too. Why not both?
A character who needs to change is rooted on one side of a polarity: me or you, yin or yang, Jeckyll or Hyde, helpless or reckless, righteous or resigned. Such a character is stuck for good reasons. Wrong belief and damaging behavior become traps because they work. Until they don’t.
Even then they hang on because to change means giving up what is familiar and simple. The old ways boost confidence, compensate for weakness and, sometimes, make one acceptable to a group. Adopting new ways requires becoming vulnerable, facing complexity, accepting ambiguity as well as feeling alone, unsure and at risk. No wonder people backslide.
[pullquote]Change feels good. It’s a relief, liberating, and empowering. It’s a turn away from self-pity and toward understanding of self and others. It brings maturity, perspective, and elevates one to a higher consciousness.[/pullquote]
Once accomplished, though, change feels good. It’s a relief, liberating, and empowering. It’s a turn away from self-pity and toward understanding of self and others. It brings maturity, perspective, and elevates one to a higher consciousness. Change is akin to religious surrender, mystical detachment, meditation, mindfulness, and the state of self-observation achieved in psychotherapy. Turmoil is let go. Peace is found.
Now, how do we turn this into a set of tools for fiction? Here are some questions to help pin down the unique change a given character needs to undergo, what makes it difficult, who helps or hinders, the trigger for the change and the rewards.
Define the Change:
Choose a character. This person is hurting himself or herself in a way that no one else is, what is it? Choose three other characters. How would each differently describe this flawed thinking or unhelpful behavior? Who, by contrast, sees it as strength? How is this everyone’s issue, a timeless dichotomy, or a wholly contemporary malaise? Who expresses that? Put this character’s belief and/or behavior at one end of a spectrum…what’s at the other end?
Build Resistance:
What’s good about being stuck in the old way of thinking or being? How has it benefited, if not profited, your character? What makes it a rule for living? Who in history lived by the same rule and was better off? How does your character know the old belief and way of being works? What does it simplify? Who approves? How does it make your character feel good? What does it mask? Demonstrate the rewards.
More: Why is it too soon to change? Why is it better to wait? Why is it too much work? How is your character simply incapable of changing? What power or authority would he or she lose? Who would shun this character if he or she changed? How would it be humiliating? Who would be harmed? Who needs to be protected?
Finally: What past resentment is this character clinging onto? At whom is he or she still angry? How does your character fool himself or herself into thinking that he or she no longer cares? How is that right—yet utterly wrong to someone else who sees your character clearly?
Add a Wise Mentor:
Who sees your character’s good side when others might not? Who is able to put himself or herself in your character’s shoes? Who accepts your character as he or she is, does not judge, and respects their choices? Who has not forgotten why your character was important to them? Who stands by even when things fall apart?
Trigger the Change with Adverse Consequences:
Why does this character feel guilty about his or her old way of thinking or acting? How does he or she struggle with it? Show an attempt at making a change and how that fails. What’s the most dramatic way for your character return to the old ways? How does backsliding bite? Who is disgusted? Who turns away? What’s the biggest cost of failing to change? Make that happen.
Become New:
What’s the most symbolic way in which your character can show that he or she has changed? What does he or she now understand that he or she did not understand before? What does he or she now see about self? What is he or she now capable of doing that previously was impossible? What’s the best thing about letting go of strife? How does the world look different? How are other people new? What timeless principle is proven? How does it feel to be at peace?
Phew. No wonder change is hard—and hard to write effectively. But when change happens we readers are grateful. We feel better. We are moved. And even more than the satisfaction of a plot resolution, wouldn’t you like your readers to feel just that at the end of your novel?
Of course. Now you know a way to bring that about.
How will your protagonist change? What makes it necessary? What makes it hard? What makes it happen? Who helps? What will we take away?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Change is painful, so mostly we avoid it until staying the same is more painful than changing. Same with our characters. Feeling that tension is what keeps us reading, and resolving it is why, “we readers are grateful. We feel better. We are moved.”
The trick is in the timing, right? How long to build the tension and prolong it before resolving it. That’s the trick of good fiction I learned from you.
Mia-
How long to prolong the tension? While it’s possible to drag it out too long, most manuscripts don’t make the tension (of necessary change) real enough, difficult enough or prolonged enough.
I say err on the side of “too much”, which is to say what feels like too much to you. If you over do it your beta readers will tell you!
I’m having a tough time with my current WIP because my protagonist’s change causes him to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. . .and it blows up in his face.
Raven is, for reasons clear in the backstory and in the first novel, extremely untrusting of anyone outside of a few core people. The first novel was the story of his redemption from the life of a dark mage and his return to the community. The second novel shows him learning that sometimes he has to allow himself to rely on others for help. In the third novel, as I’ve mentioned, he goes beyond himself to help a young man who has started down the path toward dark magic choose a better path. To do this, he has to face the loss of hard-won approval from those around him who don’t believe the young man can be saved.
The problem is that the people around him are more right than they are wrong about the young man, and he ultimately betrays Raven’s trust. Which makes for great drama and a good deal of emotional pain for Raven (especially as the young man is killed by the dark mages he returns to, when he might have been safe if he had remained in custody.) The ending fits nicely into the overall arc of the three books. Raven learns that a)he is fallible and b)the people around him will accept that fallibility and ultimately forgive him his mistakes. A mentor points out that, while Raven was wrong, he could have just as easily been right, and the thing with taking a chance on someone is that sometimes the risk doesn’t pan out. . . but sometimes it does.
The thing is, the arc of the individual book feels like a muddle. Raven makes a much-needed change. . .and gets punished for it. There is a smaller, contrasting example of the change (he reluctantly takes in a stray kitten) that turns out to be slightly less of a disaster (the kitten destroys an antique chair, but also provides some comfort at key moments) but that seems small in comparison to the instance of the young man (who at one point nearly gets Raven’s fiance killed).
To make it more complicated, the save-the-young-dark-mage arc is just a subplot to Raven’s showdown with his former mentor in dark magic.
I feel that there has to be a way to make this all work neatly, but I just can’t see it.
Shawna-
I’m intrigued by your trilogy and delighted that you present your story problem so clearly. Thanks.
I wonder if you haven’t already identified Raven’s necessary change when you write this:
“…the people around him are more right than they are wrong.”
Ah. Raven doesn’t listen to advice wiser than his own. He thinks he knows best, but he doesn’t. Isn’t that like us all? Oh, our ego. Our righteous self-justification. Our conviction that we can fix the world and everyone in it if only the world would listen to us and do as we say.
All of us are fallible. Perhaps that is what Raven doesn’t understand? He needs humility. Maybe look at his arc of change that way?
Wow. You cut to the heart of what I was too close to the work to see. I’m ready to plunge back in with more confidence, Thanks!
Shawna, what you’ve described sounds really rich and meaty, and I’m not sure what’s wrong with it. My favorite way to do tension in a novel is to have all the people criticizing the protag be correct in their evaluation of the situation — but there’s also something deeply correct in what the protag insists on doing/believing.
Do you feel insecure about it because Raven’s attempts to redeem this character bring nothing but strife? Does Raven have moments of almost succeeding with this kid to keep him going and keep the reader guessing?
And, always, dealing with The Don’s questions will help a lot. Best of luck with your story!
I’m keeping this post to reread and mull over. I’ve come to believe that change is at the base of all story. Different characters react to change differently, and in their reactions are the making of the story. Thanks for pointing out the timing. The not-so-obvious-obvious, is a true aha! moment put in words, “The trick is in the timing, right? How long to build the tension and prolong it before resolving it.” You’ve just defined in clear words a key, a magical key actually. A cornerstone key, on which to build gripping and memorial story—I’m on the west coast and I knew there was a reason I got up so early this morning—it’s said the early bird catches the worm. I caught your post. Thank you.
Thanks, Bernadette, happy to give you today’s…ah, worm.
I love this post and am printing it out to tackle later on my porch. Change is the beginning of a new chapter, both in life and in story. I also liked that bit about the others not wanting to change the status quo … why, it’s comfortable for them. But when the protagonist takes action, even a small one, like putting on a scarf against the chill to sit out on the fire escape, the balance has shifted. She is no longer prisoner to the fighting indoors. Thank you.
Vijaya-
You make me want to have a porch!
Nice, Don. I especially love (and audiences do, too) when significant change happens to a supporting player, because of the actions/choices of the MC. My favorite example is Louis, the corrupt police captain in Casablanca. The story would have been just fine with Rick alone changing, but when Louis decides to “round up the usual suspects” the film becomes transcendent.
Jim-
Louis is inspired by the change in Rick. I think of that as cascading change, and a while back wrote a post about it:
https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2013/11/06/newtons-law-for-novelists/
Changes on the page also cascade in readers, an effect called “moral uplift”, which I also wrote about:
https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2015/01/07/stirring-higher-emotions/
How’s things?
This is very helpful. I love these questions. I’m currently working on a story in which one main character dies and another main character is left to figure out how to go on alone. Your questions are prompting me with new ways of looking at the changes the survivor needs to go through to come out on the other side as a convincingly changed person. Thank you!
Cool!
Valuable and provocative are your questions. Anyone with a character or building a character would be well advised to march themselves through these questions. Wonderful contribution, Donald.
Welcome, Alex.
Don, each of your posts derails my work day as I start scribbling notes and shirking responsibilities. The kind of writing–hard work writing–you inspire makes us all want to quit our jobs so we can devote each moment of the day to developing our craft. I believe I will start my Saturday morning very early this weekend and answer each of these questions at length for my MC and jump back into revisions that had been stagnating. Thanks, as always, for the creative boost.
Erin-
Always happy to give writers more to do on Saturday!
Don – You have reminded me before that the tools are there to be used, and once again you’ve illuminated a brilliant one. I’ve been wondering about the use of those tools as they apply to creating emotional response. I can see the power of change more clearly now.
I’ve always featured change, and my protagonists’ resistance to it. But I now see change not just as a switch to be flipped, or even a lever for prying. It’s more nuanced than that. Applying your questions reveals it is sort of like a transmission, with weight of the vehicle and the hills of story being the resistance, and the timing of the shifts being crucial to the enhancement or reversals in momentum. And, as with when I learned to drive my father’s ’68 Impala with “three on the tree” (a 3-speed transmission on the steering column), I’m still a bit clunky. I guess if I can master a 5-speed with a Turbo overdrive, with practice I can master change in fiction…? Wish it were that easy. But at least, as my younger self was with driving, I am a passionate aspirant.
Thanks for providing the high-octane fuel for my upcoming practice sessions!
Vaughn-
I love that shifting gears analogy. (I learned four-on-the-floor in my Beetle.) Gives me an idea for another tool, this one to add dynamism to a scene.
Busy, busy, always more work, always more to do…
Don–
When your posts finally reach warp speed (as they always do), they put me in mind of a thirty-caliber machine gun spraying no-man’s land. With us, though, it’s not the Ypres Salient, but the field of battle faced by writers, heavily mined with countless opportunities to self-destruct. You provide cover fire as we dodge and weave our way through the barbed wire.
Your post focuses on change, and it immediately makes me think of the American political landscape, also heavily mined. Consider how resistant some are to changes taking place in our society, how angry and hostile they are when faced with a new flood of immigrants, or with a demand that marriage needs to be redefined. They feel under assault, their accepted truths under siege. What’s wrong with things as they are? Why are you terrorizing my most closely held opinions? I mention this because I think the connection serves to demonstrate how universally true your premise is.
Among many others, the second idea your post brings to my mind has to do with your take on how change is revealed in characters:
“Change can also be momentary, though, as when in a scene a point of view character gains insight, makes an intuitive leap, asks the right question, reverses course or steps out of the box of our expectations and acts differently or looks at things in a new way.”
This is very hopeful, very optimistic. And to some degree, it’s also the quick fix relied on by too much fiction. Yes, change can be momentary, occurring suddenly in an instance that leads to an intuitive leap, leads to asking just the right question, etc. But such change mostly happens in genre novels, not in life, where change is glacial or evolutionary rather than spontaneous.
Near the end of Deep North, my soon-to-be released suspense novel, a POV character must make a choice that, either way, is certain to change her life. But the whole novel (I hope) is a gradual preparation for this moment. The scene can’t be anticipated by the reader or the character, but when it comes, the story’s no-man’s land (the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota) has been crossed. If I’ve gotten it right, my character drops into a hard-won new world of moral complexity and possibility, waiting for her in book three of the series.
Barry-
I’m struck by this in your comment:
“…change mostly happens in genre novels, not in life, where change is glacial or evolutionary rather than spontaneous.”
I think that’s true but fortunately novels are not life. They’re life compressed and made more dramatic. Thank goodness.
I wish I could change my own habits and ways of thinking as quickly as characters do!
“…fortunately, novels are not life. They’re life compressed and made more dramatic.” True enough. And the ultimate trick for the novelist is to make the reader forget the distinction.
I always enjoy your posts, Don, and today’s is no exception. Change, the heartbeat of story, the heartbeat of life too–what are we all if not constantly changing? What is story if not the representation of the myriad aspects of the universal journey we are all on?
Every time I sit down with my manuscript and the scene I’m working, I always ask how the point of view character is changing. Every scene, not just at one critical point in the novel. True, the character will undergo a macroscopic change, but that change will be the sum of several critical small changes. Just as in life; often those great “aha” moments, though they might seem profound and sudden and immense, are preceded but so many small, seemingly insignificant moments of insight and discovery that all just happened to add up–like the firing of a neuron.
It’s hard work and means the writing often goes slower, because writing means thinking, taking time to step away from the manuscript and instead step into the mind of my characters, but the results are rewarding. I’m about one third through my present manuscript, and even though I haven’t hit the midpoint yet, I already feel like so much is happening, so much change is in place. It’s like an exciting game of Jenga. Instead of waiting for the mighty end, there are wonderful rewards in the beginning, and every step of the way, that make that mighty end all the mightier.
John-
Jenga! Why didn’t I think of that? It’s a wonderful analogy for the slow, self-destructive course of a character on their way to change. The tower will topple eventually. There will be wreckage. And rebuilding.
Don,
Your post reminded me of a counselor long ago who was helping my teenage daughter and me change our patterns of talking to each other. She reminded us that every relationship is a dance. Change is good, but she warned that when one partner changes her steps, then other dancers are thrown off, and everyone either protests or finally tries to adjust to the new pattern. If I change, others in my life may have to change too.
I now have a teenaged protagonist in an abusive home. When she finally chooses to change, the others in her life–mother, brother, friends, enemies–will each have to adjust, or get their toes trampled. My challenge is to show how Bria’s steps toward growth and truth are going to force others around her to change as well.
As I write this, I realize that I still tiptoe around land mines in conversations with my daughter, and still pay the price. I am disappointed at this weakness in myself but perhaps, through writing out my protagonist’s choice for change, I will be encouraged to do so as well.
Edi-
Don’t feel bad. It all comes down to communication, doesn’t it? Trouble in the family so often comes down to how we talk (or argue) with each other. Definitely true for me.
Sounds like you’re using this well in your current piece.
Thanks for this post on change, Don. I feel I should take your post to my couch and begin asking myself these questions before I ask them of my characters.
Mary Lou-
Ha! Right on. I should probably do the same. When I get time, you know. And the dog makes room on the couch. And after I’ve made a cup of tea. And…
Yeah. Good advice.
Hi Don,
As always, a helpful post. Often we encounter someone who we would like to change. Someone who doesn’t think like we do or who offers us an argument at the slightest provocation. The interchanges offer a challenge, and yet as writers we can again use those conflicts to increase the tension in our fiction. I agree that change can be subtle and often a minor turn, versus a major, as the character we are creating begins to see things another way or makes some connection that maybe she hasn’t made before. That’s why fiction is exciting to work with–we are right there with our characters because our daily lives often mirror what they are experiencing–conflicts, resistance–and the consequences of both.
Beth-
Small moments of insight, self-recognition, self-understanding, redefinition of self, etc., enacted scene by scene, are all necessary if one is to take a character–and readers–on an emotional journey.
You got it.
Don, as Vaughn suggested, change is much more nuanced than we might think. With your guidance, I can see there are advances and retreats of change, half-changes, pseudo changes, changes of which the impact is seen only later, changes only certain characters would pick up on in the protagonist, others not. Change that readers feel as truth, not manipulation.
It seems that it’s not that the tiger can’t change his stripes, but that the stripes can veer, fade, criss-cross and even become plaid. Thanks for opening my mind up to an entire ecology of change.
Tom-
All true, I think the important thing is to think about change in the first place and make it a deliberate intention in telling the story.
Don, you know what’s super exciting? This is the first time I’ve read one of your posts where, in service to the story, I’ve already worked through 90% of the prompts. Further, I can see where to fix the remaining 10%. Huzzah. As always, thank you for the practicality embedded in your lessons.
Jan-
Not surprised. You’re a smart student of the craft.
This post couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I am revising the novel that has it out for me. I might now have the upper hand for a change…
Great stuff, Donald, and an excellent roadmap for making our characters seem truly three-dimensional and real.
One thing that kept occurring to me as I read your post is how I could see real-life examples of each situation you described in the people around me. That might be a good exercise for writers who are struggling to imbue their characters with all this depth. Take a look around at the people you love, the people you hate, the people who frustrate you even as you’re rooting for them, and see how vivid your feelings are about the changes you wish you’d see in them – or the things you pray they’ll never change about themselves. That kind of reflection might raise the emotional stakes for you, and give you some extra mojo to apply to developing your characters.
Don, thanks as always for planting these excellent seeds!
Keith-
You’re so right. For writers there’s no laboratory like life.
Thank you for this. I work with students in a creative writing program and am going to share your wisdom with them.
Awesome!
Great questions! I especially liked the bit about cascading change. I’m editing now, and at first I was taking out a lot about how change was affecting all these other characters. Now, I see it’s better (as you say) to err on the side of long. Cascading change is what happens in real life. It needs to happen in fiction, too. Thanks!
Serendipity! I visited Writer Unboxed for the first ever time today and read Change. I am currently crafting an agent query letter and synopsis for my recently completed novel and Change helped crystallize my thoughts. The main theme of my novel is growth through change; your post was opportune and spot on. Thank you.
KERiley-
Welcome! Come back often and thanks for saying hi.
A great post. I am working on a mystery with a WWII Jewish resistance fighter changing for the worst. He uses the knowledge he gained outsmarting the Germans to become a thief, one of the richest men in Deadly, Texas (the name of the town), and a murderer. He discovers that his neighbor, an art appraiser, is convinced that the FBI agent tracking him is the infamous Nazi Angel of Death Dr. Joseph Mengele. He uses this information to mask his activities and to create the illusion that the FBI agent hunting him was the culprit. The FBI agent, who assumes the identity of a very unpleasant old man, is the nephew of the Israeli Mossad agent who was instrumental in the 1960 capture of Adolf Eichmann. His mission is to return Holocaust treasures to their rightful owners.
Elaine-
That’s quite a story! Enjoy. Such characters with which to work!
I think change has to be linked to the major conflict. While you suggest tools to achieve that in your description of the CHANGE, you might have indicated how the conflict is part of the change.
I think the opening probably brings the reader into an obstacle the protagonist (P) faces that disturbs a major goal or lifestyle pattern.
I am reminded of a workshop I conducted where a Latina writer tossed around the idea of a personal relationship story or an immigration one.
She decided to focus on a conflict with between the P and P’s daughter. P was too rigid. She would change.
But several elements were needed to explain the change. She couldn’t simply have P understand her rigid mentality. Why the change now?
In a brainstorming session, I had the writer find the thread between the immigration theme and the personal behavior. The P thought of her family in the old country. That set the stage for the need to return to the old country. That change would erupt quakes in her present life pattern.
That change could also mean that P and daughter had to spend a concentrated time together. That allowed for a gradual change on the part of P to understand her daughter. P’s rigidness actually came from an oppressive regime that forced her initial immigration. In the transition, P had become more rigid and repressed the daughter in the same way she had been treated by her country’s political system.
The thinking came resolved by the writer when she brought the change into focus with the major conflict.
Let me know what you think,
Tom Pope
Fiction Coach/Writing Teacher
Terrific insights and questions, as always, Don. Thanks! I especially like this one: “What does it (the old belief and way of being) mask?”
We’re constantly reminded that the protagonist has to change in the course of the story, but your questions encourage us to find a more nuanced path. In my WIP I’ve been actively looking for opportunities to have my protagonist avoid, consider, try out, back away from, etc. the change. Your questions have given me lots of new ideas! Thank you.
Thank you for your post, Donald. It made me think about the problem I was trying to deal with in a new WIP. I have a protagonist who doesn’t know who she is or where she came from. The who she is now is unlike the who she was. So I was stuck on how to deal with the present catalyst that demands action. She has to change to deal with it. That means I need to go back and work out more fully why her memory is buried so deep it seems lost forever. So I’m really glad I dropped in and found a signpost pointed in a different direction than I was headed.
I am not a writer but rather a 30-year consultant in human and organizational change. I’ve enjoyed Donald’s post and your comments. Here’s another perspective: not all humans dislike change. Some are change-seekers. They often contemplate the change they are about to make in advance of initiating the change, but less often are they aware of the impact of that change on others. Consider the business owner who is tired, and contemplates selling the business. When that happens, employees, vendors, customers all will be affected. What seems to the owner to be a way to self- renewal can be a challenging change for stakeholders. Broadly, we are more likely to respond positively to change when we have been included in the process leading to the initiation of the change. We respond with resistance and experience pain when change is thrust upon us. Perhaps these thoughts will be useful.