Changed Perceptions Equals Character Growth
By Kim Bullock | July 30, 2018 |
Flickr Creative Commons: jechstra
I left home at sixteen and spent the next two decades hemming and hawing when asked where I was from. Upon hearing I’d lived in nine different places before I was three, most people assumed my entire childhood was equally nomadic, a perception I rarely corrected.
In truth I had roots, reluctant ones, thrust deep into the unforgiving soil of the western mountains of Maine. I knew every ski trail on Sugarloaf, every snowmobile trail in Kingfield, and every swimming hole in the Carrabassett River. I encountered moose and bear and lived to tell about it. I lost a notch out of my ear to frostbite. I knew the sweet agony of plunging into Rangeley Lake a month after ice cleared and the exhilaration of galloping my horse across abandoned farm fields.
My childhood brimmed with freedom and imagination, but being “from away” meant that much of it was spent alone, communing with tree friends instead of human ones. Seven years of isolation at a formative time of life hardened me against a home that could never be Home. Maine became my soul’s purgatory, a place I endured until my sentence ended and the cage door creaked open enough for me to fly away.
Nearly thirty years later, my children teenagers, it saddened me that they had no concept of how I grew up. Maine was a place on a map, interchangeable with Nebraska, Kentucky, or any other place to which they hadn’t been. They had never picked wild blueberries, ate lobster, dipped their feet in a frigid mountain stream, or seen a moose.
“We have to go,” I told my husband. “They’ll never truly know me if we don’t.”
Little has changed in the world I left behind. Sugarloaf has more condos. A few shops in Kingfield went out of business, replaced by new ones. The school I attended from grades 3-8 has added a couple rooms and PE classes now include snowshoeing. The high school has a newish sign but, thanks to an accommodating secretary, my family toured a building completely frozen in time.
“All it took to get in is to say you went here,” my older daughter said, “and she’s not even following us around. People are so nice here.”
My old high school hasn’t changed.
I’d noticed this, too, but years of believing otherwise conditioned me to assume it was due to the importance of tourism to the area or that the internet had softened insular tendencies. Tourists never ventured into Mt. Abram High School, though. No one would claim to have attended there if they hadn’t. That I brought my family all the way from Texas and made a point to stop in proved I was trustworthy.
The towns hadn’t changed. The people hadn’t changed. My perception of myself and my place in that world had. I’ll never live there again, but a part of me will always be a Mainer. I can now say that with a smile.
What does this have to do with writing? Quite a bit, actually.
Stories about characters whom, due to usual circumstances, are forced to go back to a place that left them conflicted, perhaps one to which they had sworn never to return, make for interesting reading. Many of us have “that place” in our own pasts, a town we claim to hate but from which we can never fully free ourselves. It often makes an appearance in our work, thinly disguised as a fictional town, and offers us the chance to rewrite our lives with happier outcomes. Sometimes this process is therapeutic and brings peace. Sometimes it offers the chance to get revenge on those who wronged us. Other times it is simply literary vomit which must be expelled before we can write something else. (I have two such novels on my hard drive – one literary vomit and one therapeutic.)
A frequent problem with these novels is that characters – which often represent ourselves – tend not to change. Circumstances change. Secondary characters change. History is revised in a way that satisfies the author without moving the reader. Such pitfalls may well be avoided if the writer recognizes themselves in the protagonist, admits to mistakes they may have made, and is willing, at least on paper, to allow their alter ego to question their own perceptions.
Over to you – do you have a “that place” in your past? Have your perceptions of it ever been tested or changed? Would you (or have you) written about it?
[coffee]
Kim (she/her) has an M.A. in English from Iowa State University. She writes mainly historical fiction, though has also contributed non-fiction articles to historical and Arts and Crafts publications in both the United States and Canada. She has just finished The Oak Lovers, a novel based on the rather colorful life of her great-grandfather, landscape painter Carl Ahrens.
Hey Kim – At first, I was a bit confused by how you so lovingly describe Maine, but also call it, “my soul’s purgatory, a place I endured until my sentence ended…”
But I get you. In thinking about my own inner conflicts over the Mighty Mitten, particularly during my late twenties and early thirties, I completely empathize with your ambivalence. My high school years in particular are years for which I rarely reminisce and have few fond memories.
If there’s one thing I learned during the sixteen years I lived in states other than Michigan, it’s that I consider Michigan home. And it has so much to do with nature. The sandy beaches, dunes, and forests; crossing “the pine line” on the way “up north” (a spot where the deciduous clearly and almost instantaneously gives way to the coniferous, which seems to magically change the freshness of the air).
I am positive that both this sense of “home,” born of nature, and the inner longing to return to it, is part and parcel to my fiction. I think I’m a better writer for it, and I know I’m a happier human having returned and re-rooted here.
Thanks for inspiring the reflection! Glad you and the family had what seems to have been a nice (and insightful) trip.
Hi Vaughn,
Had I written this post even six years ago, you would not have sensed much love in it. I walked around with an open wound about the place for more years than I care to think about. It wasn’t until the first UnCon, when I walked around Salem, that I realized you can take the girl out of New England, but can’t take New Eng;and out of the girl. The first longings to return to Maine started then, and I couldn’t shake them. I was at a point in my life where I was ready to grow, I suppose.
I think my children were surprised by a few things in Maine. I enjoy rock-hopping at 44 as much as I did at 8, and my usual clumsiness disappeared while doing so. I still take the woodland path to the top of Small Falls at a jog, dodging roots as I go. Frigid lake temperatures to them were only “a bit brisk” to me.
I was a child again there.
The only place I hesitated was at my old schools. That’s where all the memories of rejection were for me, and I worried they would haunt me. A magical thing happened at both places, though. The doors were left wide open. I couldn’t leave without at least poking my head in the door. Friendly faces waited there and we were invited inside. The secretary at the elementary school did follow us, but only because she wanted to reminisce about her own days there as a student and compare notes.
I would never want to live so remotely again, but I would gladly visit my old home above “the pine line” again.
I can’t imagine you living anywhere but beside your beach!
Vaughn, I get a physical ache as spring starts to flirt with us here in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula. The ache to get in the car and start driving north and not stop until I hit Lake Superior. I love visiting other places, but I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I found your post touching and so very true. Well done.
Thank you, Nancy!
The only time I’d come close to loosing an ear was when a Siamese cat decided he’d had enough of my shit. Life as a Navy brat, however, offered many such places. Some I hated, like San Diego. Others I adored, like Port Orchard, Washington (yes, even more than Hawaii). But each place contributed to who would become me. By the time I graduated high school and joined the Navy for my own stint, I’d seen more places that most will see in a lifetime. And now that I’m writing middle-grade historical fiction, those places, sights, sounds, and smells (lots of smells in the Navy) are paying off. I can’t imagine trying to describe a Navy ship without having been aboard a few. Or what it feels like as you watch a Mayflower moving truck load all your family’s possessions for the 5th time.
I am blessed for the the life I’ve led, both the good and the bad. Without it, all those places would be just points on a map, like you said.
Thanks for sharing. By the way, in all fairness to San Diego, I was in the 5th grade. 5th grade always sucks. San Diego just became the backdrop to the horrors of that age.
Hi Ron,
Thankfully, I didn’t lose the whole ear – just a small notch on the rim, which has healed well enough that no one would know it happened unless they ran a finger along the edge and felt a slight indented spot. It happened when I was twelve, on a not particularly cold day, but there was a wet snow falling. I was riding my horse on one of the ski trails and didn’t plan to be out long, so I left my hat behind. (Many kids that age in Maine left their hat behind as often as they could get away with it.) No, I didn’t learn my lesson from the experience.
I sure know about the moving. My dad built golf courses for a living and so when one job would finish we moved. He built the one on Sugarloaf and my parents liked the area and so he quit for awhile to give me a more stable school environment. He went back to it as a teen and I ended up in Finland for about ten months. My parents were in Thailand while I was in college.
Smells are so important! What’s funny is that I started going up to Canada in 2004 and fell in love with the smell of sweetgrass. There was just something about it that was so familiar. I didn’t realize until I got back to Maine that it was familiar from my time there!
5th grade did suck. So did junior high. Does anyone really ever have an easy time with that?
As an immigrant “home” was always somewhere across the seas. It took me years to realize “home” was Southern California, and it took my writing to reveal my heart’s secret to me.
Lovely, bittersweet post, Kim. Blessed be your journey.
Home has always been such a complicated word for me. Part of my childhood was nomadic. The part that wasn’t left me in a place I felt both deeply connected to and rejected by. Now I live in a city which is “home” because I’ve lived here for twenty years, but to which I have no emotional attachment to at all.
I’m glad you have found your home. Southern California is lovely!
Such a great piece, Kim. I have a *that place* that I’ve revisited and it’s changed me, but it was a place and time that I’d idolized. Coming back to it and realizing that it *wasn’t* the same, that I wasn’t the same and it wasn’t the same was tremendously helpful. I no longer measured every place to that one; I was grateful for that time and place, because it was something special. But it changing set me free from constant comparison. This piece is such a great reminder to have our characters go back to those iconic places in their lives–so much scope for reflection and change!
Hi Natalie,
I had a place I idolized as well. It was a small central Texas town, the place I moved from when I went to Maine. I longed to go back for years. I’ve gone back a couple of times since, and it is really a no-nothing little place. It is about the last place I’d want to live now! I would be a completely different person had I remained there.
Boy, can I relate to this, Kim. First, because I too moved frequently (all over the world) and never know what to answer when someone asks me, “Where are you from?” Second, living in Maine as I do, I’ve been told (more times than I can count) that I don’t belong. That I’m from away. That I’m not a Mainer because I wasn’t born here. It’s uncomfortable and it’s painful. And I’m an adult.
As for “that place in my past,” I lived in Kenya for three years when I was a kid, and that is my place… the second time we were there, I was a teen, I was miserable, and I tried to run away (back to the states). To be honest, going there wouldn’t really help me — I loved the place — it was the circumstances, being kept there away from my true home — that made it difficult. But I do understand and agree, maybe if I rewrite that history, I could see things in a more positive light.
Thank you for a really timely post!
I knew you’d get what I meant by the “from away” line, Julia. I would have thought you’d hear less of it in a coastal town, but the attitude is so deeply ingrained that I’m not surprised you’ve dealt with it. Yes, it is painful, especially when you do connect with the landscape and the lifestyle or an area.
Oddly, when I came back to Portland as an adult for job training, I got to experience what it felt like to be an ‘insider.’ Most of the group I came up with were from southern field offices. My nametag may have said Dallas on it, but as soon as word got around the Portland office that I had grown up in Maine, it was like open sesame. I was invited to special dinners and let in on all the inside gossip. I never said what age I was when I moved there as a kid. They assumed I was born there and I let them go right on thinking that.
Kenya would have been a great experience for a kid (though yeah, rough for a teen.) I’m sure it helped to shape who you became as an adult.
Hi Kim. As you say, painful experiences associated with a place will shape or color memories of that place. But then you move on to other places, and points of contrast are now possible. In another context, I’ve read what you had to say about life in Texas. Without causing Texans to saddle up and head after me, I have to think your experience in the Lone Star State has something to do with why Maine no longer seems to be your “soul’s purgatory.” Thanks for your post.
Hi Barry,
The difference between life in Maine as a kid and life in Texas as an adult is the level of my emotional attachment to the landscape. I loved the unspoiled beauty of the mountains, rivers and lakes. I loved the winter sports. What made it my soul’s purgatory was that I would forever be considered an outsider by the people who had always lived there. I could never “belong.” I won’t ever “belong” in Texas either, but I have no emotional attachment to Dallas so that fact can’t really hurt me. Provided I had my family with me, I could leave this house and this city and not mourn a bit. I have a few friends I would miss, but as long as visiting from time to time was an option, I’d be fine. :-)
In my story, my character eventually comes home. After 3 drafts, I realized that her leaving had affected her parent’s relationship pretty strongly.
But, you made me realize that her hometown needs to look smaller/simpler/something when she comes back, now that she’s seen more of the world.
Yes, that is an important change, especially since the perception of the town’s smallness shows that the character has grown bigger/stronger/wiser.
Thank you for commenting!
Hi, Kim:
The whole issue of character change is so fraught with misunderstanding. Thanks for clarifying this sneaky, subtle element of it.
So many people think that unless a character undergoes a Saul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus transformation he hasn’t in fact changed. Steven James in STORY TRUMPS STRUCTURE makes the point that often a character’s change reflects only the “new normal.”
But my favorite quote on the subject is this one from Lajos Egri, in his The Art of Dramatic Writing:
“No man ever lived who could remain the same through a series of conflicts which affected his way of living. Of necessity he must change, and alter his attitude toward life… The only place where characters defy natural law and fail to change is in the realm of bad writing.”
I would add that “making mistakes” is one of those “series of conflicts” that “alter’s one’s attitude toward life,” and which makes it difficult if not impossible to “go home again.”
Lovely post. Thanks!
You bring up an interesting point, David. What I find especially interesting about that view about change needing to be of epic proportions in order to count, is that the idea goes completely against human nature. Most people are resistant to change, and if they do change the shift is often internal or, at the very least, subtle. If someone I knew did a complete 180, I would have a hard time believing the sincerity of the change. I wouldn’t believe that in character, either!
“A frequent problem with these novels is that characters – which often represent ourselves – tend not to change. Circumstances change. Secondary characters change. History is revised in a way that satisfies the author without moving the reader.”
This is so perceptive. You are absolutely right. I think this is why my (and others’, I’m sure) first protagonists as I tried my hand at writing were so boring.
“Such pitfalls may well be avoided if the writer recognizes themselves in the protagonist, admits to mistakes they may have made, and is willing, at least on paper, to allow their alter ego to question their own perceptions.”
And there is an elegant (and therapeutic) solution.
I definitely had my share of those boring characters, Erin. Lots of rewritten history in my first three novels, which could be why none of them will ever be published. They weren’t a waste of time though, since they taught me how to write a novel.
I grew up between two countries, and constantly moving – I was 14 before I’d lived 12 consecutive months in one house. I’m 32 now, and I think my record is 5 1/2 years in one house, and the last 7 1/2 years in one town (three houses).
So for me, home is not a ‘where’, it’s a ‘who’ – and my characters seem to be perpetually on journeys.
“Home is not a where, it’s a who.” I love that so much! I can’t imagine having moved that much. No wonder your characters don’t stay still.
I’m now been in this house twenty years, and kind of wish I could move…
Surely not the point of this post, but now I wish I had grown up in Maine, and that my children could too — at least for a little while, hehe. Thank you for giving me a glimpse through your words.
And yes, I know that feeling of want to fly out of the cage, even when the cage is actually quite a wonderful place.
I also have those novels, in which the protagonist returns to a home she left and vowed to forever leave behind. One which was vomit, one which was (and will be again, when I can revisit it) beautiful therapy.
I don’t have much to add here. I just found myself very much vibrating on this frequency. :)
In many ways I had a great childhood in Maine. I so wish I could offer my children (both born and raised in Dallas) even a sliver of the freedom I had as a kid. Most non-school days my parents had no idea where I was most of the time. I did have to stay within certain boundaries, but they covered pretty much the whole town and then some. (Not a big town.)
I do miss the woods. In particular the smell of the woods. The recent reminder only heightened that longing.
Thanks for commenting, Kristan!