Your Character's Degree of Change: Evolution or Transformation?

Story is about change, be it big or small, and it’s usually the main character who embodies this change—she lives through it and dramatizes it by experiencing challenges and setbacks, successes and failures, blind spots and insights.

But how much will your character change? A little or a lot? Does she grow to such a degree that by the end of the story she has a completely different personality? Or has she expanded her perception in a minor way, yet remains essentially herself?

Change that occurs through learning and maturing unfolds as a progressive evolution—the character becomes a better version of herself. But sometimes the change is a transformation—the character appears to become a different version of herself.

Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, grows in understanding of his peers, society, and justice, but he doesn’t fundamentally change his beliefs or modes of operating in the world. Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, changes completely.

In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is a different person at the end of the story compared to the beginning. Like Scrooge, he grows so much over the course of the story that, by the end, he is a changed man.

If your character’s degree of change is small or medium, think of your character being on a journey of evolution. If it’s a large change, which involves a fundamental shift in perspective, consider the character undergoing a journey of transformation.

Character arcs involving transformation usually deal with the uncovering and dealing with an old, deep wound. This healing often includes some kind of personal redemption for the character.

Most transformation stories bring up the past, but not all do. Scrooge and Phil Connors go through similar transformations in personality, but in A Christmas Carol, we gain insight into Scrooge’s deep wounds when the ghost of Christmas past visits, whereas we don’t go into Phil’s past at all.

Evolution arcs tend to address what appears to be a “lack of maturity.” It’s as if something is missing in the character’s awareness and the story encourages the kind of growth and change that can fulfill this lack, usually by learning new things, stretching beyond personal limitations, and confronting past mistakes.

In Casablanca, Ilsa learns to integrate the free spirit she was in Paris with the self who is both responsible for and devoted to revolutionary causes with her husband, Lazlo. When we first meet Isla she has separated these two aspects of self, and the story provides the opportunity to bring them together.

Rick’s arc involves a greater degree of change that leads to his transformation. He was heartbroken by Ilsa’s disappearance in Paris and he has held onto his anger and a belief that she’d never really loved him. This wound makes him callow and self serving, but when it’s healed—when he understands Ilsa really did love him—his personality and behavior change significantly. He seems like a different person at the end.

Transforming characters do evolve as they change in big ways, while evolving characters change in smaller yet important ways without undergoing a full transformation.

Each story, and each character, is unique, and so the degree of change will be particular to your character and story situation. Once you determine the degree of change your character undergoes, evolution or transformation, you will be clearer about your overall deep story design.

A character undergoing a personal change is what’s most satisfying to readers. It doesn’t always matter whether the change is small or large, so long as there is a shift of some kind.

Structure is King, Character is Queen

In chess, the game is over when the king falls, but the queen is the strongest piece during the game. She has the most power and flexibility. If you lose your queen it’s almost guaranteed you’ll lose the game as well. In many ways, the queen rules the gameplay, but her allegiance is to the safety and preservation of the king.

Similarly, structure and character work together to create a dynamic game of story. Characters are your strongest elements–they have the power to enliven the story and the flexibility to create dynamic change–but they exist within the foundational element of structure. What characters do, how they do it, and why, relates directly to the shape of a story’s beginning, middle, and end.

When I refer to structure, I don’t mean plot exactly, though it’s naturally inferred. I see structure as a general framework on which you hang a specific plot. Plot and character follow the dictates of structure (ideally, three-act structure, though there are various offshoots an interpretations). When you write a story, you have to choose where to start, where to end, and what to include in the middle.

Structure is a bit like the chessboard and the rules of the game. The plot is the particular game, of which there are myriad patterns. A particular plot makes a story unique, but structure makes it understandable.

Structure sets the stage for plot. And what is plot without character?  A story is always about someone (character) doing something (plot). Many writers start with a character as a source of inspiration. They drop them into a challenging situation and watch what happens. A character in pursuit of something that’s not easy to achieve, with worthy obstacles and adversaries, plus an uncertain outcome, is endlessly entertaining to us readers. And it fits nicely within a shape of beginning, middle, and ending.

Structure as a ruling, guiding force is your friend. It’s worth defending. All eyes will be focused on your characters, their choices and their fates, but their journeys will mean something because of where the story begins, where it ends, and all that happens in the middle.

So set up your pieces and have fun with the game of story. Let your characters take the spotlight, honor structure’s guidelines, and allow the wild plots to unfold.

Writing Scenes

You have a ton of tasks to tend to when it comes to crafting your stories, and writing scenes is one of them.

What is a scene? A useful writer’s definition goes something like this: a scene consists of action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that leads to a minor or major change in character or plot.

“Action through conflict” includes situations of physical action and dialogue that move the story forward in a dynamic way.

“Continuous time and space” means that a scene generally takes place in one location and during a set amount of time that feels like the present moment of the story.

“Change” refers to the particular relevance of the scene, the thing that happens that warrants the scene’s necessary inclusion in the story. This change, small or large, propels the story forward.

The scene is the essential building block of storytelling. It’s your most powerful tool for conjuring images in the mind’s eye of the reader. Your story’s most important events, ideas, actions, and emotions will be conveyed primarily through scenes.

Scenes are different from what’s known as “summary.” A simple, general way to differentiate the two types of writing is to think of scenes as the “showing” part of your writing and summary as the “telling” part.

A scene will make us feel as if we’re right there with the characters, as if we’re watching the action and dialogue unfold in real time. Screenwriters rely on scenes almost exclusively, because their stories must be told visually. They depend on action, dialogue, image, and sound to convey meaning. (On rare occasions they include voice over to convey the inner thoughts of characters.)

Novelists and memoirists have a lot more leeway. They aim to strike a balance between scene and summary. (Though, by balance I don’t mean giving them equal weight, since most stories favour more scenes than summary.) Novels and memoirs include things like inner dialogue, self reflection, memories, backstory, exposition, lyrical description, and some summary of events that are less relevant to the story and can be covered through “telling” rather than “showing.”

In fact, the artfulness of novels and memoirs often depends on the ability of the writer to use summary techniques. Scenes with action and dialogue are the most engaging to read, but prose writers can interrupt or bracket these scenes to enter a character’s inner world or memories, or to summarize accounts of backstory or other story information.

Pure summary is used sparingly to fill in gaps, provide information, bridge action sequences, adjust pacing, and possibly add color, depth, and description to the prose. Literary fiction tends to include more summary than genre or commercial fiction.

The whole flow of story is a kind of action-reaction pattern set in motion from the initial catalyzing event that really gets the story going. Once the story is underway, a character responds to consequential events and makes decisions that lead to more consequences that lead to more decisions and responses. Think of your scenes as a series of dominoes; the events of one scene fall naturally to the next and trigger the next event, which triggers the next event, and so on.

Scene writing is an art rather than a science, but most writers can stand to boost their scene writing skills in order to realize the potential of a story’s scenes.

Choice, Change, and Conflict

In the midst of all the changes in the world, we are invited to make some new choices—collectively and individually. Unexpected changes bring us face to face with unexpected choices—to let go of certain assumptions and plans, to reframe cultural beliefs and “norms,” to examine what really matters, and why.

Making choices and making changes are inherently anxiety provoking, and rarely occur without some degree of conflict. In the world at large we’re witnessing a lot of conflict, but many of us are dealing with it at a personal level too. We are each in our ways dealing with anxiety, worry, pain, and fear related to experiences or observations of inner and outer conflict. These are natural human responses to anticipating change and choice.

I think about choice, change, and conflict a lot because they are so much a part of the writing life and telling stories, even in small or subtle ways. Just think: without that bit of inner conflict that arises when we want to write a book but haven’t done it yet, we wouldn’t choose to change our habits to get up early or stay up late to fit our writing in. And if we didn’t throw conflict in our characters’ paths by forcing them to make choices that lead to personal evolution through change, our stories wouldn’t get very far.

As messy as conflict can be, I respect its energy to pressure us to choose and thereby provoke change. And I also respect—or better yet, trust—our human ability to adapt to changing circumstances as well as our ability choose and forge new paths. It’s not easy to change. Not for us or for our story characters. We resist it as much as we long for it. We fear what we may lose, and we don’t trust we can successfully create what we long for, so we often stay stuck.

In the book I’m writing, I tell writers that their story situations “…must be compelling enough to overcome the inertia of being human. The truth is, we’d all rather not change because change is uncomfortable, inconvenient, anxiety-provoking, and often leads to real or imagined loss or even death, as well as changes to beliefs and personal world order. Of course, deep down, we do want to change. We, and our characters, just need the right set of circumstances and enough motivation to do it.”

We seem to be living through such circumstances now, but it’s still hard to know exactly what to do. As our identities and belief systems are being challenged, we are called to examine our mental and moral natures, which are capable of change, but require will, determination, and trust in a vision for a new way of being. I don’t have any answers for rallying that will, focusing that determination, or expanding that trust, except to embrace the clumsy, vulnerable messiness that the choice to change entails—and to have the courage to face the inner and outer conflicts.

Another passage in the book, which is about story characters but also applies to ourselves, seems to fit here: “Change is inherently conflictual whether it occurs on the inside or outside, but without it, we would not grow. We are wired to change. We are wired to evolve. We are wired to heal. And life—in the real version or the story version—provides us with invitation after invitation to rise to those challenges.” Collectively and individually, let’s accept these invitations…and rise.

The Uncertainty of Writing

Lately I’ve been dipping into Pema Chodron’s book Comfortable with Uncertainty (Shambhala, 2002). I’m at an uncertain point in my life and needing reminders to breathe deeply, face my fears, and accept that everything is impermanent. I’m reminded that all of this is good advice for the writing life as well. After all, what’s more uncertain than the writer’s life?

When we open up to writing, we, perhaps unwittingly, open up to uncertainty. We cannot predict where the act of writing will take us. Deeper into ourselves? Into new worlds? Into untapped tombs of passion, tenderness, or rage that find a way onto the page?

It takes courage to face the blank page, to explore new areas of our own minds and hearts, and then to put words down without knowing where they’ll lead. It takes courage to face uncertainty. In the process of developing courage, I’ve been exploring these three approaches:

~ Practice accepting that writing, like life, rises from the uncertain places in ourselves as much as the certain ones. We may not know where our writing is leading us, and that’s fine. It’s part of embracing the mystery of being engaged in creativity, of having the courage to breathe and live.

~ Consider handing off some of your uncertainty to your characters. All humans feel uncertain at some point or other, and so readers will be able to identify with the uncertainty of your characters. Vicariously experiencing a character’s uncertainty, and how they handle it, can help us (and readers) gain a new perspective.

~ Place your need for certainty in areas where you have a fair bit of control. If you set aside time to write daily, even if it’s only 10 minutes or 30 minutes, you are in control of this agreement with yourself. There is too much about writing that is beyond a writer’s control. When we have expectations about particular outcomes, or anticipate who might like our work down the road, or carry around other unfulfilled hopes, we end up creating a lot of unnecessary uncertainty because we’re looking for it in places where it doesn’t exist.

Cultivating the courage to deal with uncertainty, in writing and in life, doesn’t make it go away, but it does make us more resilient creators of life and words.

Choice, Change, and Conflict

In the midst of all the changes in the world, we are invited to make some new choices—collectively and individually. Unexpected changes bring us face to face with unexpected choices—to let go of certain assumptions and plans, to reframe cultural beliefs and “norms,” to examine what really matters, and why.Making choices and making changes are inherently anxiety provoking, and rarely occur without some degree of conflict. In the world at large we’re witnessing a lot of conflict, but many of us are dealing with it at a personal level too. We are each in our ways dealing with anxiety, worry, pain, and fear related to experiences or observations of inner and outer conflict. These are natural human responses to anticipating change and choice.I think about choice, change, and conflict a lot because they are so much a part of the writing life and telling stories, even in small or subtle ways. Just think: without that bit of inner conflict that arises when we want to write a book but haven’t done it yet, we wouldn’t choose to change our habits to get up early or stay up late to fit our writing in. And if we didn’t throw conflict in our characters’ paths by forcing them to make choices that lead to personal evolution through change, our stories wouldn’t get very far.As messy as conflict can be, I respect its energy to pressure us to choose and thereby provoke change. And I also respect—or better yet, trust—our human ability to adapt to changing circumstances as well as our ability choose and forge new paths. It’s not easy to change. Not for us or for our story characters. We resist it as much as we long for it. We fear what we may lose, and we don’t trust we can successfully create what we long for, so we often stay stuck.In the book I’m writing, I tell writers that their story situations “…must be compelling enough to overcome the inertia of being human. The truth is, we’d all rather not change because change is uncomfortable, inconvenient, anxiety-provoking, and often leads to real or imagined loss or even death, as well as changes to beliefs and personal world order. Of course, deep down, we do want to change. We, and our characters, just need the right set of circumstances and enough motivation to do it.”We seem to be living through such circumstances now, but it’s still hard to know exactly what to do. As our identities and belief systems are being challenged, we are called to examine our mental and moral natures, which are capable of change, but require will, determination, and trust in a vision for a new way of being. I don’t have any answers for rallying that will, focusing that determination, or expanding that trust, except to embrace the clumsy, vulnerable messiness that the choice to change entails—and to have the courage to face the inner and outer conflicts.Another passage in the book, which is about story characters but also applies to ourselves, seems to fit here: "Change is inherently conflictual whether it occurs on the inside or outside, but without it, we would not grow. We are wired to change. We are wired to evolve. We are wired to heal. And life—in the real version or the story version—provides us with invitation after invitation to rise to those challenges.” Collectively and individually, let’s accept these invitations…and rise.