“Everybody Says” Characters Need to Change
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people passing around wisdom because “everybody says” the same thing, as if it were the only way to do whatever is being asked. ”Characters need to change” is one of those things that gets talked a lot about–seen threads in two different places on the subject. The bad part about passing around common wisdom like this is that if that’s all you see and it’s an area you struggle with, then you might not know there’s an alternate choice that may work better for you.
So, do characters always need to change?
Not necessarily. In a character-driven story, yeah, it’s a requirement. I’m not as familiar with romance or women’s fiction, but these also feel like genres where character change would be important to the story itself. And I’ve seen books where the character changes too much. This seems particularly true in urban fantasy, where the writers are pushing on the change–and suddenly the series I’m reading has a character so different that I lose one of the reasons I came to the story in the first place.
In genres like mystery and thriller, the characters tend not to change. I remember reading the Kinsey Milhone series–the character of Kinsey always stayed the same from book to book. She was an orphan, a misfit in society, and cut her own hair with nail cutters, which didn’t bother her a bit.
But the way most how-to books and writers talk, it’s easy to think that every character needs to change. I fall into the latter, having a character who doesn’t change–but the situation around him does. I see topics like character worksheets, character flaws, and character interviewing, and I’m like “What do I do with this? It’s not me.”
How to get around “Everybody says”? Be well read in many different genres.