Classic BaBW: Character Growth

Trying something new here today. It used to be, back when I was transferring over posts from my old blog to this site, that Thursday or Friday would be home to a Blast from the Past post—essentially an excuse to go back to one of the old Being a Better Writer posts that wasn't on Unusual Things yet and transfer it over (albeit with a little editing). Those posts ran for a little over year, if memory serves, but inevitably had to stop, as I caught up with the present day.

But ... that left a large gap in my posting schedule. Now, I'll admit that I'm not a frequent blogger like a lot of other authors, mostly because—no offense—I spend that time writing on the books rather than writing on the blog. Monday's BaBW is the only regular exception. Otherwise I don't have much to say unless something catches my attention. But that leaves dead-time on the blog, and on the internet, dead-time is kind of a literal term.

So, the solution? Classic posts!

Okay, it's not a perfect solution. And I don't think I'l throw these up every week, but here's the idea: BaBW has a pretty big backlog by now. At least 200 articles on all sorts of writing topics. So, from time to time, I'm going to pick a topic, then gather three BaBW posts on that topic and post about them in one of these "Classic BaBW" posts. That way newcomers can easily find older articles that they may not have clicked through the archives for, and recurring readers can get a nice moment of "Hey, I'd like to reread that!"

So, that's the intro. Now onto the post! Today's topic: Character Growth! Three articles about developing characters from the archives of Unusual Things!

Character Development and Character Growth—
Characters. There’s no force more central to any story you tell. Be it a run-and-gun thriller or a dramatic love dodecahedron, a tale focused around a lone wanderer exploring a crumbling city or a baker expanding her rivalry with a butcher (that last one sounds like a potential rom-com, doesn’t it?), your stories are going to have characters. Characters that laugh, characters that scream, characters that live … Well, you get the picture.

Exploring Character Growth and Conflict—
So, to begin with, I view character growth as having two distinct types. The first is the growth of the character to the reader, and the second is the growth of the character to themselves.

Showing Character Through Dialog—
Now let’s put this in a scene. We have a grizzled FBI man, undercover on a train, sitting in his seat and pretending to be a newspaper. His passenger, a woman who has no idea who he is, turns towards him and asks “Would you like some gum?”

Now, let’s look at his response. The grammatically correct response is “No, thanks.” However, what differences does this imply about his character over “No thanks,” without any pause? One is timely, implies a pause and perhaps some thought. The other is brusque, pre-determined, almost dismissive, and can be more so based on what action he couples with his statement.

Like this post? Want more? Support via Patreon!

Comments

[D48]

Hm, this brings up a few questions and thoughts.

First, I'm curious if you have any entertaining stories of characters running away with the plot. I'd assume you probably know better than to enable something like Old Man Henderson, but there's still plenty of room for plot derailment shenanigans.

Second, this is a bit of a long and rambling video about an RPG system, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it in relation to writing. It seems to me like that system of setting up character conflicts and relationships could be useful with some tweaks, but I haven't really had much time to think about it in detail, let alone try doing something with it, thanks to the joys of real life so I figured I may as well toss it your way.

Third is that while you have talked a lot about character growth, you have mostly been framing it as a positive thing with characters improving themselves so I was wondering if you had any specific thoughts for doing the opposite. This doesn't come up all that much in MLP, but darker works can do a lot with tearing a character down and basically exploring how they break. It is also essential for any story that is developing an antagonist over the course of the story to show their decent into an extreme/unpleasant ideology which can do amazing things for a story if it is handled well, but it's also really easy to screw up (I remember reading a story that was looking amazing until this basically blew up right at the end and killed the whole thing) so I was wondering if you had specifically addressed this.

Fourth is that the growth of the character to the reader is what I felt was missing from Dawn's story. There's not really a lot to say here, but I found that she frequently got overshadowed by the other characters in Rise which, when combined with her general focus on the mission over socializing, seriously weakened this form of development and masked a lot of her subtleties.

Fifth is that interview transcripts are a great example of the struggle to understand natural speech you were talking about. I was reading an interview transcript the other day and ran into these kinds of ugly messes in a bunch of places, and that wasn't even dealing with someone with a particularly broken speech pattern (Trump immediately comes to mind).

Sixth, while there were a number of irrelevant typos in these, this one made me laugh:

We have a grizzled FBI man, undercover on a train, sitting in his seat and pretending to be a newspaper.