CHANGE IS THE GOD OF FICTION

Paul Lewin’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER

In which I answer an excellent question from our Office Hours—.

Paúl Rivera Melo writes: Junot, would love to see your take on change. I've been advised along the lines of "Characters should show change not only in the beginning vs. the end of a novel, but also within chapters." - Thoughts? Guidance? Do you HAVE to?

Fiction strives to present a persuasive vision of the Real (even if the Real happens to be a neomedieval fantasy or a post-apocalyptic future three thousand years hence).  Unless you’re writing some highly weird shit, most of our characters and most of our worlds are defined by certain familiar Realnesses — chief among them that implacable inescapable fact of mortal existence: change. 

In other words: if fiction is to work as fiction it must do change convincingly. 

Fiction that cannot do change convincingly will strike the reader as lacking an understanding of How The World Works and therefore will feel bogus.   Because if human beings know anything, they know that change is our only constant, our only guarantee; they intuit what Lauren Olamina realizes in Parable of the Sower:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

is Change.

God is Change.

As with Earthseed, so with fiction.

The smart writer, therefore, will figure out quick painless ways to do change -- to represent the world’s dynamism, its generativity, its transiency, its rising and falling.

It is important to remember that in traditional fiction Change will play out primarily along two axes.   

-- in the Story’s Conflict.   

-- in the make-up of your characters and their storyworld.

Even characters who refuse the Big Change of their Story’s Conflict (or who are super-resistant to change at a personality level) must live in a world that expresses the dynamism of everyday life.  After all, a character and a storyworld that do not reflect life’s liveliness will simply not fly.   

2

With our axes of opportunity laid out, let’s move onto the methodology of Doing Change.

First way to do change is the most obvious: through the story’s Conflict. 

A good conflict goes a long way in creating change in your characters.  Remember our story formula?  An emplaced narrative in which a sympathetic character is forced by a disruptive conflict to make a consequential choice. When a character is confronted by a disruptive conflict that forces them to make a consequential choice –- the person they were before the decision is not the person they were after the choice.   Change de jour. 

Even if the character decides against changing, if they choose to do nothing, the character will be marked by what they didn’t do—in the readers heart, at the very least.     

Second way to do change: use time. 

Time, after all, is change. 

I’ve talked about time in an earlier essay so I’ll keep it short here.  

The simplest approach is to organize your story around a temporal frame.

For example: The story begins at the start of summer, ends at the end of summer.  Story begins at dawn, ends at night.  The story starts in the present and travels back in time.  You get the idea.       

This temporal frame can tie into the Conflict or it might just be a feature of the storyworld -- temporal weather, in a way.

Third way to do change: make sure the storyworld is dynamic and expresses transience.  Give your story weather; traffic; holidays; black-outs; elections—you know, liveliness.  Have something in the storyworld turn or flip, fade or pass on.  A restaurant closes, a neighbor moves or dies.  The bird that used to sit on the fence no longer shows up.  This is the Sic transit gloria mundi maneuver.   Very effective way to represent the world’s dynamism with very little effort¹. 

Fourth way to do change is to make sure the characters themselves (and not just their world) are marked by life’s dynamism and its transience.  For dynamism: give the characters purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous actions (as per Samuel R. Delany’s advice).  Dramatize minor shifts in characters’ habits, predilections, or relationships.  Friends stop being so close or our protagonist decides to stop playing soccer or becomes vegetarian.  For transience (the fact that nothing in the world lasts): dramatize how time, how aging, impacts the characters.  This need not be something huge.  The character gets grey hair or isn’t fitting into their pants like before, or their least favorite season has arrived.  

3

One question that remains: How much change, exactly, is the right amount of change to convince a reader that the story approximates the Real?    

Or as Paúl asked: Do characters have to change at the beginning and end of a novel but also in each chapter?

There is, in my experience, no firm rule.  How much change depends on the story and on the characters.  A nail-biting thriller might need more change than a contemplative tale about a memory-obsessed nonagenarian.

For some characters lots of change will be normal, because that’s the kind of character they are and the kind of world they inhabit.  But there are other characters who will spend an entire novel wrestling with a single simple shift and that’s OK, too, because that’s their character and their world.  Remember: just because a character isn’t drowning in change doesn’t mean they aren’t well drawn or won’t shine in the reader’s imagination. As I mentioned above, you could easily have a character decide against a change altogether and that would be absolutely fine, as long as they are sharply rendered.  I often write stories with these types of protagonists.   What matters is that a change pressed on the character and they turned away from it. (And because the world they inhabit will be marked by all sorts of picayune changes that cannot be turned away, that are the default feature of everyday life, their resistance to change will feel all the more real, all the more ironic, all the more tragic.)

When it comes to change, it’s better to let the character and their storyworld determine how much or how little is needed, and not some abstract metric.  After all, a little bit of the right change could do a whole lot more for your story and your character than a whole lot of the wrong change.  Practice and study — and asking yourself again and again if what you’re writing reads Real² — will make it easier for you to tell the difference.

In the end, whether the change in your story is a low hum or an operatic crescendo, as long as the world and the character are tugged by the ceaseless tide of change you’ll be kicking ass.

Do change convincingly in both the character and world and you’ll more likely approximate the Real and persuade your reader that you, the writer, understand how the world works.  With that concordance, with that authority, the writer is well on their way to creating something extraordinary.³

1. Another related strategy is establishing a Consequence Economy. See

2. I’m always keeping an eye on my Realness levels as I write and re-write.

3. Please note: after the initial stack, I revised some of this for clarity