Do characters need to change?

I have stories I write where there are things to learn, integral to the stories. The characters involved might not change so much, although it can happen, but they can be wiser from the experience and know more than they did to start with. And certainly, there might be new connections, and maybe a better position. That's more than I yet get, myself, though more wisdom can apply.

 

I wonder how many of those could be classified as tragedies, specifically because the protaag refused to change? I'm not really familiar with any of them, except No Country, and that only through the movie. But then Anton Chigurh wasn't the protagonist, or was he? Maybe he was. Weird, I didn't think about it that way.

I agree that something definitely needs to change, or there's no story. Story pretty much is change, or the failure to do so when it's necessary, which would be tragedy. I have one of the Rabbit stories on my Kindle but haven't read very far into it yet. I'm wondering if those would fall into the categoy McKee calls Anti-Narrative, where the modernists or post-modernists are deliberately breaking the rules.

A flat arc character can change somewhat, they aren't completely inflexible. I don't claim to understand this perfectly, but there can be some kind of change so long as it isn't internal or at a deep character level. This is a part of it I don't know much about though, only from reading the blog posts abouit it on K M Weiland's site. She said they can learn new skills in order to deal with life's issues better, or—I don't remember right now. But it isn't the big deal we think of as a change arc, where it's the whole point of the story and it almost destroys them.

 

Probably what's considered melodrama. At its worst it;s what you see in the old silent movies where Nell is tied to the tracks and the villain is twirling his moustache as the train approaches. It's pretty standard in soap operas today and certain other places. And then there are those things that rely on nostalgia or on a pleasant low-level emotion, like the Hallmark movies. Sorry @deadrats , I find though many of us haven't read more than a few genres, we're all familiar with all of them through TV and movies.

 

True—plot-driven as opposed to character-driven. I don't know offhand if plot-driven stories always have a flat character arc or not. Probably not. These things are usually pretty flexible.

 

I think the sheriff is the real protagonist in that story precisely because he does have kind of a discernible arc.

 

Spoiler alert for No Country for Old Men

Same here, but then he dies! I had forgotten Tommy Lee was the main character, and even that he was in it. Not saying he was forgettable, he's always excellent, but I just have this spotty memory...

I guess they were working the same trick Hitchcock did in Psycho, where you think Marion Crane is the MC until the fateful shower scene.

 

My overall response to the OP:

"Do characters need to change?"

... Yes, at least their underwear.

Unless the story takes place in one day I suppose. Then no.

 

What about stories where the character undergoes change (maybe even a big change), but reverts back to who they were by the end of the story?

 

Hamlet is a nice example actually, throughout the play, he refused to change, always driven by his desire for revenge. A writer of today might have applied a full character arc on him by say, having him learn that revenge isn't right and that there are other ways to do things. Maybe throw in the twist that the ghost of his father was Satan himself trying to temp him into wrongdoing to fortify this.

But that never happens, Hamlet never overcomes his desire for revenge, and everyone around him dies at the end. That's a bad ending, a tragedy. His frame of mind never changes, driven to the same goal until the bitter end.

 

What about it?

 

I've done that! I put my character through an atrociously difficult adventure she thought of as a defining moment in her life. By the end of that adventure, I did a twist and made it so none of it actually happened, which threw my character into a massive state of depression and hopelessness, just as she had originally started.

The final act covered her discovering that although it was a lie, her memories of it were still valid observations of herself, and not inherit lies. She explores what was real and what was fake, and changes once again.

I believe in this story a lot, I have 8 drafts of it but it still needs quite a bit of polishing and perhaps a lot of re-writing. I always feel like I haven't done it enough justice.

 

Hilarious. Though I did quite like Herbert's novel.

 

Yes but have them change due to an event that impacts them personally.

 

It just occurred to me that there's a flip side to the "tragic hero who can't or won't change" - the "moral hero" who succeeds specifically because they don't change, no matter what life/society/whatever throws at them. They tend to pop up in religious stories; the Book of Job might be the definitive example, and modern Christian fiction (The Left Behind series, The Christ Clone Trilogy, etc.) is rife with them. The point of the stories is generally to reinforce to the reader that strong faith (in whatever belief the author is pushing) will be rewarded, so they often don't have much appeal outside their particular faith group, but within it they can be enormously popular.

I think the unchanging heroes of many thrillers, crime fiction, military fiction, and the like are often cast from this mold. They're driven by an unshakable faith in order, traditional society, and "Truth, Justice, and The American Way," rather than exclusively religious faith (though there's often a lot of overlap), but a lot of their appeal to readers is that they reinforce their belief that if the good guys fight for what's right without compromising, they'll win in the end.

Atlas Shrugged is an interesting example, both because it's secular (the faith being in Rand's free-market Objectivist philosophy) and because the heroes aren't really victorious by traditional standards. They don't win and change their corrupt society, but instead withdraw from it to live together without compromise; their victory is in remaining true to themselves despite the cost (and now you don't need to slog through 1,000 pages of rubbish to know it).

Hmm... now that I'm thinking of this, though, I think that the MC or POV character often starts out as a skeptic, then gets converted to the faith. So, that would be more of a traditional character growth arc, with the unchanging, faithful character(s) in a supporting/mentor role (I expect many stories like this follow Campbell's "Hero's Journey" structure). Actually, even Job isn't really the protagonist of his own story, is he? The framework is about God and Satan, I think. I'd have to go back and read it again. Regardless, there are plenty of "faithful MC" stories, but I think they tend to stay in their niche, because people usually prefer seeing the MC change.

 

What you're calling faith is what Weiland calls 'the truth the hero knows, that the rest of the scoiety doesn't'. It's her Truth and Lie thing. The whole society believes a lie while only the protagonist understands the truth of the situation. But faith works just as well, for certian situations anyway. Yes, I'm pretty sure she said they have unshakeable faith in the truth, even though everyone else is against it. She may have used a different word, but it would mean the same thing as faith.

Well, unless it's an ongoing series. In a series the change usually happens at the beginning or has already happened. Or the protagonist just already knows the truth. A Superman or Captain America already has unshakeable faith in their own code and won't be swayed from it, unless it's one of those arcs where they turn evil. The cops in a detective procedural or a police show already knot what's right and wrong, unless it's a show questioning the nature of the police or morality itself. But for most of them it's a standard flat heroic arc, like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

 

And then it's always more engaging and interesting, adds layers, to see some kind of awakening in them.

 

I'm not familiar with Weiland, but I'll take your word for it. My insights may not be profound or original, but I actually take comfort in that, since if different people keep having the same idea, we might all be onto something.

 

Oh sorry, I thought you were referring to her blog post:

• How to Write a Flat Character Arc, Pt. 1: The First Act

This is where I learned about flat character arcs. I posted a link, but I think it was basically unnoticeable.

 

Interesting discussion!

My first thought was to recall some advice a writing teacher gave their class: "If you want to know what the story is about, see who changes between the beginning and the end."

But, as people have pointed out, a lot of stories aren't based on that. The characters really didn't change in most of the old television series; they would just encounter a different situation each week, deal with it as they could, and move on to the next episode. The device of the character changing as the series progresses is something that happened only recently.

And Sherlock Holmes has been mentioned as an example of a character that didn't change, but just provided a clothesline on which Conan Doyle hung one plot after another. Watson changed a bit, going from bachelor to married man, but that really didn't influence the plot at all.

But just because Holmes didn't change doesn't mean that he couldn't. There was a book out by Mitch Collin called A Slight Trick of the Mind, in which Holmes is very old and losing some of the faculties that served him when he was younger. You see him frustrated at his inability to remember or to deal with the loss of his friends. (If this seems familiar to you, it may be because it was made into a very fine movie called Mr. Holmes starring Ian McKellen and Laura Linney.) The character's change is precisely what the book and movie are about.

 

I would argue that Sherlock Holmes' reasoning abilities mixed with some of his traits are what makes the plot, a sort of a character of a character. It is not about what he feels that makes the story, but rather the way he approaches a mystery--his overly-logical mind is a metaphor for the socio-technological changes of the time.