Changing Characters: How We Experience Story
Emotional Resonance Through Character Growth.
Writing is like travel: you cannot get to where you want to go, until you know where you want to go. Sure, you can leave your home with no destination in mind. Wander aimlessly this way and that. Maybe you’ll have some fun along the way. Maybe you’ll end up somewhere worthwhile.
But probably not.
As people, we’re much more likely to wander in a circle — around the block, down the street and back, to the park and back. We might even just take a few steps off the porch, look around, decide that this experience wasn’t for us, and go back inside.
Travel requires a destination, a route, and a means of travel. Writing is the same.
“Wait, Haly…. Are you sure you know what you’re saying?”
Yup.
Writing requires a destination. This is your plot, and especially the resolution. It requires a route. This is your world-building, the choices you make to convey the plot. Finally, writing requires a means of travel. This is your point-of-view and is (usually) expressed through your main character (MC) and how they change through the story.
Our main character, whoever or whatever that may be, is the quickest and easiest way to forge an emotional bond with our audience. In my short story, “The Bus,” I very quickly establish that “you” are the main character. Because I want to make an immediate connection and give you a way into the story as “you” the character, I chose to set it on a bus. Most people in the world know what a bus is and have been on one, either as a student, a commuter, a tourist, or a traveler.
These choices give me an instant ‘in’ with my audience’s emotional state, an immediate way to forge a connection. You care about the main character because I’ve put you in their shoes, and in a familiar circumstance where you can easily picture yourself as “you.”
As the story develops, you continue experiencing it through the MC’s interaction with the passengers on the bus, with the stranger, and with the world after getting off the bus. Each of these progresses the story by progressing the character’s changing experience.
The “you” who exits the bus is certainly not the same “you” who entered the bus, and that’s what gives us the satisfaction of a complete story: the MC came out different. And hopefully, you did, too.
As you expand your world-building, make sure to keep your destination in mind and don’t build more road than you need to get where you’re going. Leaving yourself room to expand in the future (and especially in editing) will lead to fewer headaches as your story progresses.