khiemtran | Journeys not made

I've been thinking today about the journeys that characters can make. (Specifically, I was thinking about the development the protagonist goes through in the story-at-hand, and how my characters all tend to soak up a succession of external stimuli and then change all at once, rather than changing gradually over the course of the story.)

It occurred to me that there's the sort of story where a character does make a transition between a series of different states, but there's also another sort of story where they don't change at all. What happens is they're shown at the start in one state and then presented with a series of things that have the potential to make them change. It's virtue-in-jeopardy, basically. The good man being offered temptations or provocations, or the flawed character being offered chances for redemption.

It seems to be the threat of the change that is important. It doesn't matter if the character never changes a bit as long as the possibility of change was there and believable.

Sometimes the journeys not made are journeys too.