Last week, I wrote about the benefits of limited procrastination while writing a novel. This time, I’d like to follow up with some thoughts on an aspect of writing that is specific to series: watching characters grow.
If you’re scratching your head, I don’t blame you. Don’t all lead characters grow, even within a single novel? Why focus on series?
Well, first and foremost, although it’s true that most lead characters grow, there are entire genres (mysteries and thrillers, in particular) where the main characters don’t change much over the course of a novel or even a series. That’s less true than it was back in the 1930s or the 1960s, but it’s still the case that in genres where plot takes precedence over character development, protagonists may not change much over time. Think of Hercule Poirot, to give just one example.
Why write about this now? In part, this post grew out of last week’s, but it was also inspired by one I wrote several years ago on my old blog. Having produced weekly blog entries for the last twelve years, I sometimes forget whether I’ve covered a subject already, so before diving into last week’s discussion of procrastination, I searched my old writing posts. Only then did I realize I’d promised to discuss character growth back in 2021 and never gotten around to it. Since the need to “grow” Anna and Yuri has been the main task slowing down Song of the Steadfast, I thought this was as good a time as any to tackle the issue.
The catch here is what I mean by “grow.” It is, after all, true that in a well-constructed novel that focuses on characters as much as or more than plot, a protagonist develops over the course of that book, regardless of whether the book forms part of a series. The hero and heroine face a problem that defies easy resolution (because otherwise there would be no story), and often the sticking point derives from their faulty assumptions about themselves or their antagonist or how the world works. To attain the goal, the characters must confront and change those assumptions, which constitutes their growth.
But over the course of a series, characters must also grow in the way that people do in the real world. When I created Nasan, the lead character in Legends of the Five Directions, she had just turned sixteen. She had the boundless faith in her own powers and her own judgment that adolescents have despite their short time on the planet, and those characteristics both pushed her toward solving her problems and got in her way, since like most teenagers she knew less about the world around her than she thought she did.
By the time Nasan appears briefly at the end of Song of the Storyteller, thirteen years have passed. During that time, she has moved back to the steppe with her husband, whom she has learned to love, and birthed four children. She has created a life that satisfies her, and in doing so she has found herself. She remains in some ways the same impetuous, almost fearless warrior woman she aspired to be at sixteen, but it would be unrealistic for her to respond to challenges she faces at thirty with the same heedless abandon she demonstrated as a girl.
That’s what I mean by growing characters from one book to the next. In the case of Anna, the heroine of Song of the Steadfast, I faced the issue that she had started life as the quintessential “good girl,” eager to please and a perfect fit for the expectations placed on her as the daughter of a Russian boyar—essentially, obedience, deference to authority, and the ability to perform the tasks assigned to women of her class (domestic management, embroidery, and regular attendance at church).
So long as she remained a minor character, all that worked fine: she provided a foil for her less conventional, more intellectual, fierier friend Lyuba. But as I began to imagine a story for Anna, she had to develop a few thorns and complexes to keep her from boring readers to tears. As a teenage girl, she would, I figured, develop issues with her mother; she expressed those in her opposition to Solomonida’s remarriage in Song of the Sinner.
But defying her cousin’s choice of a spouse for her and running off with the man she prefers demands more strength of character than Anna has displayed so far—and that, in a nutshell, has been the holdup. How much change is essential to make her story believable? How much would turn her into someone unrecognizable as the person she used to be? What could explain her coming out of her shell and expressing desires that readers might identify with?
Yuri, too—her intended from Song of the Sinner—started life as a rather uncomplicated “good boy.” That was his purpose on first appearance, to overcome Anna’s fears and offer her a way to reconcile with her mother. But Yuri has endured quite a bit since then, and his experiences have undermined his faith that if he just does what’s expected of him, life will go his way. Three years have passed since that first meeting, and Yuri’s illusion that the world will always support him if he does the right thing have shattered. He’s nineteen, so he has a good deal of growing yet to do, but he neither can nor should start from the place where I left him three books ago.
Meanwhile, my new heroine, Kiraz—who first appeared as a timid twelve-year-old in Song of the Shaman—hovers in the wings, awaiting her own novel. She too needs to grow to fit her new role, or more accurately, I need to figure out how events of the ten to twelve years that have passed since we last heard of her might affect her experience of life, and which faulty assumptions she still needs to correct. I look forward to pursuing those questions—as soon as I send Anna and Yuri out into the world.
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