I’ve heard it said that in life people don’t really change, and that herein lies the fundamental dishonesty of fiction –the “lie” that certain experiences can change a person forever.
So fiction is a sham? A construct? A lie? Here’s my answer:
First, yes we are most certainly sham artists. We construct and we lie. And when we do it well, we’re proud of it. Damned proud. We not only lie, we spend untold hours, days, years struggling to make the lie so good that reader can’t tell the difference between our illusion and reality itself.
Second, if our characters don’t undergo a significant sea change by story’s end, we will have failed–and probably lost most of our readers along the way. If you’re a fiction writer, you don’t care whether or not people change in real life; but you know from hard experience that a main character must actively change.
Something powerful (invented by you) must drive that character through a long arc of change that ends in a place very different from that where he or she started. Anything less and what’s the point? Why take a reader on a journey to nowhere?
Third, and most important, the whole bru-ha-ha is bogus, based on to conflicting ways of using the verb “to change.” Yes, it’s correct that in life, people don’t “change.” They do however, modify their natures under pressure–sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Alcoholics stop drinking. They don’t lose their addiction. They “change” by modifying one huge piece of behavior.
The next time you hear “But people don’t REALLY change, do they?” my advice is, don’t argue, cede the point––then add, “And so what? The point is irrelevant to the requirements of building a good story. It’s not our job to create real people in a real word. It is our job to create story people in story people in a made-up world. And to do it, we must make our made-up worlds seem as real as the “real” world–and yet the only way to do this is to be (yes) bogus: we are wholeheartedly constructing a sham, a construct, a lie.
Paradoxical? You better believe it!