How much character growth crosses the line into breaking the character
(not a duplicate of Character Development - How much is too much? because that one is more about "overreaction" to smaller events.)
TL;DR: How much can a character change without becoming unrecognizable? How can you indicate character growth (causes/effects) efficiently?
I was listening to Worm and "We've Got Worm" (a long web-serial turned into a fan audio project, and a podcast discussing the writing choices in Worm, and I was struck by something.
Often the hosts of the "We've Got Worm" podcast praise a character for "growing so much" either behind the scenes, or especially our main character.
Now the main character's main transition, from mousy pale high school sophomore who is bullied to confident leader who often over-escalates her responses to things is extreme, yet it makes sense given step-by-step what has happened to her. (Gaining Powers, gaining friends, disasters strike but she tries to help, repeat disasters/help a few more times.) She's still "recognizable" the whole time.
Because Worm is a web-serial running over 1.5 million words (and I'm at arc 15, about one-third through, in this re-listen), the author has time to step us through all of these changes.
But in my writing -- I don't have that length! In a novel of a "normal" length (60,000-120,000 words?), how can you indicate character growth without taking an entire 10,000 word interlude about them?
And how do you limit it so each character still acts "in character" even if it's a bolder or shyer version of their prior self, and isn't just acting differently because Plot Demands Someone Do X?
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Here's something important: if I am invested in a character, I would feel cheated if that character suddenly changes off-screen, and I am supposed to just accept that change as their new "characteristic". It's not enough that one could theoretically get there from here, as @Jedediah states. I would want to be there watching it happen.
Alternatively, if we encounter a character following a time-skip, and he is suddenly different, I would expect someone to be there, asking my question "what happened to you? What made you change?" A drastic change would pique my interest, it would be something I'd want to explore.
This is not to say that no change can be just skipped over, ever. In some cases, it is acceptable for a character to "grow up" and outgrow certain traits. In other cases, "what happened to you" is easily understood: a man coming home from war is not the same boy who went out, no additional explanation required. And it could be that you start a character on a path, and then pick up the story a while later, when they have gone some distance along that path.
All the same, character growth is one of the things one is looking for in a story. If you hide it all "off-screen", and just skip from result to result, even if you manage to justify it all, you're still waving candy before your reader without letting them eat it. Not nice.
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In my opinion, a character needs some kind of impetus or crisis or catalyst or heartfelt realization to change their character. To me, that reflects reality. For a positive change of character, something has to cause the change, to make the character either realize they don't want to be the same person, or realize they have been wrong and someone -- themselves, their family, innocent people -- have now been hurt by them being wrong.
On the flip side, for a negative change of character, something still has to cause the change, but this will usually be an injury to the character; literally or metaphorically. They were trusting, and that trust made them a victim. Or even without them trusting, circumstances (like poverty, racism, bigotry) cause them great harm, and their reaction, in despair, in sorrow, in outrage, is to cause great harm in return. They decide to take what they need when it isn't going to be given to them, or to harm others to get ahead in what they see as a dog-eat-dog world: The dog being eaten didn't do anything wrong, it was just too weak to win the fight.
However, these circumstances require at least several pages to set up (for me chapters to set up) and the issues and current "setting" of the character must be described in even more pages, and the triggering event must seem realistic as a cause of change.
How many pages depends on your skill as a writer. Thus how many such changes with realistic causes you can get into a novel depends on your writing ability. For me, it isn't many, for a single character I have one epiphany, or perhaps two unrelated epiphanies, but I also have two or three characters that can experience such growth.
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