Don’t stay true to your characters.

This articles concerns gamers just as it does authors.

I have heard countless times in my gaming life that one had to stay true to his character. A character is made with a certain mentality, and that should be respected. I have heard the same of readers of fiction, including many aspiring authors. Respecting the initial idea behind the character, and keeping him true to that vision through the whole story, is a crucial principle in the eyes of many.

This is pure hogwash. Good characters flow like water and bend like the willow. They should never be stuck in stasis, unchanging. If nothing in the story can affect them enough to make them evolve, then either the story is not worth being told, or the character is not worth portraying.

The most profound, but also the most subtle, failure of this static vision for characters occurs when people forget that the purpose of the characters is to awe, shock and enamor us. They exist not to be themselves, but to entertain people. Both as a gamer and as a player, when you realize a character, as written, breaks the flow of the story and becomes a hindrance, you have to make him change or evolve in such a way that will enhance the story instead.

In a game, if you or a player have made an all-powerful tyrant that prevents other players from truly participating, you can either make him too bored to bother and mess with the others, or create a number of flaws in him that give the other characters a fighting chance. If a character is beaten down and lost everything, give him something strong he can grab onto and fight back. It is especially important in games, since players who are stuck with nothing to do and nothing to work towards will grow bored fast. It is also most difficult there, because some players will fight you every step of the way to keep a problematic status quo that is advantageous to their characters.

Authors are not as limited as storytellers are concerning this. You control everything that happens in the story, and you don’t have to make sure every player has fun the whole time. However, as an author, you still have to be careful not letting too many “This character wouldn’t do that, even though the story wouldn’t work without it” moments ruin your work.  If you need your character to behave a certain way, try to find why he would do that, or how he might do something equivalent.

The other reason why characters must not be static is simply entertainment value. Many characters, especially primary and secondary characters, have to evolve, one way or another, to maintain the reader's interest. Many heroes will evolve by growing up, gathering their courage, learning to love, etc. Most good villains either develop a more and more dramatic bend, or you get to see their evolution, using flashbacks and old newspapers, in a way that justifies what they have become.

Tertiary characters tend to be much more stable throughout a story, mostly because they would derive too much attention away from the main characters if they changed too deeply or too often. Still, if you read Harry Potter, you will note that Neville and Ginny, who are clearly backbenchers throughout the series, evolve a lot, and that makes them much more endearing than Lupin, who remains pretty much the same from his introduction on. A large 7-novel series does grant an author the room to treat those subjects, while a beginner's 125 pages novella will not.

Professor Rogue, likewise, is not a static entity of established beliefs that cannot change. He is playing the middle against both sides throughout the series, for very personal reasons and aspirations. He seems to sway between those two poles. Also, he is far from the frightened child or the nerdy teenager he once was. That all participates to making the reader's hatred, love and passion for him that much stronger.

Let us face the facts here: people who do not change are boring. They are Autumn people, never progressing, never trying anything new, always the same. Nobody cares about their stories. Who would want to read about them? Who would enjoy playing them? I know I wouldn't.

Examples abound of characters keeping our interest through their evolution. If you want examples of stories solely focused on character evolution, I would suggest two very nice stories that revolve around that are "Spirited Away" by Hayao Miyazaki, or "Les Aimants" by Yves Pelletier. I believe it is not possible to watch those movies and not get the point I'm trying to make.