This week: Change is a Constant Edited by: Kit  
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How have you changed this past year? We change as our circumstances change - for better or worse.
This week's Action/Adventure Newsletter, then, is all about change, and what this means for us as writers.
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I might as well begin this newsletter by stating that I am not a royalist. The idea that one’s bloodline determines one’s superiority or inferiority seems rather silly to me. Yet, when the news stations announced Queen Elizabeth II’s passing, I felt a little sad. It was an unexpected rush of emotion.
I guess (other than the fact that I feel for her family), it’s because it’s the end of an era. Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom before I was born. She was the queen before my mom was born! She may not have been a big part of most people’s lives, but she’s always been there, in the background, unchangeable… until now. Now she’s gone, and with that a lot of little things you don’t even tend to think about will change – coins, stamps, and the national anthem, for example - and whilst we knew that she knew how to fulfil her role, people aren’t too sure yet about Charles III.
It doesn’t help that we’re already in an unpleasant situation here in the UK. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but we’re dealing with inflation, and many households are uncertain if they’ll be able to heat their homes over the winter. Rising costs are threatening business, meaning jobs are at risk. We don’t know what the future will look like, but for now it looks none too bright. It’s the kind of time when you seek something to depend on, but the reality is that change is inevitable. Life is filled with constant change, for better or worse.
Change doesn’t need to be bad. Imagine what we’d be like if we didn’t change – we wouldn’t be able to crawl, let alone walk. We wouldn’t be able to speak. We would, in other words, spend our lives as we did when we were a baby and I, for one, am grateful that it isn’t so.
As children we undergo great change within a relatively short amount of time. We absorb knowledge from our parents, our school, and by discovering the world around us. We don’t just learn how to walk, but to climb, to cycle, to swim… Well, most of us. The swimming and cycling didn’t work out for me. Point is, though, that change can mean growth. It can enhance our existence.
And we don’t stop learning and changing. Perhaps, as we grow up, the pace of change is less dramatic, but with each experience – the good and the bad – we learn (or ought to learn), and adapt or alter our path. If you look back at each decade of your life so far, you’re likely to see a different you at each stage, whether those changes are slight or significant. I sometimes wonder who I’ll be in the future. What I will have learned, and how it will have affected me. I hope what changes there will be are positive ones.
It is this reality that makes readers expect the characters they meet in novels, movies or TV series to undergo some kind of personal growth along the way. Even in short stories there ought to be a reasonable level of character development. A character’s circumstances generally undergo change – there wouldn’t be much of a story if they didn’t – which means that it would feel unnatural for the character to remain unaffected. As a reader we want to be able to emphasize with the heroes and heroines of the stories we invite into our lives, and that is difficult if they do not feel or behave anywhere even remotely as we think we might were we faced with the same circumstances. Some exceptions apply here - non-humanoid characters can, of course, be understood to remain unaffected, or to respond differently. Still, who doesn’t love Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or Voyager’s The Doctor, for that matter?
Antagonists, too, undergo change – again, for better or worse. In order to understand an antagonist, one must ask why they are the way that they are. People aren’t born evil. There must be a reason for their actions. Their motives have to make sense. If their behaviour grows worse over time, what has caused this? If they become remorseful, what triggered this? Is there hope that they’ll eventually switch sides? Might they even save the day?
Change, then, affects us all. It may feel counterintuitive, but it’s fair to say that change is a constant – one of the few that we have. I don’t know what the future will bring, but because I know that nothing stays the same for long, I hope that we’ll soon see brighter days. That’s something to hold onto while we face the years ahead.
Kit
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Action/Adventure: September 14, 2022 Issue [#11559]
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