How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Times, They Are A-Changin'

Now we come to the last in this short work, a chapter on the principal directive of all stories everywhere.

Metamorphosis. Transformation.

Change.

Change is represented in your character arcs, your story arc, your A and B plots, the conflict and tension, relationships and empathy, and everything else that's meaningful in your story. It's your final objective as a storyteller. What is different in the end?

Traveling the distance between a conflict and a resolution is a key that I feel most aspiring writers, especially young aspiring writers, miss entirely.

To put this as simply as possible, if you reach the last chapter of your story and nothing is any different from the first, no matter how artfully you've written it, you've wasted your time, and the time of everyone else's who's thumbed through your pages.

The thing that changes doesn't matter, and it doesn't need to be this massive dramatic process, but it should, at least, be poignant enough that it's worthy of the attention that's been paid to it.

Big changes are usually obvious. In epic fantasy sagas, it's usually the entire world that changes. Yes, I'm thinking of the Lord of the Rings because I'm stupid and lazy and it's low hanging fruit. But that huge difference isn't the only one. 

Look at Frodo. He begins life a naive hobbit who wants nothing so much as to live quietly in the Shire, and when events turn him ass-over-heels he can hardly bear it. It changes him more than the world around him, so much, in fact, that he can't remain in it, and chooses to depart with Gandalf and the last of the elves. When you stop and look at it, all of the characters undergo significant change, from Samwise to Gandalf. 

Some have smaller, subtler transformations. The best example I can think of as I write this is Bruce Almighty, the story about a man so upset with his lot in life he challenges God, who says fine, here's my power let's see you do better. So he tries, and the shenanigans are epic, but Bruce ultimately fails and surrenders himself completely. By the end of the movie, he's living the exact life he had at the beginning; ostensibly, nothing has changed except his attitude, and that has made all the difference.

Some stories change the reader more than anything else, and a few brilliant works change only the reader without fundamentally changing anything else, but if you've effectively brought them along for the ride, that transition is inescapable. Arguably, it's why we bother to read anything in the first place.

In short, The STORY is the PROCESS of that change. Without the change, there is no story.

There are a few major takeaways I want to leave you with:

1. Pace your transformations.
Everyone has, I'm sure, heard the analogy about cooking frogs. If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it'll just jump out, but if you put it in the water and then heat it slowly, it won't notice the change until it's too late. 

That might sound morbid, but it underscores an important truth. You can't twist your characters, or your readers, in knots all at once. You need to lure them in gradually. A very common mistake a lot of writers make is forcing the changes too early or too quickly. Let it build.

2. Fuel your fire.
Change requires energy; heat, pressure, an emotional catalyst, a catastrophic event, or some motive that's stronger than the resistance. Humans inherently fear change and will find it difficult to accept that its happening without a cause. The pressure doesn't have to come from the primary conflict, but it has to exist.

3. Make it matter.
Change shouldn't be arbitrary. Nobody gives two hoots that the Holy Amethyst of Naff has been replenished by the blood of the Last Chimera. I might, however, care about that Last Chimera, and the people who sought it out and how that adventure affected their lives and the fate of their world. That's what we care about, the Holy Amethyst is just a MacGuffin.

As a side note, the change doesn't have to be the obvious thing, or even in your main plot. Some of the most entertaining books I've read have been ones where the transformation in the B-plot has superseded the one being driven by the A-plot. This happens naturally in long series' where (for example) the protagonist's romance is a sub-sub-plot, but tension has been building for so long that you come to care more about what happens between them than the fact that a Velorkian Ninja Battle Fleet is about to destroy the Solar System.

When you're tempted to focus all your time and energy on getting the One Ring to Mordor, don't forget Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, Gandalf and all the kings, and even the immortal Elrond. The personal changes each of them passes through are the reason this epic series has survived and thrived for generations.