Character Growth and Learning

lpetrich

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Some creative-writing guides emphasize that one's characters ought to grow and learn things. What do your characters do?

Here are some of mine.

"Tunguska and the Titanic" - a takeoff of the spaceship-crash theory of the Tunguska disaster, as an expansion of George Adamski's UFO-contactee stories. GA's human-ET friends ("the Solar System Community" or SSC) and an Earthling find something in common. Then the SSC ones learn more about the Titanic.

"The Great Bomb" - some SSC Earth observers get a look at the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, and they then get very depressing thoughts about a possible future of Earthling warfare.

"Contact across the Solar System" - several. The SSC people decide that they made some big mistakes in their contacts with him, mistakes that they try to correct in later contacts. Like when they take Earth people on rides in their spacecraft, have those people document their rides - something much better than the farfetched-sounding accounts and low-quality pictures of the original contacts. As the SSC people observe Earthling spaceflight, they notice an extremely outlandish way of returning: hitting our planet's atmosphere at full speed. They then decide to use that for some low-tech capsules with messages in them, so as not to give away their more advanced technology.

I also have a scene where a SSC woman reads an Earthwoman's mind as she thinks about how violated she feels by the thought of someone reading her mind. They are both grateful to each other for being willing to do this, because both the Earthwoman and the SSC woman want to improve Earth - SSC relations.
 

VVoltairx

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The last novel I finished was about a young girl who was created from magic. She was raised in an isolated castle and everything was fine until her father sickened and it was revealed he had to eat parts of humans to be immortal. So it threw her from innocence into the lap of evil. She had to scramble her way through the world to survive. She turned into an assassin and impressed a dragon enough with her bravery to spare her life. Pretty satisfying character arc :)