: Re: Character growth when the entire story is actively working to prevent it? My MC is a woman who is shy, introverted, has a strong sense of right and wrong but also a doormat personality -

@Pierce369

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I can’t tell you what to write, but if I were writing such a character, I would have bending or breaking not choices, but the result of choices made. Assuming a traditional society, she has entered into an arranged marriage and meets her husband when they marry. She has the option of declining, as is the case, but chooses to accept him to honor her father’s wishes.

My character would gradually discover that her position is a difficult one, but would strive to adapt first as that is what her training suggests. A point comes when she must choose and this stressor will threaten everything she has worked for - huge consequences whichever path she takes. She decides that she matters more than she was taught - not a realization but a choice. She has seen women around her who mattered, she must choose to become a person of consequence.

Her strength would be tested but as she has been inculcated with the notions of being only significant with regard to the men in her life, she would find assimilation easy - too easy. She has been trained for this and has the tools.

RS29 has a point, though, in that even in the most ‘traditional’ societies a woman still had influence. Often, she had much more influence than was generally admitted by the men around her.

Create a world of characters and make each real. Give them problems and lives to live - even apparently circumscribed by societal standards.

The Joy Luck Club has examples of this transformation in a couple of its characters. In one, a daughter is told of the suicide of her grandmother that was strategic and designed to give her daughter not only a strong position in the family but a strong personal voice, becoming someone none could silence.

The granddaughter hears this tale from her mother and it changes her. Previously a rather meek woman whose husband ran the show and was getting bored with her, she finds her voice as her mother did before her, making the grandmother’s sacrifice even more powerful.

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