: Re: How do I balance immature levity and flaws and character growth? I am working on a series where one of the intended primary draws is character drama and growth. I have an ensemble cast of

@Phylliss352

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No matter how much real or fictional people grow, they never become perfect. That's one of those observations that simultaneously seems impossible and obvious: obvious because no-one is ever perfect, and impossible because how do they keep finding new imperfections that need work? My own experience - in myself, in people I've known, in people I've known of, in fictional characters I've loved in other words, and in characters I've created - is that it comes down to a few things (I'll illustrate with TV examples because they tend to have enough duration to be comparable to your situation, in a way a single novel might not):

Growth comes at a cost. The Doctor in Doctor Who gradually became more caring about others, more sure of his (later her) right to intercede in other's affairs, and more forthright in challenging their own people. All good, right? But this eventually culminated, at least in many in-universe detractors' eyes, in self-righteous hypocrisy, self-appointed policing of others, and a willingness to sacrifice their species. Once aware of that, the Doctor experimented with various forms of retreat from such overreach, only to find it cost dependents dearly. More recently, she has tried a more constrained and empathetic form of intercession. At the time of writing, the most recently aired episode, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, even this hasn't worked right for her, and she had to revisit some of the darkness she overdid in the past. In other words, 2 steps forward, 1 step back... only in more than one dimension.
Characters grow in a specific way, because of difficult choices they make about how to do it. In one episode of Silicon Valley, Dinesh seeks Richard's advice when there are no right answers to deal with a crisis. Richard tells him he's found it's more about finding the one wrong answer you can live with. In that scene, it seems like an aspect of in-the-moment decisions. But if you look at Richard's character arc over the series, it seems to also characterize the ways a character chooses to experiment with self-growth. As per the above point, they often have to get worse in one way to get better in another, if only because of overshooting like a pendulum.
One often doesn't know whether a change is for the better until one has gone so far down it one can't really walk it back; one can only see how to grow next. This time, I'll talk about my own work. I have a protagonist who, in her first book, keeps to herself because she is terrified of the way the world threatens her, only to realize how much power she can exert over it, in ways no-one else can. This leads her to morally dubious actions to keep herself safe, and later to try to help others in her own 10-year-old way, until she has a what-you-are-in-the-dark moment at the end. In a later story, she learns that coming out of her shell attracts dangers half-similar to what she'd envisaged, and at first tries to do even shadier things to neutralize such dangers. But as she gets older, her caring for those weaker than herself grows, and eventually she dedicates her life to a cause she can't expect to ever see fulfilled. In the story I'm working on now, unforeseen events allow her to see the end result of what she did, and everyone's happy with it but herself. Then she's forced to take a leadership role she never sought, and has to change again to do it right.
Much growth is needed because of new problems. A character with such experience can give half-valid advice to someone else. This is connected to my second and third bullet points (and arguably also my first), and I could illustrate it with the same examples, but this time I'll talk about Frasier instead. Roz became a parent after a few seasons, and wasn't confident she'd do it well until Frasier told her about how long it had taken him to learn certain important facts about it. Later, Niles admits his love for Daphne and she reciprocates, but she eventually challenges him to explain why he'd be more loyal to her than his ex-wife, and he explains it's because this is his first relationship not attributable to what others expected of him. What these examples have in common is that character A advises B on how to deal with a situation B didn't find forced upon them until recently, whereas A can speak about it from much older experiences, often predating the first episode.

I suspect you can think of examples of these points applying elsewhere - in your work, in other fiction, and in real life.

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