Doing that ID List exercise I mentioned in my last post has already paid off. One item I came up with was “the ditz goes steely,” which is when a frivolous or comic relief character gets serious. I noticed how much I liked this kind of thing when I was watching Wicked: For Good and got such a thrill out of the moment when Glinda took charge. That movie has a two-fer, with Fiyero doing something similar (though he was already getting serious in the first movie, so it wasn’t so abrupt). You also see that in Legally Blonde, and it’s what the whole Barbie movie was building to. There’s just something about a seemingly shallow goofball getting serious and putting the startled villain in his place that makes you want to cheer.

And what that boils down to is a character transformation. It’s really satisfying when you can see a character change, and it’s more dramatic when a character makes a big change, like from ditz to badass. It’s even better when it’s not just the audience who sees the change, but the other characters are also taken aback when the fluffy lap dog growls and bites them.

Then I realized that I don’t really write this. My main characters usually have it more or less together even at the beginning of the book, and their growth is more subtle, bringing out hidden parts of them or just a bit of increased awareness. I seem to resist or be afraid of letting a character be a bit of a mess at the beginning of a book. But the book I’m currently working on is one where it fits. The heroine isn’t actually a ditz. She’s quite brainy, but she is naive. She’s also a big chicken who wants to be braver but hasn’t figured out that to get braver you have to be in situations that require bravery, and she recoils from those. Only I wasn’t really writing her this way. She and other people accuse her of playing it safe, but the first moment she’s required to be brave, she has no problems with it. I’m writing her at the beginning the way she should be at the end.

So I’m regrouping and doing some rewriting, and I can already see that this is lighting a spark to the story. It’s funnier and it’s more interesting with more internal and external conflict, and I suspect that the moment when she finds her courage and takes a risk is going to be even more satisfying when I get there.

But this does mean going back to the start and doing a fair amount of rewriting because it changes most of the scenes, and each change means more changes later. It’s good that I figured this out before I got halfway into the book.