Does a Series Character Have To Grow?

by Barbara D'Amato

Many years ago, my husband and I were staging a musical. He was the composer/lyricist; I was the writer/lyricist. During the rehearsals, one of the cast members came up to me to complain about her role. [I’m changing the character’s name here, to protect her privacy.] She said, “I don’t know how to play Petunia. She doesn’t grow.”

I didn’t say what I thought, which was that Petunia didn’t need to grow. Petunia was a minor character. But lately I’ve been hearing a lot of criticism about some popular series characters in detective fiction: “She/he doesn’t grow.” As if that meant the series couldn’t be taken seriously. Unrealistic. Not literary enough.

What is “grow” anyway? Must the character start going to AA? Give up smoking? Learn about her inner devils and exorcize them?

There is a contrary opinion, which goes like this. A fan will say, “I like to pick up an XXX book. It’s like meeting an old friend. He’s always the same.”

Part of the problem with growing a character is that readers don’t necessarily read the books in order. They may happen upon the fifth book and then go back and read earlier ones. It can be quite disconcerting to read about a character’s angst over his divorce and then find an earlier book in which he is delighted with the new love of his life. Or--by the time later books in a series come out, earlier ones are unavailable.

Certainly I’ve now and then bought, say, the seventh book in a series I've read and liked, found the character very different, and been unhappy with the change. In real life, people don’t change much. The person who was irritable and quick to anger at twenty is still quick to anger at fifty. The easygoing, cheerful person at thirty is still cheerful, maybe barring serious illness, at sixty. People may learn a bit about themselves, and with luck overcome their worst habits. But I’d be uneasy if my friends changed very much.

I’m not arguing that series characters should never “grow” whatever that means. But when a character remains quite consistent, it’s not right to use “He doesn’t grow” as a stick to beat the author with.

Series Charaters . . . Static or Evolving?

by Sean Chercover

I just got back from Thrillerfest, where Marcus and I were on panel (with great fellow panelists Jack DuBrul, Christine Goff and super moderator Jon Land) about the pros and cons of writing a series. One of the subjects we batted around was whether a series protagonist should grow and evolve over time, or remain basically unchanged.

When I sat down to write the second Ray Dudgeon novel, I found that Ray had to have been changed by his experiences in Big City, Bad Blood. Had to. You just can’t go through the kind of hell Ray went through in that book and come out of it unchanged. It was the only way for me to continue believing in him.

But that’s Ray. There are some excellent series characters that don’t fundamentally change, no matter what happens to them over the course of a series.

Two of my favorites: Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. These guys are larger-than-life archetypes, both relatively unchanging over time. Yet I have no trouble believing in them.

I’m generally more interested in character than plot, so in most cases a static protagonist will only hold my interest for a few books, and then I'll move on to a different series. I usually prefer evolving series protagonists. But Child is such a damn good writer and storyteller (and Reacher is such a damn good character) that I’m always eager for the next book. The same can be said (in the past tense) for MacDonald and McGee.

(Sure, McGee was a product of his time and his attitude toward women is at times cringe inducing. But he did reflect many men of his era, so it doesn’t diminish his believability. The same criticism cannot be made of Reacher. Reacher respects women as his equals, and the Reacher books are well populated by strong and intelligent women.) But I digress . . .

Another thing that keeps the Reacher series fresh is that some books are written in the third person, others in the first. So even if the character is not changing much, the shift of perspective gives us different views of him.

My favorite evolving series characters? Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder leap to mind. And, as our panel moderator pointed out, James Bond changed a great deal over the course of the original Ian Fleming series.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you prefer to pick up the next book in a series knowing that you will find a reliable archetype, or are you looking for a character that has been changed by his/her previous experiences? Who are your favorite archetypal or evolving characters? And why?