With a few exceptions, readers prefer characters that change over the course of the book, preferably improving. (Unless you are doing the background of someone your readers know is a bad guy, and even then you need to show change.)

Among the exceptions are some types of literary fiction, some mystery subgenres, and “wandering detective/champion” stories, all stories where readers find little or no main-character development. The plot is in the character solving the mystery, undoing a problem, or observing the world without really changing (think the movie Being There. Chauncy the Gardner remains the same, more or less.) Readers read or watch for that character, people like Spencer in Spencer for Hire, or Mike Hammer, or The Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel. There might be a few characters like that in some humor series, where readers read for the predicaments and humor, not because the protagonist learns or grows. I’m not sure how long a writer could carry that off, at least in novels.

Outside of those genres and styles, readers expect a little bit of change in the protagonist. The protagonist appears, warts and all, and something happens. He goes exploring, or change comes to his town, or gets married, or discovers that he has a gift, or runs away and gets found by a group of travelers who take him in, or he has a vision, or starts gaining an education (traditional school, or mentor-mentee, or starts a trade apprenticeship, or …). He can be young, or older, perhaps an older man who has change forced upon him and ends up going on an adventure that he’d once dreamed of but Life had gotten in the way.* Something changes, and he has to adapt, either because he wants to or because he is forced to.

By the end of the story, the protagonist needs to be a different person than when the tale first began. She has more skills, or is wiser, or stands up for herself, or brings justice to the schoolyard (The Silver Chair), finds her true love, solves a problem, has completed a task that proves to be part of a greater whole (The Dark is Rising), or just survived the day and learned a little on the way. She’s a little different, or a lot different, depending on the story and the genre.

So, how do you work this? First, you need to realize or know that the Bob needs to grow. He’s a decent guy at heart, but he gets kicked out of his comfortable rut. Now what? There’s a forest fire bearing down on his vacation town, and he needs to get himself and his family out, if they can, or he needs to be ready to stand and defend. But he’s a townie, right? He’s not trained as a fireman, or experienced as an off-road driver. Well, Bob hesitates, then decides, “Dang it, I’m going to do this, and I will do this.” He finds something in him, or someone with the needed skills sees potential, and Bob learns. He makes some minor errors, gets singed a little on the edges, but gets his family out, or keeps them and others safe, and is a better, bigger man at the end of the story.

Or perhaps Lucy’s family drag her along on vacation when she’d rather be at home with her books, or hanging out at the mall** with her friends. But no, her parents haul her comfortable self off to, well, somewhere she’d prefer not to be. Grandmother’s stuffy old house with all the ancient, dusty junk that is soooooo uncool. Or the beach, which is cold and grey and unfun as her parents are geeking out about sea shells and wildlife. And then something happens. She finds a painting of an ancestress loading guns for the men at the siege of Lucknow, or her grandmother’s life-saving award, or an aunt’s WREN uniform. Perhaps a merman catches her eye, or she walks back in time to the Celtic Bronze Age and surprises a bard, or … She wants to learn more, takes up a challenge of some kind, or has to adapt. Heck, look at Outlander.

To boil it down—things change, the character changes for the better, his life improves in some way, and the antagonist is defeated, or survived, or otherwise loses and justice is done.

This is the big arc of the try-fail-try sequence, the W of rising and falling action in Dwight Swain’s book***. I caught myself leaving out the fail portion in a story I wrote recently. Oops! Nope, gotta have one more event, one more disaster (or so it seems) for the protagonist to trip over, cope with, and find a way to recover from.

If you are writing a Character novel, you have to have a character arc and development. If you are doing milieu? *Wags paw* Perhaps not. I finished a short story this summer that lacks character change, because the story is about the setting, not the observers. For a short story, that’s fine. I’m not good enough to do that with a novel, not yet.

*The movie Up is one example, but there are a few others in older novels.

*Children, ask your parents or grandparents what this ancient ritual of young adulthood entailed.

***You have at least glanced at the chapter about pacing and the try-fail-try pattern as a way to increase tension over time, yes?