Recently,* the Intern did a post about transformation in characters. Her point (and you should read the rest of her post, because it's awesome) is that too often, writers have their characters transform for no reason whatsoever. All of sudden they just look into the sky and decide that their lives are going to be different, and that's a crap way to handle transformation in a story.** She's right. It's not interesting, and, furthermore, it's cliched. It's every bad teenage movie/book in the world. Characters have to change over time, and even after they've changed they shouldn't be unrecognizable from their former selves. For example, in a project I'm thinking about now, a girl goes from being an ordinary good girl to being a more rebellious and outspoken girl.*** She doesn't do this by staring up at the stars and thinking to herself "as God is my witness, I'll never be shy again!" but at the result of several situations and
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