Across the Pacific

I wanted to share this moment from class yesterday, as an example of what writing should be.

One of my fellow students read a scene in which her heroine sees a surley neighbor abusing an animal. The heroine waits until later that evening, then goes to rescue the animal. The instructor listened to this and felt it wasn't quite right. The heroine wouldn't wait, the instructor said. She'd run out there as soon as she could to save that animal.

Now, the easy way out of this would have been for the writer to say, "No, she'd wait." But the heroine wouldn't wait. It was obvious from the character and the character's state of mind that waiting was the last thing she'd do. So, instead of changing the character, the writer changed the scene. The neighbor didn't abuse the dog at first. He did that later, at which point the heroine intervened.

This may not seem like much, but to me it illustrates what good writing should be. Changing a fully developed character because they do something you don't like is dishonest. That character is, for all intents and purposes, a real person. I can't simply change the personalities of my friends and family if they do things I don't like. But you can change how people behave if you change their environment and stimuli. Then the actions and reactions are true to form and much more real.