Writing Characters Who Don't Know They're About to Change

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MarkTheHerald.com

✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦

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One of the things that makes a character transformation believable — and I've thought about this a great deal in the course of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — is that the character being transformed must be entirely sincere about who they are before it happens.

Not performatively resistant. Not waiting to be convinced. Not secretly hoping someone will come along and shake them out of their rut.

Just genuinely, completely, absolutely certain that they are who they are and that this is who they will continue to be.

Mark the Herald Angel is the most certain character I've ever written. He is certain about the correct number of turns required to sharpen a pencil. He is certain about the proper protocol for counting sidewalk cracks. He is certain that singing is neither fair nor dinkum and that Heralds who say otherwise are simply not being honest with themselves.

He is also, within the first twenty pages of the book, about to be entirely wrong about all of it.

Why Certainty Makes for Better Transformation

There's a temptation in Christian fiction — and in Christian storytelling more broadly — to write characters who are visibly broken at the beginning. Characters whose need for change is obvious to both the reader and to the character themselves. Characters who are searching, explicitly and consciously, for the thing that will put them right.

This can work. Some of the most powerful Christian narratives are built on explicitly searching characters.

But I find that the transformations that land hardest — the ones readers can't stop thinking about — are the ones where the character wasn't looking. Where the change comes not to someone who was seeking it but to someone who was minding their own business, doing their job with genuine competence and integrity, and was entirely unprepared for what was about to happen to them.

Mark is not broken at the beginning of the book. He's not searching. He's not empty or yearning or secretly waiting for something to show him a better way to live. He's a good Herald Angel who sharpens his pencils correctly and counts the sidewalk cracks and does his job with meticulous pride.

And then his editor sends him to cover a story in Bethlehem. And everything he thought he knew about the universe — and about himself — turns out to be incomplete.

The completeness of his pre-transformation self is what makes the transformation devastating.

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The Pencils as Character Device

One of the things I'm most pleased with in MARK! The Herald Angel is the device of the pencils.

Mark begins the story with three perfectly sharpened yellow number two pencils. He counts them. He is proud of them. They are the tools of his trade — the implements through which his particular genius for finding and recording truth expresses itself.

He loses every single one of them in the course of Chapter 5.

He loses the first in the train station while talking to Gabriel — it slips from his grip and vanishes into the crowd. He loses the second during the disembarkation process in Bethlehem. He loses the third — the last, the most carefully preserved — to a scruffy goat in the stable while he is too transfixed by the face of the newborn King to notice.

By the end of the night, Mark has nothing left. No pencils. No ledger. No tools. No professional resources. Just himself. Just his presence. Just the encounter.

And that's precisely when the song comes out.

The pencils are not just a funny recurring gag, though they are genuinely funny. They are a character arc. They are Mark's professional identity dissolving one implement at a time until there is nothing left to hide behind.

Every character transformation I know of works the same way. The things we use to define ourselves have to be taken away — or given away — before we can discover what we actually are.

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✦ Read Mark's transformation for yourself. MARK! The Herald Angel is available at MarkTheHerald.com.