How to Show Character Growth in Story by Establishing a Pattern and then Breaking It

EPISODE DESCRIPTION – Wouldn't it be great to not have to rely so much on clever language to paint the picture of character growth within themselves and their relationships? Yeah, that "show, don't tell" thing again. Catch this week's episode about establishing patterns, breaking them, and using traditions and rituals in order to "show" a great deal to your audience and/or readers.

Free Video Tutorial for Screenwriting

Sign up for The Digest for all things story, including updates on classes, webinars, appearances, and tips and tricks from Zena herself. It's a monthly digest, so no super spamming here.

The Storyteller's Mission Podcast is now on YouTube. You can watch your favorite podcast as well as listen. Subscribe to our channel and never miss a new episode or announcement.

Support the Show on Paypal@Missionranchfilms!
 

HELPFUL LINKS AND RESOURCES - The Storyteller’s Mission online platform offers one-on-one COACHING, SCRIPT and MANUSCRIPT CRITIQUES, and ADVANCED CLASSES ON WRITING. Send us an email at info@thestorytellersmission.com, or if you have a question or a specific writing-related topic that you would like Zena to consider addressing on a future episode, LEAVE US A VOICEMAIL

Transcript

THE STORYTELLER’S MISSION WITH ZENA DELL LOWE
S3_E40. How to Show Character Growth in Story by Establishing a Pattern
and then Breaking It
 
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT 

Published August 31, 2023

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to The Storyteller's Mission with Zena Del Lowe. A podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story. 

[00:00:10] Well, I am back in Los Angeles, back in my office, feeling better, healing from whatever weird sickness I had for a while.

[00:00:18] I did not lose my sense of taste or smell. So I don't think it was COVID. However, instead of recording a brand new podcast for you, we are going to continue with some of the archived episodes because I've had a lot of positive feedback from people really enjoying a lot of the content that we've been going into.

[00:00:38] Namely, how to show don't tell. Different tricks you can use to really create visual images in story. So we have a couple more episodes on that topic and we are just going to dive right in. Okay, here we go.

[00:00:57] today I want to talk about rituals and traditions. How you can use rituals and traditions to show your audience a lot about your main character. Who are they? What are they like? What are they really like deep down inside? What is their true essence? That sort of thing. 

[00:01:13] So, the questions you would be asking yourself about your story are what sorts of rituals and traditions would your particular character engage in? 

[00:01:23] And notice from the outset, you're setting yourself up to establish a pattern that you can also break. So this is part of that, but here's what's cool. You don't actually have to. You can establish a ritual or a tradition and never break the pattern, and it will still be significant in terms of what it conveys, the information that it conveys to the audience or the readers. 

[00:01:47] So this is something you could use either way. You could use it as an established pattern that you can break and forward the story in another way, or it can just stand on its own.

[00:01:57] so the main idea here is that you would be using a ritual or a tradition to reveal a great deal of information to your audience about your character because we glean a lot of significant knowledge from the rituals and traditions that a person participates in, do we not? 

[00:02:17] For example, what can we assume about a character who goes to confession once a week come hell or high water?

[00:02:25] Well, lots of stuff, right? From that habit or ritual, we can surmise that they are religious, that they have a strong belief in God, that they have guilt, that they have things to confess, Perhaps they were raised to do that. 

[00:02:40] That habit or ritual tells us a great deal about the kind of person that that character wants to be or is already being.

[00:02:50] Now, again, you do have the option of deviating from the pattern in one direction or the other that could impact the emotional growth of the character. It could tell us something about where they're going. 

[00:03:04] So, for example, maybe the character stops going to confession after a number of things have happened in the story.

[00:03:10] And that might mean that they have lost their hope. They are questioning God. 

[00:03:15] Or maybe they don't even think that they're worthy enough to be forgiven anymore because of the things that they've done.

[00:03:21] So the fact that they have stopped going to confession reveals a lot about where they have come in their internal emotional journey. And that's significant. 

[00:03:32] And you do that, of course, by establishing the ritual that they participate in and then you break it or you might do the opposite. 

[00:03:41] Maybe later in the story they don't just go once a week, maybe they go every single day. And that might imply that they are really relying on God in a way they never have before. 

[00:03:53] Or maybe they're trying to do things that are really bad, like they're trying to enact change. So they're, they're participating in the kinds of sin that if they die before the next confession, they believe they're going straight to hell. 

[00:04:05] And so it could actually be that you're showing a terribly complex character who, on the one hand, believes in God, and on the other hand, is doing these terrible things in real life to the point that he doesn't want to go to hell.

[00:04:18] I don't know, but the point is, that could be a significant thing in their character development because of the frequency of their attendance to confession. 

[00:04:29] And the principle again is that if you establish a ritual pattern, you can then use the ritual or the tradition by itself, which will still tell us a great deal about our character, or you can choose to deviate from the pattern of the ritual or the tradition. And we'll learn a lot about the character's journey.

[00:04:52] But again, just establishing the pattern itself is sufficient.

[00:04:57] And maybe it's not going to be about going to confession, but let's look at another ritual that you're very familiar with. And this is the morning ritual that Rocky goes through 

[00:05:05] and it's his training sequence. So, of course, here we see the established ritual or the morning routine that Rocky Balboa goes through every day. I mean, he drinks that raw egg and then he goes jogging and he, you know, he's running down the street 

[00:05:21] He keeps trying to get up these steps to this one particular building. But he has to train. He has to train. 

[00:05:27] So here we're showing a ritual that has small progression. It is about incremental progression and changes. It's not a vast change. It's not that you've taken a pattern and established it and then radically broken it. You do it through incremental changes. 

[00:05:47] And so with Rocky, he gets a little bit further up those steps every time. And then, by the time he gets to the top, and he finishes, and he's up at the top of those stairs. We feel it, man. We feel that victory with him. We know what it means because we've seen the routine and we've seen the progression and we know what it means. And it gives us energy and excitement for the narrative.

[00:06:13] But also it tells us. He's ready, he's ready, he's now ready to face the heavyweight champion of the world and to fight in that particular battle. 

[00:06:24] So the tradition or the ritual impacts more than just your main character. It impacts us, the audience. It draws us further and deeper into their story and it gets exciting for us.

[00:06:40] But you can also use traditions and rituals in a way that impacts other characters in the story. 

[00:06:48] So maybe you are going to show something about traditions around a holiday. Maybe your character goes home for Thanksgiving, and that family has a tradition that they keep, and now we get to see a lot, not just about the character, but about the family unit themselves. 

[00:07:09] And by the way, family of origin, man, family of origin. We learn a lot about who people are based on their family of origin. And there's a lot of different type of traditions, by the way. Some of them are formal, like what I'm about to talk about.

[00:07:24] But some of them are informal, which are the rituals or traditions that the family unit itself has adopted that can be maladaptive behavior patterns, that can be disfunctional patterns of relationship, but they're still patterns. They're still rituals or traditions that are utilized by that particular family unit, and so you can reveal that, and it's going to tell us a lot about not just your main character, but also the other people in his world. 

[00:07:55] So in this case, let's say that your character goes home and they're sitting around the table for Thanksgiving. And one of the traditions of that particular family is they have to go around the table and share what they're grateful for that year.

[00:08:11] And let's say that it gets to your character and he has one of two options. Either your character shares like everybody else, or your character deviates from the share and doesn't do what everybody else is doing, and they both mean something, especially if you contrast it with what their personality is typically like. 

[00:08:34] Like, maybe this is not a character who normally is very share-y, and yet we see in the realm of his family of origin there is a softer side to him, or that he's respectful to the matriarch, or that he actually does have a heart, or that he actually has some depth, or something to that effect.

[00:08:52] Now all of a sudden we get to see something different and deeper simply because you've put the ritual or the tradition in the story. The audience would never have this insight if you hadn't have designed and contrived that particular scene, which is organic, given the tradition.

[00:09:09] Or, perhaps, your character, it gets to him and he's like, this is such crap. You're all a bunch of hypocrites. I don't even know why you're doing this. I know that you're not grateful for that, Billy. And I know that you're not grateful for that, Margaret. And I know that you, you know, and he calls them all out on their hypocrisy.

[00:09:28] Maybe that's the type of family it is. Maybe they're all just trying to out spiritualize each other, but it's not from the heart, because he knows what they're doing in real life. And this particular occasion, he's sick of it, and he calls them on it. Or maybe that's part of the pattern. Maybe part of the pattern is that he gets drunk and he blows it up every year.

[00:09:48] And maybe later on in the story, when we come back to it, it's the first time he doesn't blow it up. And that shows us growth. 

[00:09:55] I mean, there's just so many things that you can do to use the tradition of the family to show internal emotional growth and or to show relationships and the types of people that the other characters are that are in your main character's orbit. 

[00:10:14] So utilizing traditions and rituals in your story are very important. But notice also, there's a lot of fun things that you can do because of visuals. Because of visuals. And now those visuals take on meaning too. Because visuals become a part of the tradition. A ritual naturally has built into it, certain visual images or visual cues that are necessary in order to communicate what that ritual is.

[00:10:43] So it's storytelling on another level. You're thinking about all those things at once. And you're able to utilize that to truly reveal a change in your character's world. His internal emotional state, his growth, his relationships, all those things. It's a fabulous, fabulous tool. 

[00:11:02] So I've been breaking down different ways, various techniques that you can use to actually do this well.

[00:11:11] We're going to talk about something really great. It helps you understand character actions. It helps with visual cues, but it also just accomplishes so much in terms of forwarding your story. And it certainly is a primary show, don't tell technique. 

[00:11:29] And what I'm talking about is establishing a pattern and then breaking it. 

[00:11:35] So this came up recently in one of my client's screenplays. 

[00:11:39] So during the opening sequence, he shows the character wearing VR goggles and dressed in a complete suit and standing in this spotlight of white in his apartment. And when he's playing the video game as the character, he's actually submerged into the fake world of the computer game. So his avatar does everything that he does in real life and that sort of thing. 

[00:12:04] Okay, so what the author wanted to show right away in the opening sequence of his story was that his character had played this game a thousand times. And he knew exactly how it would go and this character would play the game because it was a comfort to him personally.

[00:12:22] But in that opening sequence, the author wanted to show that the game diverges from the norm. Something happens that is different than the thousand other times that the character has played this game. 

[00:12:34] But the problem was, as I pointed out, how will the audience know that the game has diverged from the normal way it's supposed to play out?

[00:12:44] Because we, the audience, we've never seen it play out before. We don't know what it's supposed to be. So, how will we know that the game diverges? And what a big deal it is that it does. How do we show that to the audience?

[00:12:58] Well, the solution is that we have to somehow establish the pattern before you can break it. You have to establish the pattern before you can break it. You have to show us what the norm is and then you can break it.

[00:13:12] And then when you break the pattern, here's what happens. It means more. It means something and this applies to other areas of your story as well. 

[00:13:22] Like for example, if you show two characters that are in relationship, you establish the pattern of their relationship.

[00:13:28] How do they treat each other? What is it like? How much fun do they have? How in love are they? Or how buddy buddy are they? That sort of thing. 

[00:13:36] You establish the norm and then later you break the pattern. And BAM! It takes on meaning. All of a sudden, we are witnessing and seeing growth or change or a rift or whatever the case may be.

[00:13:50] We're seeing something significant happen in the life of the character simply because of a deviation from the norm. 

[00:13:57] When any character deviates from a previously established pattern, it's a major development in the story, and it gives us more momentum moving forward. It puts energy into the narrative.

[00:14:13] It excites us, the audience, because we know that something exciting is happening. We can feel the story moving forward. 

[00:14:20] So there's a couple of great examples of this. The film Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds. And he plays a background character in a video game app, and yet he somehow develops a consciousness.

[00:14:33] He becomes aware, he kind of wakes up. And then he starts trying to defend the other background characters of the game. 

[00:14:40] So what the writers need to show us before all of this can happen is 1. Some sort of awakening on the part of Free Guy to take up this duty. And 2. How the character grows and changes over time. 

[00:14:57] How did they accomplish this? Pretty much by establishing the pattern and then breaking it over and over and over again. 

[00:15:05] It was a really, really wonderful tool that basically drove the entire story. 

[00:15:12] Okay, so let's break it down. We started at the beginning, where we saw Ryan Reynolds character, the free guy. He wakes up in his apartment and he talks to his goldfish and then we see him go into the coffee shop. 

[00:15:27] He orders the same coffee. Says hi to the other people in the coffee shop and then he goes into work. 

[00:15:33] He works at a bank and his BFF is there and they have a conversation that we're led to understand is the conversation they always have, so we know that this is part of the norm. The established routine. 

[00:15:45] Okay, so this is the first day, right? And then they continue their day like this until one of them gets killed, but that's okay. No big deal, happens all the time. 

[00:15:55] They wake up the next day and they start over. That is the norm. That is the norm. They're in this constant loop. 

[00:16:04] But then one day something happens, which rocks his world and changes the story. And on this particular day, his character is walking down the street and he sees the woman of his dreams, and it triggers something in him.

[00:16:19] It awakens something in him, something that he's never actually had happen before, a longing that he's never fully had or experienced, and it starts changing things. 

[00:16:29] But it doesn't happen all at once. He follows the character. He breaks a pattern right away. He follows her, but then as he's following her and he sees where she goes, all of a sudden he's hit. And he wakes up the next day in his apartment again.

[00:16:44] And that morning he says the same thing to his goldfish. But then when he goes into the coffee shop, he orders something different. All of a sudden he wants something different. He breaks the pattern. And in that moment, when he asks for something different, everybody else in the coffee shop looks at him.

[00:17:03] And in fact, the world starts kind of shaking because he's breaking the norm. This is upsetting the way things are, sort of like it isn't right. What you're just, you're deviating from the pattern. They really draw attention to it. He's deviating from the pattern. 

[00:17:20] So you need to establish the norm. You need to establish the pattern before you can break it. But when you do that, breaking the pattern can show significant growth on the part of the character.

[00:17:34] So, for example, let's say that you have a character who's very standoffish to other people. Let's say that this character is in elementary school, maybe fourth, fifth grade, something like this.

[00:17:47] But this kid has had a significant amount of trauma or something in his life. And so he just leaves everybody alone. His norm is to keep to himself and not talk to any of the other students. But they don't talk to him either. They just basically leave him alone. So that's his norm. 

[00:18:05] But then, let's say there's a new girl who shows up at school. And by God, as she's on the playground one day, the bullies start picking on her. And our character, our main character, notices. 

[00:18:20] Now, maybe at first he doesn't get involved, but he notices. And even that is significant. The fact that he actually notices because normally he just goes and reads his comic books at a particular table. Nobody bothers him. He doesn't bother anybody else.

[00:18:34] But on this day, he looks up from the comic books and he notices these guys are picking on her and he doesn't like it. 

[00:18:40] But he tries to go back to doing what he's always done, which is just ignore everybody. But then time goes by another day and those same bullies are picking on that girl. 

[00:18:50] And maybe this time they even knock her down and she gets a bloody elbow or something. and so now our character then maybe he finds her at the drinking fountain and he pulls a shirt out of his own backpack and offers it to her Because he knows that she needs an unripped shirt or something.

[00:19:11] Well now, it means something. It means a lot. We are showing how he actually feels about this character without having to tell anything. Simply because of how vastly that is a deviation from his norm. 

[00:19:26] So when you deviate from the norm, you are revealing huge things about your character. 

[00:19:32] Now, notice you're not just showing significant character growth, but you're also showing the evolution of character relationships, and that's an essential part of storytelling.

[00:19:43] So, that's something that can also happen in character relationships. You establish a pattern, and then you break it. 

[00:19:50] So, you show, for example, maybe two buddies that are... They're partying and drinking. They're in college. They're having a great time. They go to the football games together. They cheer, yell, whatever. Maybe they're drinking too much, but they're on the same page.

[00:20:05] But then let's say that one of the buddies has something significant happen to them. Something big happens and it changes who that guy is.

[00:20:14] So now, maybe the next time we go to the game, maybe he tries to be the guy he's always been. He tries to get involved in those same antics as always, but it's different and they can feel it, right? They can feel it that this guy that something has happened to, that he's not quite fully in it, right?

[00:20:35] And yet he's trying, but then as time goes by, at some point, that's going to come to a head. At some point, there's probably going to be a big blow up between those characters. and one of two things is going to happen.

[00:20:50] If it's a good enough friendship, the party guy won't ask his friend to keep trying to fake it. He'll adjust to his friend. And he'll accommodate that. 

[00:21:00] But if it's not a strong enough friendship, if it was always superficial to begin with, then it will sever the relationship because it will tick the buddy off that he won't party with them anymore. 

[00:21:11] The point is, is that it will basically alter their bro-ship one way or the other because they can no longer tolerate the same kinds of things and you've broken the pattern. 

[00:21:24] You started out with a particular type of scenario and you've broken the pattern and therefore it changes significantly the relationship.

[00:21:33] It's all about establishing a pattern and then breaking it. And see, when you do that, You don't have to think nearly as much in terms of trying to write cleverly or write with flowery language. You don't even have to try to come up with a powerful image or metaphor to convey meaning. 

[00:21:52] Now you can do that and I suggest that you do that also if you can.

[00:21:58] But you don't have to because when you establish a pattern and then break it, you're communicating layers and layers and layers of content to your reader or your audience. And you're doing it without having any of that fancy writing. It's all just showing deviations to character behavior, to character relationship, and of course to patterns that have been established.

[00:22:22] And then we, the audience, interpret those things and we know what it means. So it's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful technique.

[00:22:31] All right, so I hope that you have enjoyed this archived episode on rituals and traditions and how to establish a pattern and then break it as a way to show character arc and growth and development of character relationships. This is a great, great tool. 

[00:22:47] If you are a screenwriter and you're interested in learning more tools like this, I would like to invite you to check out my online course.

[00:22:56] There's a link to a free video tutorial that talks about Formatting as an Art Form, the kinds of things that if you're trying to be a screenwriter that you need to know. 

[00:23:06] Click on that link and you'll be taken to the website where you can watch a free video tutorial and then learn more about my online course. 

[00:23:14] I mention it because I honestly believe it's the best course available on screenwriting anywhere on the marketplace and it's only going to be on sale for a little bit longer.

[00:23:24] So if ever you wanted to take it, now is the time. Okay. 

[00:23:28] Thank you for listening to the Storyteller's Mission with Zena Del Lowe. May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better through story.