Microshift in Fiction

In life, microshifts are small, achievable actions that take you towards your target. In fiction, microshifts give your story real-life texture, making the characters much more believable. The more you notice the microshifts happening in the world around you, the easier it is to recreate believable microshifts in fiction.

To illustrate this a little better, we can re-examine the microshifts in Lena’s subplot. 

What is true of people is also true of characters: they rarely huge grand, sweeping changes overnight. The difference is that in a story, sometimes, a character does experience an overnight change.

You can actually get away with a grand, sweeping change near the beginning of the story, if at least a couple conditions are present:

• The reader knows, usually from the backstory (i.e. the story’s original normal), that the character has been building towards this grand, sweeping change for a long while.

• Something external happens to catalyze the grand, sweeping change, as if the character finally got the missing ingredient they needed to achieve this change.

So, for example, Lena went from having the dream of being a magical inventor to actually being a well-known inventor pretty swiftly. In the series, this transformation occurs outside the action of the books: at the end of the first novel, Of Giants and Ice, she is still aspiring to be a magical inventor. At the beginning of the second novel, Of Witches and Wind, set a year later, she has completed a lot of magical inventions already, so many that even those outside of her community have heard of her. This change is a major shift but still believable, because it meets the requirements:

• One of the first things that readers learn about Lena is that she has a dream of becoming a magical inventor like her ancestress, Madame Benne. In fact, she has been doing research and experimenting on her own, and everyone believes she will eventually get there. In other words, she has been walking towards this target with her whole being for a while.

• Plus, at the end of her “Jack and the Beanstalk” Tale in Of Giants and Ice, Lena gets her missing ingredients: she discovers that she now has access to Madame Benne’s spellbook and assistant. Those two resources hold the information she needs to go from having a bunch of failed experiments to successful inventions. Since this process takes place over a period of a few months, outside the events of the books, it also feels more believable.

The same conditions are met in the story with my college coach:  

If I had just said, “I quit the crew team after fainting at a race,” it would be understandable in a logical way, but it wouldn’t be relatable since very few people have had a similar experience. However, I also included the backstory, mentioning that I had been sick for a while, that my coach hadn’t necessarily believed me and that I wanted to show up for my teammates. More people can relate to having a persistent problem, not having the support I needed, and wanting to do more than is physically possible. 

Then, the drastic change—quitting the team—occurred after I woke up wordless in a puddle. Feeling like my long-term dreams were at risk, I had enough clarity to make the change I needed to repair and restore my body.  

So, if you need to include grand sweeping changes in a story, you can place them near the beginning, and make sure that you include longer development in the backstory and add a catalyst for the change. The change may feel sudden, but since it has actually been underway for a while, the story just shows the transformation coming to completion.

Forced” vs. “Earned” Character Development

Overnight changes near the end of a book or a series don’t feel real or natural. Actually, I have thrown several books across the room, feeling personally betrayed by the author, for just this reason—especially if the book is long. Characters who change in a way that feels forced can throw you out of a story, thinking, Ugh, why would the author do that? And when it comes from the author artificially rather naturally from than the character’s story, the reader can always feel that it’s “forced.”

When big internal change comes instead from the character, we often say it feels “earned.” 

As a writer, you “earn” these big changes by stringing together microshifts. You arrange scene after scene where the same character takes a step in the same direction, a little at a time until it’s obvious that this character is not the same as they were when the story started.

Over time, something major has shifted on the inside, and this shows up on the outside by the end of the story. The reader believes the big shift, because they already witnessed a lot of the smaller shifts. Understanding how the smaller changes came about makes the big change easy to swallow.

For example, at the beginning of the series, Lena believes that the Director’s rules will keep everyone safe. She believes this with such devotion that she quotes the rules to her classmates, especially when she’s nervous.

By the end of the series, Lena—three years older, having lost her hands and regrown them—tells the same Director that she makes the rules. Then she enforces her own rules to keep herself and the people she cares about safe.

This is a pretty major shift, but readers witnessed quite a few shifts in Lena:

• She bent the rules about the Table of Plenty at the Ever Afters Market to buy Madame Benne’s spellbook.

• She allowed her friend to convince her to go a forbidden rescue mission.

• Instead of obeying the Director’s demand for exploding bats, she tried to invent a slightly less destructive weapon.  

Having gone on the journey with Lena, readers knew how far she had come, and like Lena’s friends in the books, they cheer her on in that moment. That transformation is undeniable, but it’s also earned.

You can also use microshifts strategically when developing a character’s subplot. For example, I knew that it wouldn’t have been believable for Lena to invent a weapon capable of destroying her hands on her own. To make it feel earned, I set up mini character arcs that brought her closer and closer to that situation. Each of them were also microshifts—you can see each of those arcs and small shifts in the second section of “The Tales of Lena LaMarelle,” marked 2a, 2b, and 2c.