Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks Page A

blind, and her sight comes and goes at inappropriate moments, leaving her particularly vulnerable to an attack. The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.
    Of course, you can overdo this. Too many threats make the story unbelievable. Too much conflict renders it unrealistic. As with all things, you have to find a balance that works.
    The fourth rule ties right into the first three: MOVEMENT EQUALS GROWTH; GROWTH EQUALS CHANGE; WITHOUT CHANGE, NOTHING HAPPENS .
    Uh-oh. I can read the confusion on your faces from here. The last part of this equation is self-explanatory. I think we all agree that changes in the lives of characters are necessary for the reader to feel that the journey traveled from beginning to end in a book has been worthwhile. But what about the rest of it? What the heck does all that mean?
    Let’s start with the word
movement
and see if the mystery won’t come clear. When I use the word here, I am speaking of the sort of movement that takes place in the lives of characters during the course of a book. That movement can take many different forms. In some books, the movement is of a purely physical nature. The characters are on a quest that requires them to travel a great distance, or they are situated in a strange place that requires them to move around to understand what is happening. In other books, no one goes much of anywhere, and the movement is all emotional or even psychological. The characters are discovering truths about themselves or others that they hadn’t recognized before. They are coming to terms with their lives through events and circumstances or through their interaction with other characters. Maybe they never even leave their houses, but they are moving about inside their own heads, nevertheless.
    What matters is that in each case, whether the movement is physical or emotional or psychological, the result is that some form of growth takes place with the characters involved. Again, it might be physical—a coming of age that results in a transition from child to adult, a literal growing up. It might also be a coming of age that takes place emotionally or psychologically, one that involves maturity of thought, and takes place inside the person involved. Or it might be a kind of recognition of truths that becomes life-transforming.
    But without that movement to trigger that growth and that growth to cause that change, we don’t have a very compelling story. The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and as the rule points out, nothing happens if the characters don’t change. I would suggest that this is the single biggest problem with series in all categories of fiction writing. From one book to the next, the characters don’t ever change, don’t ever grow, and don’t ever surprise. They turn static, and when that happens you can be pretty sure the writer has lost interest in what he or she is doing.
    So in
Cat Chaser
, even if we don’t see this as more than a single book, Maud needs to evolve in some measurable way. She needs to do more than sit around fretting about the coming of Feral. Engaging in a successful confrontation that frees her from her worries isn’t enough. She has to do more. She has to come to terms with who and what she is, what it means to her to have to fight that last battle, and how she is likely to go on with things once it is over. The reader wants some enlightenment on these issues, some sense of the humanity of the character, and if the author doesn’t provide it, the story loses a great deal of its impact.
    Part of the way in which we writers achieve all this is through the relationship we create between our protagonist and antagonist. Thus, our fifth rule: THE STRENGTH OF THE PROTAGONIST IS MEASURED BY THE THREAT OF THE ANTAGONIST .
    The stronger the threat posed by