There is an odd thing I see in books sometimes where a character who is defined by their steadfast loyalty to a person or organization is presented with one (1) piece of evidence against them and immediately changes their mind.
I was just reading a book where a character is deeply loyal to the royal family despite being their literal whipping girl, but she immediately decides that the king must be a bad ruler the first time she sees poverty exists. And he is--but it's weird that the 15 years of being whipped didn't convince her but the existence of poor people did.
It often reads like a plot-convenient way of having a character change their mind without having to do any of the actual work or spend any actual time on what it means for them to change their mind. But it also often rings false--we know for a fact that people with deeply held beliefs are often not convinced no matter how much evidence they see to the contrary, much less because one piece of evidence was presented to them.
Writing partner and I were recently working on a piece that involved a character escaping brainwashing like that and we had a convo about this exact thing. Because I thought the character need more than one thing to break the brainwashing, and partner, who has actual experience escaping a cult she grew up in, said something very interesting. 'Not if there were cracks.'
She went on to explain how for her, there had always been little things about the cult that bothered her, but she excused them, pushed them aside, papered them over in her own mind. And then one thing happened. One very specific thing that went directly contrary to all the things the cult taught her.
And that one thing put enough pressure on her belief that all those cracks... exploded and she lost faith in the cult practically overnight. And the thing is, from my outsider perspective, it was like one day I talked with her and she was true believer, and the next time religion came up she was an ex- and talking about how she'd just recognized this thing about how harmful her former religion was.
I knew another man, briefly, who grew up evangelical protestant, spent more than half his life living and proselytizing as a true believer, then one day just... stopped. He said that he had always had doubts, never really believed, but he pushed all those doubts and disbeliefs down and acted all the more fervent to prove to himself that he was a good Christian. Until one day he realized what he was doing and... was done.
Now, with writing, we truly hope an author is good enough to convey this kind of internal conflict, but when someone spends half their life suppressing these kinds of things, it can be very hard to see even from the 'inside', because hiding it from themselves is the whole point. And when aren't talking about a PoV character or are in a real world situation...
Not long ago, i would have agreed with you. Now I can say that actually, sometimes I can be 'just one thing' -- or at least look that way because all the little things that came before are so small they're invisible.
God, I didn't even need to reblog with ny addition; you absolutely had it covered. Screenshotting and putting it here so they can be together.
I also want to say that this doesn't mean, to me, that we shouldn't take this note as writers. If fiction were completely realistic, there would have been a lot more bathroom breaks in Homer's Odyssey, but we take liberties to get to emotional truths rather than things that absolutely totally could have happened that way. Loved reading both the original post and your addition.
This post keeps going around and I've been seeing a lot of people's responses, and I think that a lot of them actually illustrate my point in a way that they don't seem to think they do.
In the vast majority of cases that people are citing, there is existing doubt or turmoil or cracks, and then there is a straw that breaks the camel's back. There is one specific thing that changes things, but there were doubts or questions already, even if they were small.
When the person who has having that massive change of heart is the POV character, if those cracks exist, we should be seeing them. That's the job of the author! To show us the things happening in the POV character's head!
The reason that this often fails to me in books is that it has the same problem as insta-love: the change is the point, and this is a cheap and facile way to gloss over it instead of doing the work of actually showing the change.
Do people break an entire lifetime's worth of brainwashing and unquestioned beliefs based on one experience? I'm sure it has happened.
But the complete reversal of unquestioned loyalty or beliefs (the version with no cracks or doubts) with no hesitation or looking back or struggle after the fact generally reads like a deus ex machina, not a realistic event.
