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 is absolutely how it happened to me, too. It wasn't even in the moment--I was just in my car at work, making deliveries, and my brain was turning something over and over in the back of my mind. All of a sudden, things just... fell apart, and I wasn't even fully able to identify where that last straw came from. I went out on that delivery a believer, and I got back to the store afterward feeling lighter and happier than I had in a very long time.
Of course, if you want that to be seen in a work of fiction it's important to have that set up and payoff, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to experiment with how you do it. Is there a way to make that single sudden change of mind feel satisfying? Is there a good way to express to the outside people the changes that are happening subtly? Maybe the logic of it doesn't even need to be expressed--the most important thing might be simply hammering in the profound and sudden feeling of understanding. It all depends on your story and character.
