Posted: September 18, 2025

Watching them Grow up in Print

Unless you're writing a particularly shallow adventure story, your main character needs to grow over the course of your novel. After all, stories are built around conflict, and how important can that conflict be if it leaves the character in the middle of it unchanged. Also, following your main character as they learn something new about themselves or the world, find a courage they didn't know they had, or face hard truths about their lives creates an emotional connection with your readers and makes your ending that much more satisfying.

But how do you have your main character grow when your main character is not an adult? I had a client run into this problem with a YA novel about a 13-year-old. Her character goes through some serious, life-changing stuff, but at the end of the story, she's still 13. So how do your characters grow without growing up?

When adult characters grow, it usually means learning or facing something that shakes them out of what had been a comfortable complacency. Something that challenges who they always felt they were. They've overcome a longstanding fear or healed some lingering damage from earlier in their lives. They see themselves and the world differently. That sort of change is a lot less convincing if your character hasn't had years for the problem they overcome to grow entrenched.

So, look at the question of growth from the other end. Instead of having your character grow by straightening out some damage from the past, have them grow by avoiding some damage in the future. This is easiest to do with a young teen, who's in the middle of trying to figure out who they are apart from their parents. It's a time when a lot of growth can go wrong, and it can be as satisfying for readers to watch your main character avoid future mistakes as to correct past ones.

This approach works for even younger children. Some years ago, I edited a book about a six year old living with an abusive stepfather. He was clearly heading toward a future burdened with a lot of childhood pain. But in the course of the novel, between his own innocence and some help from a couple of unexpected sources, he managed to get free of his stepfather, and at the end was looking at a future that preserved his innocence.

You also have to be careful not to put young characters through the wringer too much. If what they face is too damaging, then either it won't leave them terribly changed (in which case, their reaction isn't plausible) or they'll wind up with PTSD. The struggles they face have to be age appropriate.

Maybe the best example of this is the Harry Potter books. All of the books are exciting, and Harry faces genuine danger from the very beginning. But note how the danger starts out as mostly external -- facing down trolls and hellhounds and one mad magician. In the first book, Harry does deal a bit with missing his parents. But for the most part, he simply moves from the cupboard under the stairs in Privet Drive into a place where he fits in and finds friends and a mentor. What's changed for him internally is that his world and future have opened up.

Then things get grimmer. In the fourth book, he watches a friend casually murdered in front of him and faces down Voldemort on his own. By the sixth book, he sees his mentor killed by a man who has hated him for years. And in the last book, he winds up as a fugitive and learns that he's been carrying a piece of Voldemort's soul inside of him his entire life, and has to die in order to defeat him. He doesn't only have to face down danger. He has to face down radical changes to his sense of who he is. In the end, he's beaten and broken, but he's also found depths of courage, learned to trust himself and his friends, and even to see the good in a man who hated him.

So when you're writing your YA character, pay attention to who they are and where they're going at the beginning of the book, and how they've changed at the end. You can have your characters grow, no matter how young they are.