clearing things up - Change character

July 7, 2005

After a week or so off for the holiday, I went back to what I’ve written here and found that I was thoroughly confused. On the one hand, I had spent several weeks writing about the four different types of stories - Building Up and Tearing Down for a Change Character and for a Steadfast Character. Then, I ended the whole discussion with my last post which basically said that all Change characters describe a process of Tearing Down, and all Steadfast Characters describe a process of building up. Another meeting with Chris cleared all that up, and I hope I can communicate it well here…

The Building Up and the Tearing Down concepts are all about Justifications. There are two ways of visualizing this - one for Change character stories and one for Steadfast character stories.

First, the Change character story. Imagine a wall with four rows of very large bricks. It’s so large that by the time you put up that fourth row of bricks you can’t even see over to the other side. You can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything - it looks like its just the wall.

Now, if you’re this character with this wall in front of you, it seems like it has always been that way - you don’t realize that there is something behind it.

But there is something there. And its causing problems for you. You can’t see what it is. Instead, all you see are the Symptoms of the problem. The stink of something unseen! And that’s what the you react to.

As a Change character you are forced to tear those bricks down. It’s only once you clear all those bricks away do you finally say, “Oh, this thing again.” You are now faced with an inequity that you had previously justified away. You had completely forgotten about it - but it really never went away - only your awareness of it went away.