fiction - Is it a good idea to make the protagonist pull themselves together

Is it a good idea, to make the protagonist pull themselves together at a point in a work of fiction. I've been writing a novel, and for practically the entire first half the main protagonist has been running from everything, scared to kill, generally scared of the battle he has been plunged into. He relies on someone else to help him get through it, that he recently broke away from as he wanted to escape from the thing entirely.

Is it a good idea to have these two characters come back together, fast forward a few weeks and continue the story? After that event, and those few weeks which nothing exciting happens in so I don't need to go through them, the main protagonist thinks "Okay, if I run from everything nothing is going to change. Let's put an end to this once and for all."

Is there a better way to put across such a massive change in attitude? Is this a good move to pull off? I've written this at about 50k words in the novel, so the protagonist has been being scared for a while. I'm worried that the change will be too sudden and the reader would not respond well to it.

If I skip forward one week, is that too far forward to skip?

Answer

First of all, your protagonist almost must change, or there's not much point to your book. If s/he does not at some point stop running and pull him/herself together, your reader will feel like the book is a waste of time.

To make it seem not rushed or fake, you need two things:

• sufficient buildup before the epiphany


• to give enough space to the epiphany that the reader believes it

By "buildup" I mean the protagonist has to be thinking about the things which will lead up to the epiphany before it happens. S/he feels afraid, but you have to show the terrible things and you have to show how the terrible things affect the character. Then the character briefly needs to reflect on or think about the gradual pileup of scary things — and by "brief" I mean a paragraph or two a chapter, but on an ongoing basis — and also to think about how things could be better. If only I could do X or If only Y were different, then the scary things would stop or be defeated.

When the character is finally at rock bottom, then the desire to change will outweigh the fears of not acting. Remember that the fears don't have to go away. The character does not magically have to stop shaking, or stop being afraid. The character just has to push on through the fear and act anyway. This is "pulling it together."

This scene shouldn't be only a few paragraphs; it should probably be a few pages. The reader needs to believe that the protagonist has genuinely weighed the choices and felt that moving forward was better than avoiding risk.