What Transformation Means in My Work

Transformation is one of the words in my tagline: fiction of beauty, danger, and transformation.

I chose it because becoming someone you did not know you could be—or someone you did not realize you wanted to be—feels like an integral part of being alive.

I think that carries particular weight for queer people, especially those of us who grew up without much support or without the language to understand ourselves. When the future presented to you assumes a version of yourself that does not quite exist, growing up can involve more than figuring out what you want. First, you have to discover that there are other ways to live at all.

That idea appears again and again in the way I think about stories.

Transformation, to me, is larger than a character learning a lesson or correcting a flaw. It includes the slow accumulation of choices, the things done to us that we cannot control, the things we decide afterward, and the uncomfortable business of continuing to live once a major change has already happened.

A character can become someone entirely different by the end of a story and still have an enormous amount of becoming left to do.

Becoming is not the finish line

Stories naturally give weight to moments of change.

A character leaves home. Admits what they want. Learns something that changes how they understand their past. Falls in love. Escapes. Claims power. Makes a choice they can never undo.

Those moments matter. I love writing them.

I am equally interested in the morning after.

Imagine waking up tomorrow as exactly the person you ultimately needed to become. You would still have to get out of bed. You would still have relationships to navigate, decisions to make, habits you have not broken, things you do not understand, and consequences from whatever brought you there.

You would eventually discover new things about yourself because that supposedly final version of you had never lived Thursday before.

That is why transformation interests me as both process and aftermath.

A major decision may give a life a new direction, but direction is not destination. Once the dramatic moment passes, the character has to build an ordinary life around what changed. They have to find out whether their new beliefs survive inconvenience. They have to discover how a choice feels after they have lived with it for six months instead of six minutes.

Sometimes they regret it. Sometimes they become more certain. Often the answer is less tidy than either.

For me, that continuing life is part of the transformation rather than an epilogue to it.

Choice exists inside circumstances we did not choose

I put a lot of weight on choice in my stories, although that does not mean I think people control everything that happens to them.

We very clearly do not.

Bodies change. People leave. Systems restrict what choices are available. Illness, family, money, violence, chance, prejudice, grief, and countless other forces can alter a life without asking what the person living it would prefer.

I am interested in what remains possible inside those limits.

Choice often exists at a much smaller scale than fiction makes it look. A breath. A step. A sentence said when silence would have been easier. Staying another day. Leaving one day earlier. Accepting a hand. Refusing one. Telling someone the truth. Deciding which truth they have earned.

None of those decisions has to transform a person immediately.

Taken together, they can.

I tend to find that more interesting than a single revelation that changes a character's personality in an instant. Most people have already been becoming the person who makes the enormous choice long before the story reaches the moment where they finally make it.

Even when the catalyst for change is completely outside a character's control, the story still contains choices about what follows. They can decide what they want to preserve, what they are willing to lose, what they will repeat, what they refuse to become, and what they are going to do with knowledge they cannot put back.

The circumstances matter. So does the person navigating them.

That tension gives transformation its shape.

Change is not a moral ladder

Character growth is often discussed as though every meaningful transformation should move in the direction of improvement.

Someone begins fearful and becomes brave. Selfish and becomes generous. Lost and becomes certain. Closed off and learns to love.

Those arcs work because people really do change in those ways.

People also become harder.

Survival can teach habits that are extremely useful while surviving and miserable to live with afterward. Love can widen someone's world or narrow it until they can barely see beyond one person. Grief can make someone gentler in one relationship and unreachable in another. Confidence can become arrogance. Caution can become fear. Anger can become the thing that finally gets someone out of a dangerous situation.

A transformation can make a person happier without making them kinder. It can make them safer while costing them something they valued. It can improve one part of their life while making another substantially more complicated.

I do not think change needs to reward a character for behaving correctly.

I want it to reveal something about what they value, what they fear, what they have learned, and what their choices have cost.

That leaves room for transformations that are ugly, frightening, liberating, destructive, healing, or difficult to classify at all.

Leaving your comfort zone does not mean abandoning it forever

Transformation often requires discomfort because new possibilities are, by definition, unfamiliar.

A character may have to encounter information that contradicts what they have believed for years. They may have to admit that a familiar way of living has stopped working. They may try something they dislike before discovering what they actually want.

That does not mean every story needs to end as far from the starting point as possible.

Sometimes a character leaves something familiar, sees what else exists, and eventually chooses to return.

I like those transformations.

There is a meaningful difference between remaining somewhere because you cannot imagine an alternative and choosing it after you have seen the alternatives for yourself. From the outside, the character may appear to have ended where they began. Their relationship to that place, person, belief, or life can be completely different.

Maybe home really was where they wanted to be.

Now it is something they chose rather than the edge of the only world they knew.

Transformation does not always require throwing away the old self. Sometimes it gives that person enough room to decide which parts were worth keeping.

I care about who stories expect to change

I cannot think of a kind of transformation that has no place in fiction.

Characters can be redeemed. Corrupted. Cured. Changed by love. Changed by grief. Become parents. Decide they never want children. Leave home. Return home. Become softer, crueler, louder, quieter, stranger, more conventional.

Any one of those transformations can belong in the right story.

Patterns are where I start paying closer attention.

When a certain kind of character repeatedly enters fiction with trait X and leaves only after acquiring trait Y, eventually the pattern stops feeling like individual character development. It starts revealing which kinds of people a culture considers unfinished.

If every character who does not want romance eventually discovers the right person, that means something.

If every disabled character's happiest ending requires a cure, that means something.

If every angry woman has to become gentler before the story will let her be loved, that means something.

If every character who rejects a traditional life eventually realizes the traditional life was what they needed all along, that means something too.

None of those arcs is automatically wrong on its own. Repetition changes the context around them.

The same thing applies to stories about resisting oppressive systems. A character can overthrow someone enforcing a status quo and then become the person who maintains essentially the same structure. That could be an excellent tragedy, a story about compromised revolutions, or an examination of how power reproduces itself.

What matters to me is whether the story understands what happened.

When an unconventional character ends up conforming, I want their transformation to belong to that specific person rather than function as proof that everybody eventually grows into the same acceptable life.

I want change to create possibilities, not quietly reduce them.

Queerness gave transformation a particular meaning for me

My own relationship with transformation is impossible to separate completely from queerness.

A lot of us grow up being handed expectations before we understand enough about ourselves to question them. There are assumptions about who we will love, what relationships will look like, what our bodies mean, which milestones we should want, and what kind of future counts as successful.

When you do not have much queer support growing up, those assumptions can feel less like one possible future and more like the structure of reality.

Discovering otherwise can be disorienting.

There is the obvious relief of finding language for something that previously existed only as discomfort, difference, or a question you did not know how to ask. There can also be grief for the time spent trying to fit something that never fit particularly well.

And then there is the problem of actually building a life with that knowledge.

Knowing you are allowed to be something does not instantly teach you how to be it.

You still have to make decisions. You may have to reconsider relationships, expectations, boundaries, and the future you assumed you were moving toward. You have to discover what you want once "what I am supposed to want" stops providing the answer.

That experience has probably shaped my fiction more deeply than any conscious decision to write about transformation.

I am interested in characters discovering that the life they were given is not the entire map.

What they do after that interests me even more.

Change does not erase what came before

One thing I resist in stories is transformation that cleans up all evidence of the process.

Someone changes, and suddenly the person they used to be seems irrelevant. Their old coping mechanisms vanish. Their grief resolves. Their relationships reorganize without friction. A revelation explains the past so completely that nothing messy survives it.

My experience of change is much less efficient.

New knowledge does not remove the years you spent without it.

Making a better choice today does not make yesterday's choice disappear.

Leaving a harmful situation does not mean you immediately stop using the skills that helped you survive it.

Changing your mind can be absolutely necessary while still requiring you to reckon with whatever you did while you believed something else.

Transformation creates history.

I want characters to have that history rather than stepping out of an important moment with a freshly installed personality.

The person they become should contain evidence of the person who got them there.

Even wanted transformation can involve grief

Some of the hardest changes are the ones you know were right.

You can choose something willingly and still miss what it replaced.

A new life may cost access to a familiar one. A belief that once made the world easy to understand may become impossible to keep. A relationship may have depended on a version of you that no longer exists. You may realize that you no longer want a future you spent years preparing for.

There is grief in that.

It does not invalidate the choice.

I think we sometimes struggle to let those emotions coexist. If leaving was right, why are you sad? If becoming this person made you happier, why do you miss anything about before? If the old future was never really yours, why mourn it?

Because familiarity has weight.

Because people can love things that were not good for them.

Because an imagined future can occupy real space in a life even if it never happens.

Because choosing one possibility often means closing another.

I want transformation to have room for all of that. A character can be relieved and grieving, frightened and certain, happier and still angry about what it cost to get there.

Those contradictions make the change feel lived rather than symbolic.

We are also changed by things we never deserved

There is another idea I try to avoid: that suffering becomes worthwhile because it transforms someone.

Terrible experiences can change people. That does not make the experience necessary, valuable, or secretly good for them.

Someone can grow around an injury without owing the injury gratitude.

They can become more compassionate after grief without suggesting that losing someone was a fair price for compassion.

They can build a life they love after something awful and still wish with complete sincerity that the awful thing had never happened.

That distinction matters to me.

Transformation can come from pain without turning pain into a gift.

The changed person still gets to decide how they understand what happened to them.

The aftermath is where choice returns

Stories often place enormous emphasis on the event that changes someone. I keep returning to the quieter question that follows it: what now?

A character has survived something they never expected to survive. They have made the choice they spent the whole story avoiding. They know the truth. They have lost the thing they were trying to keep. They have become someone the person at the beginning could not have imagined.

Then they have to live as that person.

That life will involve more choices.

They may discover that some part of the transformation does not suit them after all. They may change direction again. They may want something their earlier self would have hated. They may recognize old habits returning and decide whether those habits still serve a purpose.

The future is shaped by what happened, but it is not completely dictated by it.

That is probably the part I find most hopeful.

You do not have to become untouched by the past in order to have a future.

You only have to continue having one.

There is no final form

I do not think we eventually reach the version of ourselves who has finished becoming.

There are major thresholds. Some choices divide a life so clearly that "before" and "after" become useful categories. Some realizations make it impossible to see the world the same way again.

Then time continues.

The person on the other side encounters new people, new circumstances, new desires, new mistakes, and new information. They change again.

That is what I want transformation to mean in my work.

Change can be survived without pretending survival makes it painless. Becoming something new can be frightening and still worth choosing. We cannot always return to who we were, and sometimes we discover that returning was never what we wanted. Even the transformations we celebrate can carry losses with them.

Most of all, I want there to be possibility.

Not the promise that everyone eventually becomes exactly who they were meant to be, as though there were only one correct person waiting at the end.

I prefer the idea that we can become people we once lacked the language, support, experience, or imagination to envision—and that meeting one of those people does not close the story.

They still have tomorrow.