En Route to Experience

David Lodge, in his excellent book The Art of Fiction, maintains that, "All novels are essentially about the passage from innocence to experience," and while I'm not sure that I entirely agree -- the novel that I'm working on at the moment follows virtually the opposite trajectory, from world-weariness to redemption - I think it is interesting food for thought.

Novels are most definitely about a journey and essential to that journey is the process of change and growth. It is up to you as the author whether that journey is from innocence to experience, or from despair to hope, but you need to make sure that during his adventures your hero acquires the self-knowledge that he lacked at the outset. The path he follows should take him up one or two blind alleys, the gradient should be steep and there should be plenty of setbacks and breakdowns en route. The creativity for you, as a writer, lies in how you engineer the discoveries your protagonist makes, how you inflect his emotional encounters, but it might be worth putting David Lodge's theory to the test and telling a story that arcs from one state to its opposite....

....just to see what doors it opens for you and your characters along the way.