I saw Beauty and the Beast last night, and it moved me more than I expected. It wasn’t the cinematography, the beautifully decorated sets, Emma Watson, or the hopeful story of love that did it for me. If I’d seen the same movie six months ago, I’d still have felt something, but nothing quite as beautiful as what I felt for an entire hour after seeing this movie. I was so inspired that I came home and immediately wrote the outline to this blog post. I felt this warm, beautiful glow in my chest. A peaceful feeling, like the one you feel right before you easily fall asleep after a particularly rewarding and exhausting day’s work. I’ve changed, somehow. The past several months have probably been the most emotionally engaged of my life. Both my brother and sister have noticed it in their own ways and told me as much. But how did it happen?

All my life, I’ve felt as though my mind was locked in a rational, logical box. From within, I could see others behaving in ways that I could not understand. People developed relationships and made life-altering choices. They experienced significant and often permanent changes in their way of thought. Some of these choices led to success and others to failure. Consequently, I felt as though my mind was imprisoned. Unchangeable. Immovable. I considered it a major character flaw. Why couldn’t I understand how people can be so moved by something as simple as a movie? As a result, I’ve always been interested in stories where people change how they think and become different people.

The major question has always been: “Was it believable?” Last night, I realized that a major part of why I want to become a writer is to discover how to make a reader accept that a character has truly changed. I’ve always subconsciously known this fact about myself, but never mentally verbalized it until now. It’s a transference of my own desire to understand how many people in my life seemed to become different people. Can studying with monks on the top of a mountain really bring you to a peaceful state of mindfulness? Can you really “bend” yourself and “change your mind” like Neo did in the Matrix? Perhaps the best example I have to give (due to obvious circumstances) is that of Belle falling in love with the Beast. In the end, it felt like the moment of redamancy came up short. On the other hand, it is just a movie, and in the limited time they had they got pretty darn close to making it work. How can I capture their successes? How can I use it as an author?

One of my favorite tropes is seeing characters go from good to bad and vice versa. The former is known as the Face-Heel Turn, while the latter is known as the Heel-Face Turn. This popular plot device leads to a lot of drama. The most culturally relevant example is that of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. He began as the “chosen one”, or the one who would defeat the Sith and bring balance to the Force. He ultimately turns evil (as shown in the third prequel) and then turns good again in the original trilogy’s third installment. Was his transformation believable? I feel as though these types of stories present the hardest writing challenge. Not only do you have to make the reader believe it, but you have to expend an enormous amount of writing capital to do it. Often, this transformation ends up becoming less important to the overall theme of the story, so it’s overlooked. The few examples I’ve found of this being done believably tend to live in series form, such as comics or TV shows. The long-form format gives the authors more bandwidth to get viewers emotionally invested in the characters. This also lets them develop the backstory that leads to the character making choices that conflict with their given archetype. Perhaps the best example I’ve ever seen of this actually working is with one of the characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender (seriously, go watch this NOW!).

While I haven’t been able to put my finger on how people change up till now, most of us use persuasive techniques to convince people to take actions every day. This is otherwise known as the art of rhetoric. While facts and examples are often the best method of persuasion, most people can’t keep tons of facts queued up in their mind to cross-examine everything a debater says. If you understand how people think, you can attack the foundation of each general thought and slowly bring them to your side. These types of arguments tend to be more flowery and poetic, often appealing to emotions. Coming from the Midwest, the politics, logic, and reason from Washington, DC was far away. They were just words in the newspaper. It did not help that those in my family were not heavy readers or writers. Even still, we bared our raw emotions at the dinner table every night. How do you convince someone when you don’t have tons of facts to back up your claim?

I noticed early on that it was easy for me to write flowery prose that sounded good but was limited in content. Most of my family has this skill. You can call it creativity, BS’ing, or purple prose. If you aren’t prepared for it, it has the tendency to stir emotions that make it much more difficult to mount a defensible position. When I got in trouble as a child, my mom made me write essays explaining what I did and why it was wrong. She sometimes took it a step further by holding family court when I had a fight with my siblings. Regardless of the facts, the sibling that was the most convincing won the argument. Needless to say, it was a pretty ruthless system, and I had a pretty good record. And still, using these techniques in writing and debate felt cheap to me. I felt shame every time I started to convince someone in this manner. It didn’t feel authentic or genuine. So I changed my style to become as rational and forthright as possible.

Over the years, I found I could always tell when I got close to convincing someone of something. I feel this rising tension and anxiety as I get closer. It’s like the room is electrified and some monumental event is about to take place. I used to recoil at the energy and back off. The power to change the hearts and minds of others is dangerous. What if they do something because I convinced them to do it? Could I live with the consequences? Could I stomach the responsibility? Do I truly believe what I told them? This translates to my current job, where my primary role is to build architectures and convince people to take certain actions. Young engineers look towards leadership to help them feel that this is all worth it, and that they are going in a direction that will lead the program to success. I find myself fighting the constant cynicism of being in their shoes and wishing for the same thing.

This all makes me think about the Belief Gremlin again. You can try to convince someone with reason, but you can’t change someone’s true beliefs that way. I used to believe that appealing to emotion through rhetoric was shameful. People should make their decisions based solely on logic and facts alone. Now I realize that it’s not wrong. Humans need to be moved. It’s the fastest way to persuasion, and it brings new meaning to the phrase, “Hit ’em when they’re down.” So many people talk of the experience of hitting rock bottom that it’s almost become a cliche in the rap industry. What they don’t talk about is that it is always an extremely personal and emotional experience. That beautiful feeling, the glowing ball, is when we find ourselves at our most vulnerable and open to suggestion. I used to believe that inner peace comes from self-acceptance–you realize who you are and enumerate your strengths and weaknesses. Put simply: I am who I am because I cannot change it. I now believe that change is possible, but gradual. You won’t notice that it’s happening, and it requires you to put in place the building blocks of the future you wish to live.