Teaching Your Characters a Lesson

Two things I really like; lists and diagrams. And I'm sorry, my readers, that you must get the brunt of it. Today is the day for another list.

Adding Lessons


lesson |ˈlesən|noun1 an amount of teaching given at one time; a period of learning or teaching: an advanced lesson in math |a driving lesson.• a thing learned or to be learned by a student.• a thing learned by experience: the tragedy is a lesson in disappointment.• an occurrence, example, or punishment that serves or should serve to warn or encourage: let that be a lesson to you!
I'm going to keep this quite simple. 
Read it, learn it, live it. 

The point of reading a story is to see a character progress. Do you think they're going to wake up in the morning and suddenly decide to be a person? Maybe in some faraway planet but we aren't going to talk about exceptions, here we do things differently. 

Uno - Learn by Teacher

Oh see me being all bilingual? 

The most basic way. Have your character learn by teacher. Elect someone in your story to be their teacher and physically give them the title of teacher. You literally should tell your reader the teacher is the teacher. 

Dos - Learn by Model

Give your MC someone to look up to, someone to be like. You may hint at or physically say that they admire them. Your character is then changed because of what their role model does.

Tres - Learn by Mistake

Have your character mess up and do something wrong. Come on, you can't expect them to be perfect! Have them fall down the stairs or trip on a curve or forget someone's name, then have them learn from it. Have them learn from someone else's mistake!

The Big Bad List of Ways to Learn

• School
• Teacher
• Apprenticeship
• Own Mistake
• Someone Else's Mistake
• Role Model
• In Training
• By Practice
• In the Middle of a Battle
• Come to the Realization by Themselves for Change
• Academy
• Nunnery

There is no wrong place for a lesson. It can be a moral lesson, and academics lesson, or a training lesson like how to use a knife. You can turn everything they do into a lesson, if you so please, but I would not recommend it. 

Guys, thank you so much for reading, you have no idea how grateful I am to anyone who has read this far. I love having an audience! (Feel free to correct me if I write something in a post you don't agree with or correct my spelling errors - I know I have them) Again, thank you so very much and have a nice day!