The phrase in the title is not of my invention.

It’s the first line of a poem by the 20th century Russian poet, Yevtushenko whose poetry I discovered round about the age of 16 and have continued to love the handful that I know since then.

People – or rather characters as clearly they are creations and products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner as every published story is obliged to state – are the concern of novelists who have the task of inventing, developing and shaping characters who will convince.

A reader, after all, needs to believe in the populace on the pages – or at least in the given context of the novel. Presumably authors of fantasy are equally duty bound to make their characters seem authentic within their created world even if that world is – well, fantastical.

And any handbook, course, article or talk about novel writing will insist that characters must surprise. They must change within the course of the story or the reader will grow bored.

Yet do people really change? In real life?

Circumstances, outer forces, domestic, national and global events might impact the life surrounding an individual; but on the whole it seems to me that human beings retain their essential selves in matters of tastes, passions, preferences and habits throughout the decades.

Someone who delights in gregarious gatherings at the age of 20 will probably still be seeking such company at 70.

The sort happily seeking a solitary Saturday at one end of the age spectrum will no doubt be selecting something similar at the other.

Interests and hobbies may accrue through a lifetime, but I doubt whether those early delights sparking joy in the 10 year old will be lost once maturity yet alone advanced age are achieved.

I remember the excitement of arriving at a library when I was around 8 or 9 years of age and finding a new book by a favourite author that I could acquire with one of my much cherished cardboard library tickets.

I’m the same now.

Only the nature of borrowing the novel has changed with bar codes and computer self-serve terminals instead of an imperious librarian with her long wooden box of library cards and her splendid date-stamping machine.

But back to the demands on the novelist to ensure characters develop and surprise which is not just a contemporary obligation.

19th century writers had to send their protagonists along a journey towards self-knowledge. Jane Austen heroines certainly make this trip to arrive at the realisation that marriage really is the best fate to befall them and that their future spouse has been hidden in plain sight all the way along.

Dickens causes Pip in Great Expectations to realise what a beastly snob and prig he’s been about Joe Gargery and Magwich and he ends up a changed and much nicer human being as a result of it. And as for Scrooge – well, yes, if ever there was an example of change in attitude, personality and morality, we can always fall back on A Christmas Carol as an example.

But 19th century novels had closed endings. Reader, I married him, Charlotte Bronte curtly informs us, implying a lifetime of happiness (although personally, I’ve always thought that marrying a Byronic, gothic trope type like Rochester was not the best route for a quiet and contented time of it…)

Jane Austen tells us definitively at the end of Emma,

…the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

I’d certainly choose the delectable Mr Knightly over Mr Rochester any day …so Emma eventually learns her lesson and after a few diversions and wrong turnings allows her creator to guide her to a sensible and very wise resolution.

Novelists today, however, are not bound by this neat Happy Ever After conclusion at the end of the story.

And there, perhaps, is the get-out for 21st century writers like me who are doubtful that people really do change that much ….

Even if characters are obliged to alter radically during the course of the novel, there is going to be no assurance that they will stay changed. They might, after the final page of the book has been turned and only blank end papers stare back at the reader, revert. Rebel. Slide back into former ways.

Or the novelist can make the last paragraph so very open-ended that potential, just-about-to-happen change might, in fact, be a mere illusion.

With open endings, anything is possible.

The reader can decide whether the protagonist is going to take that brave step confidently into the unknown, make a success or a total failure of the next imminent stage …

Unless the author writes a sequel, of course.

Personally, I don’t write sequels. I have left the protagonists of my 4 novels poised on the thresholds of new lives, major decisions, tentative new familial relationships – and wonder, from time to time, how they are getting along. After all, it gives Book Clubs material to discuss!

So back to Yevtushenko, a cyclical route to return to his wonderful poem:

No people are uninteresting,

their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,

and planet is dissimilar from planet …..

Happy reading!