Character-based plotting…not

The first time I heard an editor talk about character-based plotting, it made me think I was doing something wrong. (This was around 25 years ago, mind.) “Your characters have to want something, and want it badly,” he said. “That’s where you start. All the best plots are character-based.” And I knew that wasn’t where I started.

There is just enough truth in those statements to be disturbing. I’ve heard much the same advice repeated many times in the last twenty-five years, and it got more disturbing every time. Until finally I noticed something.

The people who were saying “Start with the characters and what they want, and use that to develop your plot” were all editors and agents. They aren’t starting with a blank piece of paper. They’re starting with a rough manuscript, something that already has characters and a plot, but that could work considerably better. They’re right in that when the book is finished, the plot will likely revolve around the characters’ wants and needs, but it doesn’t always start that way, certainly not for every writer.

Now, there are certainly writers who do start with their characters, and who work up their plots based on what the characters want or need or have to learn. Two of my best friends routinely produce brilliant work this way. But working up a plot based on what the characters desperately want requires two things: 1) your characters have to want or need something desperately, and 2) you have to know your characters well enough, deeply enough, to know what it is that they want or need or have to learn.

A lot of writers don’t know this when they are at the plot-developing stage of writing. Frequently, they still don’t know it at the end of the first chapter. Doing more up-front work on the characters doesn’t help, because many, many writers have to write their way into their characters, living with them until halfway or three-quarters of the way through the book they finally understand them well enough to say with confidence what each of them really does or doesn’t want and why. At least two authors I know don’t even name their characters until they’re halfway through the book or more.

For these writers, the plot can’t develop out of what the characters want, not during the pre-writing and development stage. Trying to force them to “start with the characters” is an exercise in frustration and futility. For them, the plot has to come initially from things the character isn’t generating within him/herself – natural disasters, villainous plots, mysterious events, murders, a stranger coming to town. Once the writer has a skeleton of a plot, then they can start figuring out what the protagonist’s stake in it is, what they want, why they need to do what the plot says they’re going to be doing.

Sometimes, the writer will get partway through the book and discover that the characters are just not the sort of people who will do the things the original plot says they have to do to keep things on track. The writer then has no choice but to toss the plot outline, or see her characters turn to cardboard puppets. This happens especially often to writers who write their way into characters (and is often the cause of various friends, colleagues, and editors advising them to start with what the characters want, which is ultimately very frustrating because this sort of writer can’t start that way).

Tossing the plot outline is hard to make yourself do, but trust me, you’ll be much happier with the result than you will with a bunch of cardboard puppets. It is also a good sign, because it means you are starting to understand your characters well enough to know what they really will and won’t do, what they truly want (as opposed to what they’ve been saying they want), and what they have to do and be and learn over the course of the story.

Working this way usually means the front part of the manuscript will need revising, now that the author understands the characters’ needs and wants and motives better.  The goal, of course, is to end up with the events of the plot being motivated by the things you now know the protagonist wants and needs and has to learn, even if it all started as a story about the dam bursting or a mysterious stranger murdering the President. Sometimes, the front-end revising is a matter of inserting a few lines here and there to hint at motives or foreshadow later development; sometimes individual scenes and chapters will change radically, or double in size, or have to be cut.

If you are this kind of writer, that is just part of the process. Don’t whinge about it. You get to skip all the “get to know your characters” stuff during pre-writing, but you end up having to do more work on it during the revision phase. (You do get to be cross with people who try to make you “start with the characters to develop the plot,” though.)