I am always surprised that I get more questions about plot than I do about characters. Plot is about what happens – the events and incidents that the characters go through in the process of getting from Situation A at the start of the story to Situation Q at the end of the story. Yes, they can look like a nest of snakes when you’re looking at the main plot and a bunch of subplots, but it’s like untangling five lengths of yarn that the cat has been playing with. Once you separate them, they’re five strings that you can either re-tangle artistically, or braid together, or tie in different artistic knots, but all of them are straightforward lengths of string. It’s the untangling that’s tricky, not the basic idea of string.
Characters, on the other hand, are about several different things at once. They are the reason why the events and incidents matter, and very frequently they’re the reason those events happen in the way that they do. (It’s “very frequently” rather than “always” because there are stories of volcanic explosions, floods, and other natural disasters that aren’t set in motion by any characters, not even ones that are off stage. Most of the time, though, what sets the plot going, and keeps it going, are actions various characters take.)
In addition, characters learn things in the course of a story (or refuse to learn them). They change, grow, and develop…or they don’t. Either way, the writer has to present that change (or lack of it) believably, or the characters start looking like puppets going through the plot motions. And then there are the personalities of the story’s central cast, and the ways those people relate to each other, all of which frequently affect why plot things happen and why they matter, as well as what the characters learn and how they learn it.
If plots and subplots are a tangled ball of string, characters are a random collection of six different grains, raisins, nuts, cranberries, candied orange peel, and dried blueberries, all stuck together in a lump of dough so that most of them are hidden and one cannot immediately tell how much of any one ingredient is present or whether the result will be a complex multigrain bread, a sweet afternoon tea bread, or a fruitcake when it’s finished baking.
I personally can never answer most of the obvious questions about my characters until after a book is written (and sometimes, not even then). I learn about them as I write them, over the course of living with these people in my head for a year or five. It’s much the same way I find out about people in real life, as I get to know them better over the course of a year or two of meetings, lunches, work sessions, parties, arguments, and whatever other interactions we have.
I find, though, that it helps to consider plot through the lens of the characters, and characters through the lens of plot. Too often, I see writers who are focusing on creating a detailed plot-map – X happens, then they do Y, which causes Z to happen – and forget to ask “Would these characters really do Y?” or “What would these people do when X happens?” If your protagonist is a stereotypical shy geek, you’re really going to have to work at it if you want me to believe she hauls off and slugs the six-foot-four Evil Minion with the machine gun, even if that’s what your plot outline calls for.
Occasionally, I also see writers who have fallen in love with a character they’ve envisioned, even though that character doesn’t fit the plot they’re developing. In extreme cases, the writer is so in love with the character that they can’t bear to have anything bad happen to them, so their “plot” disintegrates into a series of picnics and/or minor squabbles over what to have for dinner. They know enough to ask “What would this character risk everything for?” but they can’t stand to actually let them take any risks, so there’s no tension.
A mismatch between character and plot is not necessarily the kiss of death – quite the contrary. You can do really interesting things with a fish-out-of-water story, but only if you’re willing to let the plot bend in unexpected directions and let your character(s) learn, grow, and/or rise to the challenge in equally unexpected ways. (That is, ways that are unexpected to the writer, not the reader.) Your shy geek heroine, faced with the Evil Minion, needs to do something, but it needs to be something that she would think of – maybe convincing him that the box with the blinking lights is actually a bomb or a biological weapon?
Plot and characters interact constantly, which is why my planned-out-in-advance plots never manage to come out quite the way I expected. Plot and characters are complements. A weak or overused plot peopled can sometimes be propped up by a cast of fascinating characters; a twisty puzzle or slam-bang-action plot can compensate for one-dimensional characters. But it’s when the plot and characters are both pointing in the same direction that things really start working.
Strings? Luxury!
I can’t speak for the others asking about plot, but my problem is not having plot-strings, tangled or otherwise, in the first place. What I have are incidents and fragments. They’re bits of fluff, to extend the metaphor, that may or may not be the wool or other fibers that can be successfully spun into strings, and even if they are appropriate fibers, my attempts to spin them have always been hit-and-miss. Too often, when I do think I finally have a plot string, it breaks, leaving me thinking that I never did have a real plot-string in the first place. Either I’m a bad spinner, or there’s a critical fiber-type that I’m unable to obtain (or even recognize) that’s needed for my spinning, or both.
Thus my chronic whine: “Plot is Hard!”
What I have are incidents and fragments.
This, exactly. Trying to spin those bits into a viable plot thread is something I struggle with every time.
Yes, but characters are easy.
Okay, yes, YMMV, all writers have different cards they were dealt, etc. But even if characters don’t come easy to you, there are lots of ways to learn them. You can observe real people, and make up stories and backstories for them. D&D has a whole multi-layered system for creating characters. There are interview sheets, and character how-tos similar in structure to your own world-building guide, and all sorts of other tricks and tips.
How do you observe plot?
It’s much the same way I find out about people in real life
Exactly. And because we’re so used to finding out about people that way, our brains have a trained pattern for filling in those gaps even for fictional people who don’t have answers to those questions until the writer makes them up.
But most people don’t have the same kinds of experience about plot, because mostly plots don’t happen in real life. A chronological series of semi-random events is not a plot — but it is a life, in broad strokes. So how to create a series of events that interrelate and are interdependent and lead to a specific conclusion (and not to any other) in a focused and narratively-satisfying way is virgin ground for most writers. And some brains wrap themselves around the challenge more easily than others.
Before you can braid, or knot, or weave, or even just re-tangle, you’ve got to have strings in the first place.
IOW, what Deep Lurker said.
I had similar difficulties until I got onto theme. Once I did that, I had some idea what kinds of incidents and fragments to introduce that would fit with the story line.
But not everyone can work out a theme while working up a novel. It works for me, but nothing works for everyone. Oh well, if writing was easy, it wouldn’t be satisfying.
I usually recognize a theme of sorts once I’m well into a novel, if not earlier. But I still have to come up with specific plot developments that get where I need to be going, and theme’s no better a catalyst for that for me than practical goals like “then they defeat the bad guy”.
It works so well for me I’m always sad that it won’t for everyone else. But if we were all alike, we’d all write the same book, and there’d be nothing new to read.
So true!
Can you elucidate a little on *how* it works for you (here or elsewhere)? I’m looking for a more granular how-to on plot than I’ve yet found, and even if your method doesn’t work for me, it might spark something useful.
LizV: Something like this:
My first three attempts at a novel all went astray, the first because I had an idea but not idea what would obstruct or oppose my protagonist, the second because I wrote myself into a corner, the third because I felt sorry for my lone(ly) protagonist, and gave him a love triangle.
In other words, I either lacked a storyline, or deviated from it.
So when Jim Baen wrote about Lois McMaster Bujold’s Shards of Honor that it seemed like a romance but was actually about honor, I realized I could have a theme that would hold the story to one topic, and as long as I stayed on-topic, my story(line) should advance.
It’s worked for me, as I said.
If you want to read in more detail, there’s this:
https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/2017/08/writing-301-how-to-write-memorable.html
(My focus there is as much on writing something memorable as anything else.) (And having taught technical writing for years, if I think I have anything I can teach, I try to.)
As our hostess points out, and I’ve realized I need to too, when I give advice, it won’t work for everyone. But maybe it’ll give you a useful thought or two.
Kevin: Thanks for the link! Unfortunately, what I mostly took away from it is that we come up with stories in such fundamentally different ways that we’re talking apples and kumquats right from the start. 😉 But I always like seeing how other people’s brains work!
How do you observe plot?
Plot observations are ‘why did they do that?’ and ‘what could possibly have driven them to do THAT?’. ‘I wonder what they”ll do next’. ‘That’s an… unusual response. I wonder what went on between them for them to to react like that’, ‘hang on, Oslo? Weren’t they in Paris last term? Did they move AGAIN?’ and ‘Divorce? But I saw them just last week when… oh, my. No, it’s something I heard, that didn’t make sense at the time.’
Most plot questions aren’t all that obviously ‘plot’, they’re entangled with characters, and I don’t know how you can observe characters and NOT observe actions and speculate about motivations. Whether character or plot, you always get only a sliver of the truth, a public face, and much of the real events and real motivations is in the background, but the nice thing about fiction is that you can make it all up without shame. (Historians are supposed to have shame, but still make up a lot of stuff.)
I can speculate about motivations all day, but motivations are not plot. Nor are actions; actions can be building blocks of plot, but “they did this, and then they did this, and then they did that” is not a plot, it’s just a series of events. Plots have flow and cause-and-effect and have to make sense, which as we all know real life does not. 🙂
Part of the problem may be that what I’m talking about when I ask about plot, and what other people are talking about when they answer about plot, are not entirely the same thing. I keep trying to figure out a better way to ask the question….
motivations are not plot. Nor are actions
Maybe we *are* talking about different things, but to me, ‘connected actions driven by motivations’ is pretty much the definition of ‘plot’. The sense-making is my job, but I build sense out of those observations, and often the observations are details thrown in for local colour. I can build a plot from one character moving halfway across Europe (obviously something sinister) and another character divorcing much to the surprise of their friends (involved in the sinister thing and wanting to shield their ex-partner from it). All I need is a couple more data points, and the more weird or out-of-character those observations are, the better. If an otherwise unconnected character drove two hundred miles to an indoor skiing centre, they’re _obviously_ planning to go to Norway, and I may end up with a ‘chasing across a snowy landscape on skis’ scene, and in retrospect this was the first sign that they’re involved in our international spy plot.
In reality, the ski centre was an item I randomly picked because it was more interesting than have the character drive to the beach, but once it happened, it smelled like plot. But now that I have it, the interesting reaction obviously is the skier’s partner looking deadly pale when he finds out how she spent her weekend off, because *he’s* involved in the plot, and wants to distract her from any thoughts of snow, while she connected the dots and spied on him and is going to give him the surprise of his life on that Norwegian glacier when she makes off with the Macguffin.
And yes, I got all of this out of the items I randomly threw on the page above.
This sounds a lot like the way I get stories — here’s a character, here’s a cool scene-piece, here’s a bit of dialog about skiing, so obviously they’re going to Norway — so much so that I had to read it thrice to figure out why it doesn’t work that way for me. And it kind of does, but the parts that it sounds like you’re taking for granted are the parts where I struggle. What *is* the sinister thing? *How* did the skier connect the dots? “Snowy landscape on skis” leads to “international spy plot” absolutely makes sense to me, but I still don’t know *why* they’re in Norway or what clever spy thing they’re trying to accomplish/prevent.
And I’m entirely capable of writing 3/4 of a novel and still having no bleeping idea what the Macguffin is.
Let me try it this way: A character gets a piece of mis-directed mail, and takes it to the proper recipient, only to find him dead on his living room floor. She wants to find the killer (because she’s curious, because she thinks the police have got it wrong and wants to see justice done, because it’s the third death in her building this year and she’s worried she’s next — take your pick). So there’s motivation, which drives her to investigate, which she does… how? What clues does she find, and how does she find out what they mean? That’s the point at which I slam to a halt, and dragging something that resembles a coherent chain of clues and meanings into the light of day is a process that should be banned by the Geneva Convention.
(And yeah, that random example wants to be a book now, too. That, we’ve got in common.)
LizV, you said:
” So there’s motivation, which drives her to investigate, which she does… how? What clues does she find, and how does she find out what they mean? That’s the point at which I slam to a halt…”
What I normally do at this stage (or sooner, if possible), is figure out whodunnit, howdunnit, in as much detail as I can. Once I have those details, I start figuring out how to parcel them out to the protagonist(s).
And if I can’t find a way, I cheat. 😉 I change things until there’s some info for my protagonist to proceed from. If necessary, I’ll have an antagonist’s minion attack or accuse the protagonist(s).
Hope that helps (saddened but in no way surprised my approach above didn’t).
Kevin, you said:
“What I normally do at this stage (or sooner, if possible), is figure out whodunnit, howdunnit, in as much detail as I can.”
Which is clearly a reasonable thing to do. But figuring out whodunnit/howdunnit is as big a wall for me to slam into as figuring out individual clues and their meanings. (Yeah, I really suck at plot.) What I’m looking for is a better set of tools to do the figuring out with.
“And if I can’t find a way, I cheat.”
Cheating is an important skill for a writer! 🙂
I try to steer clear of cheating about plot, though; that’s too easy a trap for me to fall into. “Minion attacks protagonist” has a long and venerable tradition behind it — I just stole a variation on it from an old episode of The Rockford Files for something else I’m working on — but it’s not a crutch I want to lean on every time. I’d much rather solve a mystery with the hero being extremely clever than the villain making mistakes.
Part of my difficulty may be that stories don’t come to me as concepts or visuals or structures, but literally as the words. The last time I did this, I got the core of the solution when the smell of dust reminded the protagonist of the smell of the office of a previously unknown-to-the-author character. “Figuring out” isn’t really part of my process, in the conscious, deliberate, front-of-the-brain sense.
(I appreciate the effort!)
It was worth a shot! :} And who knows, maybe between us we’ve given our hostess something she can use to help! 🙂
The few times I’ve tried to plan a story ahead of time—that is plotting—the characters all came out flat and lifeless, without even as much dimension as a cardboard cutout. Many writers have said that plot grows from character; I’ve found if it doesn’t, there is no growth at all.
Seconding this! Even when the initial idea-spark is about the plot, it never really comes to life in my head until I have a sense of the people involved.
Time was that I could figure out my characters’ motives only once I had the first draft in hand.
But once I knew WHAT they did, I knew WHY.
The matter of spinning bit and fragments into plot-threads . . . the Rumpelstiltskin work of writing . . . seems to me a classic case of left-brain and right-brain thinking working together (using those terms metaphorically).
There are brainstorming phases, when you can keep tossing ideas up in the air and seeing what starts sticking together, relishing the freedom of open options. (What if I dropped this character back to a secondary person and instead made his executive officer the MC?) And there are logical phases, where you focus on figuring out the best connections, finding the missing links,and so on, getting the satisfaction of seeing it all link up, like invisible DNA building an RNA strand.
And you keep going back and forth between those phases, as they feed off each other. Moreover, in a kind of fractal way, the same thing happens at lower levels: building a conversation, say, as well as building an overall plot.
It’s what makes writing such fun!