Making stuff up: Characters to plot

Every writer I know has a lot of trouble with some part of the making-up process. The most common difficulties seem to be with plot, or with characters…and quite often, the people who find making up characters “the easy part” have horrible difficulties with plot, and vice versa.

This is mostly normal (if one defines “normal” as “something that happens to almost everyone who tries to write fiction”). It is, however, a little odd, because plot and characters are inextricably entwined – if one has uninteresting characters who don’t care about what’s happening, the most action-packed adventure will not be exciting and that romance that’s supposed to be emotionally fraught will fall flat; if one has a flat-lined plot, the fascinating characters will collapse under the weight of trying to carry the whole book on their own. There are exceptions to both of these statements, but in general, the plot and the characters are like a couple of ice dancers doing one of those moves where they hang on to each other and spin; if one of them lets go, they both go flying in opposite directions.

This should make it easy to get from one to the other…but it doesn’t.

From a plot perspective, there are two types of characters: those who drive the plot, and those who are driven by it. Plot-driving characters are the ones who have a clear purpose that they are striving toward. The poor kid dreaming of going to college, the police detective whose job is finding the murderer, and the marooned survivors of the spaceship crash trying to survive are all plot-drivers. Once an event (like the murder or crash) has kicked them into motion, they keep going on their own.

Non-driving characters are happy with their lives as they are. They have no burning reason to move toward a life-changing goal. Sometimes, they can be shoved into motion by being kidnapped by slavers or having the villain murder their family or burn their village, but it generally takes something extreme to get them going, and frequently they’ll stop as soon as they possibly can.

Coming up with a plot for a driver-character is usually relatively easy. Get them in motion and they’ll keep going. All the writer has to do is come up with new obstacles (and the character’s reactions and eventual solutions to them)…as long as the plot, the thing they are in motion toward, fits the thing that is driving them. A character who would grab the story and run off with it if the plot was about getting into medical school can do a spiffing imitation of a non-driver character if you try to make them the center of a spy thriller.

Coming up with a plot for a non-driver character is like pulling teeth. These are the slackers of the literary world; given half a chance, they’ll grab a glass of wine and head for the hot tub on the back porch, and they’ll stay there, ignoring the writer’s need for them to do anything until the writer, in desperation, has the ninjas invade.

One solution for this is to make some other, driver character into the main character, and leave the non-driver as an observer and reporter of the story. The classic example is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, recording Holmes’ adventures. Sometimes, though, the writer is more interested in the slacker than in any of the other potential driver-characters, so making someone else the main plot-driver character doesn’t always work.

You can also try to find a villain whose maneuvers keep forcing the slacker to do something. Even most slackers will try to escape if they’re kidnapped. The problem here comes with the next step. A proper driver character who has just escaped will immediately take steps to get revenge, stop the villain, or at the very least catch the kidnapper in order to prevent it from happening again. A true slacker, on being rescued, will head for the hot tub because catching the villain isn’t his job, that’s what police are for.

This brings me to the first big mistake people commonly make when they’re trying to gin up a plot from a cast of characters: they try to develop a plot for the characters, instead of from the characters. They start by making up a bunch of characters, take a cursory look at what they could be involved in, and then start making up plot twists…and never look back at the characters to see if their twisty political ploys or nifty action-adventure incidents are really something these people would do.

Working from the characters means looking at what they want, what they need, and what they’re willing to do to get it. A lot of slacker characters want a vacation in the Bahamas, but they only want it in a casual “that would be lovely” sort of way. They’re not willing to do anything to make it happen. There are also driver-characters want something very badly and are willing to do all kinds of things to make it happen…but the thing they want and the stuff they’ll do isn’t the kind of thing the writer usually writes about. If the writer doesn’t recognize this, he/she is likely to try stuffing an action-adventure James Bond character into a sweet Regency Romance plot, with horrible results. (If the writer does recognize this, and works with it, that James Bond/Regency crossover can be brilliant.)

So when one is trying to work up a plot from some characters, the first question is always, What do they want? How badly? And the second question (especially for drivers) is Why don’t they already have it, if they want it that badly? Sometimes, the answers to these come as a result of a precipitating incident: the bandits burn the village, the spaceship crashes, Mr. Darcy moves to town. As a result, the main character has a new goal: revenge on the bandits, surviving, marrying Mr. Darcy. This goal is really, really important, but there’s an obvious reason why the character doesn’t already have it – they didn’t need revenge or Mr. Darcy or to survive til help arrives, until after the starting incident happened.

The next question is What are these characters willing to do to get what they want? And then What are these characters absolutely NOT willing to do, even if not doing it means they never get what they want? One can then look for plot twists that deny the goal or that force them to choose between the thing they want and the thing they won’t do.

An alternative that sometimes works for slackers is: What is the thing they fear most? Or possibly What would make them totally outraged? Your slacker might be unmoved by murder but infuriated by someone vandalizing a painting. Also, preventing something from happening can be as much a goal as making something happen.

Yet another thing to look at, which I’ll get into in more detail when I get to making stuff up in the middle, is how the character’s goals might change based on their experiences as the story moves along. A character who starts off wanting to find a lost sheep may end up wanting to slay the dragon or become ruler of the kingdom.

None of this gives you an actual plot; what it does is give you elements that you can use to construct a plot. If you’re an intuitive writer, you’ll probably be drawn more to one set of answers or ideas about the character’s wants than to others. If you’re analytical, it’s more a matter of looking at the possibilities and deciding which of them would make a story you’d want to write.

Once you know this stuff about your character(s), you can start constructing the plot. The answers to the above questions – especially What do they want? And What do they fear? – should suggest some potential incidents, stuff that can happen to the character. Plotting is about organizing these incidents into a coherent story, with cause-and-effect and building tension. You don’t normally start the plot with defeating the dragon to save the kingdom and then have the hero defeat the bear to save the flock of sheep. You do it the other way around.

Note that this applies regardless of whether one is talking about an action-adventure plot or one that is psychological or emotional. The only real difference is that with action-adventure, the incidents involve things that threaten the character physically (like car chases or sword fights), while the incidents in a psychological or emotional plot involve things that threaten the character’s mental stability or emotions (like losing a job or finding out their spouse is cheating). Dramatic events like a sword fight certainly can affect the character’s emotions and identity; the difference is that in the emotional plot, the main point of the physical fight is the mental/emotional impact, while in the physical-action plot, the main point is whether the character is injured or the bad guy gets away.

Back to constructing the plot. The first question here is, What is the situation the character starts from? Is he/she in the hot tub with champagne, or taking a walk, or reading a book? Next, What is the next thing he/she is going to do? Even a horrible slacker is going to have to get up to pour some more champagne at some point. Finally, What can go wrong? And then What will the character do about it?

Ideally, of course, one wants the thing that goes wrong and the thing(s) the character does about it to lead the character toward an interesting set of incidents that can be molded into the story the author wants to write. More on that when I get to pulling it all together.

Next up, settings and situations to plot and characters.

On March 2, 2016   /   Writing  

Tags: characters, plot, process