Plot and characters go together like green eggs and ham; one without the other just isn’t as interesting. Yet a lot of writers consistently have trouble making them work together. Either they’re so focused on their characters that they forget to make the plot work, or they’re so focused on the plot that the characters become little cardboard puppets just going through the motions.
Whichever way the problem runs, the keys to getting out of it are balance, flexibility, and occasionally reminding oneself that what you’re after isn’t green eggs or ham; it’s both together.
Balance means that you don’t spend three weeks twisting and polishing your plot to a high gloss and then you start writing. It means you spend a couple of days thinking about the plot, and then a couple of days thinking about the characters, and then a couple of days thinking about how putting those people into your original plot idea will change it, and then a couple of days thinking about how your people will react and change if your current plot events happen to them, and so on. Back and forth.
Flexibility means that you aren’t wedded to any particular idea – plot or characters – at all times. When you’re developing the story, especially, you have to keep trying out new notions and alternate possibilities even if they completely change everything you thought you were sure of so far.
If you are somebody who likes to talk about your stories in development, this will drive your friends absolutely crazy.
“Wait, I thought the purple mage was the bad guy,” they say.
“Oh, I decided it’d be more interesting if he was spying for the good guys.”
“But then why does he kidnap the heroine’s son?”
“Oh, he doesn’t; he got caught spying and she finds him when she goes to let all the kids out of the dungeon.”
“Kids? Dungeon?”
“I decided to make her a school teacher, so instead of one son she has a whole classroom of kids to rescue along with the spy. Or wait, maybe it’d be better if the villain kidnapped her, and the kids have to rescue both of them…wait, no, she’s the spy, and he’s the teacher! Yeah, that’ll work…”
“I’m confused…”
“It’s OK; it’ll make sense after I’ve written it.”
When a writer gets too focused on one thing, be it characters or plot, they tend to forget to think about the interaction between the two, and they end up with something like chocolate-covered-garlic or sour-cream-and-onion ice cream: mixing two things that would be fine on their own, but that really don’t work together very well.
Plot and characters are inextricably intertwined in any effective story. Plot is stuff that happens to the characters because of who they are and what they do, and living through the events of the plot changes the characters (as any life experience changes the person who experiences it). Separating the two is often useful in order to examine and talk about particular aspects of each, but in practice, it’s a lot like trying to separate an egg yolk from the egg white after the egg has been scrambled.
If you have a character who Just Wouldn’t Do That at a critical point in your plot, you have only two choices if you want your story to continue to work: you can jettison the plot, or you can jettison the character. Forcing the character to sneak into the dungeon when he’s more of a let’s-negotiate-a-ransom type isn’t going to work without some kind of change.
This sort of problem generally crops up in mid-book somewhere, and if the writer isn’t paying attention – if she’s focused too narrowly on Following The Plan – she may just steamroller on past it and end up wondering why the story’s gone flat. (This happens to character-centered writers just as often as plot-centered ones; the character-centered ones really, really don’t want to have to come up with a different plot when they sweat blood getting this one done, so they stick to the outline, while the plot-centered ones really, really like the whole rescue-from-the-dungeon sequence and don’t want to change it.)
This is where flexibility and balance and keeping both plot and characters in mind at once come into play. Once you see that the dungeon scene isn’t going to work as planned, you can decide whether you’re going to rewrite the character so he’s more of a jump-in-and-do-it guy and the sneaking becomes plausible, or whether you’re going to rewrite the plot so far so that your negotiator-guy has some really excellent and believable reasons for not negotiating this time, or whether you’re going to throw away your plot from here on out and let him go ahead and negotiate instead of sneaking, and then see what happens.
Thanks for the advice! I only recently started following your blog, but it looks very helpful. I’m trying for a plot/character balance, but I sometimes tend to plan my characters according to what their role is in the story and then stick to the plot, trying not to let the characters do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s good or not . . . I guess we’ll see. 🙂
This is a ridiculous reaction but your sour-cream-and-onion ice cream idea immediately made me think of really, really cold dip served in a cone made of fried potato. I bet it could be tasty. Chocolate-covered garlic, though, yeah, sounds yuck.
My most consistent problem has been needing to change the plot in order to fit the characters, which I’m mostly quite willing to do, although in my second book it really sort of ruined the classic romance aspects. My plot had my hero rescuing the heroine but my heroine refused to permit that to happen. She rescued herself. A couple reviewers commented that there wasn’t much romance and it was because (IMO) my heroine ruined the big romantic moments. They still wind up HEA, but the drama doesn’t tie into their HEA. It’s fun to look at in retrospect and see how that happened.
A related problem (for me) is discovering that you’re in the wrong POV. I’m writing something now where one character is absolutely focused. She has a job to do and nothing else interests her. All the little details like sounds and description felt wrong for her because at that moment in time, she would not care about them. She would not be noticing that a coyote was howling in the distance. But the scene wound up feeling repetitive and mechanical, because all she cares about is the one thing. Switching to another character’s POV let me widen the angle so I could make the scene more evocative and interesting for the reader.
Luckily, I feel like this is something I’m learning how to do better. With the story I just finished (yay!) I had to change who the main character was even, because the character I *had* chosen just wasn’t wanting to cooperate with the plot. If anything, I’d say I’m more plot driven, since I always try to think of ways the characters might decide to do things my way. Of course, that doesn’t always work, and sometimes I have to change things. *sigh*
Sarah: Fun fact – the sour-cream-and-onion ice cream thing originates in Searching for Dragons, with a magic cauldron that makes amazing meals, but doesn’t do desserts very well. All it can manage are burned mint custard and the aforementioned ice cream.
I’m not sure if my plot is pushing aside my characters, or vice versa. I’m doing major revisions right now (mainly involving adding large chunks to fill out my once-over-lightly first draft), and I’ve gotten stuck in the gloomy feeling that I’m not doing very well on either. I’m usually inclined to concentrate on person-to-person interactions, but I somehow ended up with a largely action-based plot with lots of political intrigue, and I don’t know if it’s coming off right. Also, according to my sister who’s one of my first readers, my main character has no character arc and no internal struggles. Evidently my preference for being nice to my characters has come back to bite me.
(Correction – the ice cream is actually mentioned first in Dealing with Dragons.)
I tend to be strongly on the side of character development — I understand the main character’s arc, and have problem with a coherent plot. I tend to then jettison plot elements when necessary, which doesn’t tend to help the coherence much . . . I just tend to think in terms of big inward changes as being ‘plot’, which they aren’t always.
Thank you for this post! I would love to know more about this, if you have more to say. The plot-character balance has been a major issue for me.
I’m definitely inclined toward being true to my characters. Which is why my plot outlines sometimes writhe like the Mississippi in flood. When the character wants to do something different, I change the plot to suit and then make whatever adjustments are necessary for the change to work. Probably because I simply *can’t* come up with a plot that interests me if I’m considering the plot in isolation. My plots only live if they are grounded in and stem from character and setting. So character and setting are my sovereigns. Plot bows and submits to them as necessary.
When I was new to writing, I often had to write out the events of the story. Only on the revision would the characters reveal their motives and what they were thinking.
I’ve gotten better.
This is a great post. Thank you!
I am more of a character writer, but I fall into that same plot trap for exactly the reasons you mentioned. The first time I tried writing, the characters ended up just wandering about a blank, featureless landscape making one-liners. The second time, I pretty much killed the story by sticking to an outline- it just didn’t feel right. This post is giving me an inkling of why. I’m still trying to juggle the extremes.
Chocolate-covered garlic? Well, considering that some like chocolate with hot peppers, CCG might not be so extreme an example.