100 Things Challenge (#2):: The Origins of Fiction: Character vs. Plot

[dawn_felagund]

A few years ago, I made a statement that got people quite unexpectedly riled up. I said that not much exciting tends to happen in my stories, plot-wise. Ho boy, did people jump to defend me against myself, arguing that stories like Another Man's Cage were actually quite involved in terms of plot and very exciting in that regard. At the time, it

Comments

[heartofoshun]

You describe very well why one would write or read character-driven fiction and what it really means in the concrete.

The plot that develops is incidental to the characterization rather than the other way around.

I actually think every heated argument I ever had about writing was based on the taste question of plot vs. character, including at root my own annual rants about how alien the idea of Nanowrimo is to me. Unless I were to use it to write a sequel to an already produced novel or fanfiction, it would take me a month of thinking to decide who are the characters in this novel. If I do that in advance of the starting date, then I don't consider it a 30-day project. Plus, what kind of random number is 50,000 words? Way too long for a novella and considered too short for a standard novel by most publishers. (I wrote a 52,000-word novel. But it was fanfiction and I was the publisher!)

There are people who initially decide on a plot and then think about the characters. Personally, I have to know almost everything from birth to the beginning of a story about my character before they can take a step or speak a word. I often find stories too plotty, or annoyingly over-filled with non-stop action sequences. I never read a story with too much in-depth character development. There was a huge fad for a few years that is finally fading a little of people being encouraged to write surprise-a-minute urgent physical action, claiming it is needed to hook a reader. That reader was never me.

I do not care how clever the premise is or how interesting the world, if I do identify strongly with the protagonists, I will not like a work of fiction. If the characters are flat or utterly unlikeable, no number of car chases or battle sequences or even worlds colliding will make any of it matter to me. (For me, they do not have to be good to be likeable either. Better if they are at least a little wicked, hopefully a complex mixture of good and bad.)

[dawn_felagund]

If I do that in advance of the starting date, then I don't consider it a 30-day project.

Well, the 30 days is supposed to be for the writing itself. I've only done NaNo a couple of times but always started prewriting months in advance. I think part of the point is that we writerly types rarely have trouble or need an excuse to think about the stories we want to write (which is mostly what prewriting is to me; I write down very little) but it's sometimes hard to actually sit and put the stupid thing on paper! :) How would you even define what "prewriting" is for a story? For some of mine, germs of characters and ideas began years before I actually began to work on it; hence, I think, the emphasis on the writing itself. In that respect, I can see how NaNo definitely serves its purpose for some writers in giving them an excuse to make their writing a priority. That's how I always found it worked for me.

The 50K is just the requirement for that month; the story can, of course, be longer, as long as one wants. Nor do I think that the assumption of publication is necessarily relevant, since a lot of people do write fan fiction or just for their own enjoyment; the idea that everything done in fannish or online writing communities should be done with the assumption that the writer will want to publish in major markets someday is one of my pet peeves, incidentally! :) One of the things I do appreciate about NaNo is that all writers are welcomed.

There was a huge fad for a few years that is finally fading a little of people being encouraged to write surprise-a-minute urgent physical action, claiming it is needed to hook a reader. That reader was never me.

Me neither. I don't know if it's how my brain is wired--I am very low on spatial intelligence so fight scenes and the like don't generate any sort of visual image for me; it's just a mess of words without much meaning--or if it's just plain preference, but I need something more than action to hook me, whether a story or a movie or just about anything. I'm with you that I have to care about the people before I can give a crap about what's happening to them.

As with_rainfall noted in the comment above--and I totally agree--there needs to be emotion for a story to work. I don't see how car chases and battles and worlds colliding, in and of themselves, provide any sort of emotional connection to the people they involve.