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

[huinare]

At risk of sounding like my only comments on these entries are going to be "me too!," I relate very much to this.

I've never been the type of writer to develop a plot outline. I have characters I want to work with, and I latch on to them and run from wherever I decide the beginning ought to be. I usually do not know exactly what's going to happen to them, aside from a few Big Ideas for compelling scenes and possibly a vague and highly malleable idea of the ending.

Someone once suggested that I cut AMC by 75%, and I could certainly do that, but that suggestion rather misses the point of what I think makes the story work in the first place.

Now I just feeling like "tsk"ing the suggester. I've not had the chance to read AMC yet, but all of this only makes me more inclined to make the time this summer.

[dawn_felagund]

I've never been the type of writer to develop a plot outline.

Me neither. In fact, in high school, I was so turned off by the idea of having to outline anything that I wrote, including essays, that I used to write the essay early and then build the inevitably required outline from it. As my nonfiction work has grown beyond the five paragraphs required in high school, I have learned to use outlines for that, but not for fiction. The most I might do is jot some plot sequences if I know ahead of time that certain events have to happen in a certain order to make the story work. I have no memory for plot, so I'm always worried I'll get so wrapped up in the story that I'll forget the order things have to happen and end up making a major mistake. I've always felt that outlining ruins some of the fun for me. After all, I like discovering right alongside the characters what's going to happen in the story! :)

Completely random aside: What kind of bird is pictured in your icon?

[huinare]

The most I might do is jot some plot sequences if I know ahead of time that certain events have to happen in a certain order to make the story work.
Ditto.

Oh those patronizing outline requirements in primary school were one of the reasons I got so anxious about essays that my grades in classes were sometimes C's and D's due to not completing them (compared to now, where, left to my own devices, I castigate myself eternally if I receive the rare B in a course).
I'm hyper-organized about class notes and other things where I'm receiving information in real time, but I can't outline things before I'm convinced I actually have the info!
__________
Re icon: It's a magpie! =) I can't remember the exact species. I take great delight in all corvid birds.

[dawn_felagund]

I castigate myself eternally if I receive the rare B in a course

*waves* Yep. So me too. :D

It's a magpie! =)

Thank you! We don't have them here, but I saw them all over when I was in England. And then I realized I had one on my Scythian T-shirt! :D I meant to look them up but when I saw your icon thought I'd just ask instead. :)

[with_rainfall]

Genuine emotion is the heart of any story, whether poetry or prose. It reminds me of Robert Frost's quote, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Of course it takes skill and practice too, and lots of failure along the way, to become even a halfway decent writer. But at the end of the day, if the author isn't emotionally invested in the characters, the story will be lifeless. If the writer can't even summon up any real feeling for characters, how can the reader be expected to?

[dawn_felagund]

And yet it sometimes seems, to me anyway, that this expectation does sometimes exist. Until I began participating in fandom, creative writing was taught to me as an almost clinical process. (In fact, interning in a creative writing class last year, I got that impression again!) There were the outlines and the character maps and the overreliance on the thesaurus ... I do realize that these tools can help new writers manage the overwhelming task of putting a story from their head onto paper, but I do think there comes a time when a person just needs to sit in front of a blank page and just go. :)

Incidentally, I think my next post in this series will be about emotion in writing ... :D

[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

[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

[dreamflower02]

I am rarely a plot person either-- I mean some of my stories do have plots, but that's only an excuse to explore the characters. A good many of my stories have no plot at all and are just vignettes, slices of life or character studies.

Good characters will always keep me reading, even if the plot's full of holes. I can't say vice-versa.

[dawn_felagund]

I think most stories are a bit of both. And I think to sustain a longer story, plot is essential as well, but it should grow from the people rather than the other way around. Even a character study usually has some plot, I think! :) It's just not earth-shattering, but if you care about the person in the piece, that split grocery bag suddenly matters! :)

[spiced_wine]

which in short, says that a story about a character (written to be realistic and empathetic) walking with a heavy sack of groceries that splits and breaks halfway to her destination will inspire more emotion in readers than a story about a character (written flatly and wholly in service to the plot) undertaking an exciting quest where she risks risks life and limb

This is so true. I have mentioned to other people that if an author who is skilled in characterization were to write an entire story that had two people sitting in a room talking, I would be engrossed. I have read many stories (both fanfic and original fiction) where the people get propelled through a series of dramatic events, and all I feel is boredom. Since the characters took second place to the plot, they were not developed enough for me to care about them. For me, those stories fail.

I start with people rather than plot.It started with a person for me. My main OC. In the days when I was unaware of fanfic I role-played for many years. I virtually always rp-d original