Character-Centered and Plot-Centered – Making Room

 

“Do you write plot-centered or character-centered stories?” is a favorite question between writers. But it’s usually asked just as a way to insist on strong characters, sometimes suggesting a mix but sometimes to claim a plot doesn’t even matter compared to the people in it. From my own Unified perspective, I always want to join the authors who hold out for balancing the two… except I keep seeing some hard facts in favor of the “Characters Rule!” approach that are hard to balance out at all.

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Of course, “character” means different things to different people. Indiana Jones is an unforgettable guy, but not as much for the reasons most people think of when they really get into character-building. Yes, he’s an action hero who dares to be afraid of snakes, but that only goes so far as a “deep, realistic human being.” He’s great partly for adding just the right touches of humor and humanity to the thrills, but also because the overall film (from plot to lighting levels) coalesces around him to make him look great—“I love Indy” is partly shorthand for just loving watching his movies.

–Or is it the other way around? Maybe the character isn’t a tool for the overall story, maybe the story is a device to make us believe the character is possible. Not “possible” in that “If I get mugged someone will whip the thug’s gun away,” but meaning that heroism, facing fears, style, and all the rest of it have something to say about our own lives.

It’s not like we writers don’t know how valuable characters are. Loosely speaking, “plot” can be absolutely whatever comes into the story, and some tales are all about lingering over their people while others rush on to the next task to take on. But we humans are the proverbial social animal; we’re wired to notice anything about a Who more than we do about a What or How. So any time some hero’s about to duck a bullet through sheer skill, we know it would be so much more thrilling (and easier to explain) to say that it instead comes down to him facing his fears or realizing it’s the “friend” at his back who’s going to shoot him.

But is even that getting away from the characters? Many people think so; sometimes “plot-centered” is code for turning up their noses at any kind of genre fiction and any challenge or adventure that isn’t perfectly everyday.

The thing is, they’re partly right:

• First Danger of Dangerous Plots: is what’s at risk so big that you’re skipping most of life’s questions of whether a goal’s worth struggling for, for the hero and everyone around him?

Once someone finds a killer hunting him or her plane goes into a crash-dive, they don’t have to resolve if that’s their priority now. That can be an advantage for higher-stakes tales—once you settle on a big threat, you don’t have to convince the reader it matters. But it also means those characters aren’t dealing with the ordinary choices about how things compete with their regular lives, and how persuasive the easy choice and “What if I just walk away” are for all of us.

So, when we choose what kind of story we want to write, we need to see how much that’s limiting its ties to those regular challenges even if it’s adding focus to the bigger thrills. But it doesn’t mean a strong plot has to squeeze out some of our character choices.

One clue to that is that sometimes even small, adventureless tales end up being more plot than character anyway. A “career tale” can be purely about how to be a better accountant or rock star, or a romance can slip from the character issues of “Who’s right for me?” to plot twists struggling over “Can I get her alone in time to say I’m sorry?” But of course these tales still have one way they’re usually closer to character-based than the bigger-stakes tales:

• Second Danger of Dangerous Plots: is what’s affecting the plot so different from ordinary life, so that how he copes with it doesn’t generalize as well to the reader’s own struggles?

(Yes, in my Plot – Just Three Tools? breakdown, this is drawn from the Difficulty tool while the other Danger was the Reward and Cost questions.)

One of the biggest reasons characters are fun reading is that anything about human choices has some meaning to everything else human. Most readers haven’t tried hunting killers, but we don’t even need to have had a demanding boss ourselves to relate to the hero biting his tongue and trying to listen hard for what he needs to keep his job.

Whatever the story’s plot is, here are a few ways to make the most of your characters:

• Character is deciding What someone wants, not just How to get it. A romance could be “Can she get the promotion to face her boyfriend as an equal?” but it’s exploring character more if she can’t get it and has to consider if dating her boss is worth what it does to her self-image. –Of course, one thing both versions depend on is neither character losing their jobs so the problem disappears.
• Character is visibly Caused by Characters, not just events. The less someone is forced into a position by big events (let alone “just born bad,” or good) and the more we see they’ve made choices to get as far as they have, the more we see the choices they have ahead matter too.
• Character is Checking All The Choices. You can rush the plot along by showing there are only a few things to try doing next… or you can take a moment to show someone trying to consider every option, and/or showing their blind spots. Bad characters in danger never call the police, good ones realize they don’t have time—and great ones have reasons they hate to trust anyone (or they have a really well-presented Don’t Have Time scene).
• Character is solving the How with the Why. You can do a great story of how a general wins a war on his maps and blasts through the enemy lines, but it’s so much more human to focus on his own weakness of being suspicious or impulsive, or learning to work with his superior. Biases and bosses, biases and bosses are always fun.
• Character is Other Characters being free too. If you want to do justice to the hero winning a victory through human insight, don’t let the people he has to persuade or figure out have their own choices locked in. A cop who sees the hero chased by a murderer has a lot of choices, but not as many as a cop who only sees him get some threatening calls, or if the witness is only a neighbor who isn’t sure he wants to get involved. Real folks deserve a full range of real folks to deal with.
• Character is Consequences, even to the plot. A strong plot often means finding a path to the end that you want… but it can lead to doing “character development” as various dead end things the hero tries that just lead to him getting back on course, supposedly changed inside but not really outside. How often have we seen a hero tempted to leave the struggle for others to take over, or to sacrifice himself for innocents, but events force him to do what the story needs? You can measure how much character affects story by how completely a “change” he goes through really changes where the story’s going and how his life stands now. (Or better yet, it puts him in a wheelchair, or teaches him to fly.)
• Character might be a Plot After The Plot. Decide where your story is on the range between one main plot goal fed by a couple other threads, versus defining the tale as several separate goals. The more the story can completely finish one goal and still be about what’s next as much as it was about the last thing, the more clearly it’s like real life. Isn’t that the kind of thing Fitzgerald meant, about American lives that don’t have “second acts”?
• Character is Character-ization. Going back to Indiana Jones again, he’s memorable partly for a great movie but also for the mix of little touches that constantly say what he’s like… that is, much of screenwriting a new Indy would be the three words “cast Harrison Ford.” There are whole posts’ worth of little things that even the fastest-paced tale can take a moment to include: gestures and extra actions, clothes (the hat!) and home, the right dialog style and thoughts. And yes, you can mention or even show what the hero’s doing an hour before the next plot-relevant scene, or a year before that. On the one hand it might slow things down, but on the other every glimpse is part of what he is, and you never know when some reader will fall in love with a character for a passing statement about how he paid his college bills.

–So by all means, let’s keep the classic question in mind: How does your hero do his laundry?

It’s all character. A strong plot can keep circling back to the character too, or it can be streamlined to carry him along but mostly interact with the world… it’s all degrees of focus, and knowing your options. Either way, the character’s still there in the center, and it all helps make the story.

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