Scott Morgan-Guest Post-How Characters Drive Plot

How Characters Drive Plot

Following is an excerpt from Character Development from the Inside Out by Scott Morgan, Copyright 2011 and published by Open Door Publications, Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

I understand what people mean when they refer to plot-driven versus character-driven stories. They define “plot-driven” as something like a mainstream thriller, such as a James Patterson story, whereas they define “character-driven” as a literary piece by an author like, say, Kristin Hannah.

But I don’t share their zeal for such distinction. Kristin Hannah’s stories all have plots and James Patterson’s stories all have character development. You cannot advance a plot without advancing characters, and you cannot advance characters without advancing plot.

Shine on. In other words, plots only happen to characters that react to them accordingly. Take a mainstream novel like The Shining from Stephen King. In some ways, it’s a straight-up horror novel – haunted house, spectral visitors, croquet mallet (not an ax, this is the book, not the movie), damsel in distress, and psychic powers.

But in a more important way, The Shining is a mesmerizing character study of a genuinely mad man. Jack Torrance unravels so completely from the weight of his demons that by the end it’s almost impossible to think you didn’t see it coming in the first few pages.

But here's the thing – you didn’t see it coming. You saw glimmers of an angry personality – the way he internally argued with the man who hired him to watch the hotel, the memory of a drunken rage that ended when he accidentally broke his son’s arm. But those moments were spaced out through the book, slowly building the back story that this Jack character was rather dangerously unhitched. And by the time he snapped, you felt as if you were really inside his head.

The main thing to understand here is that the story could only happen to Jack Torrance, and it was his character traits that allowed that to happen. The story of the haunted house worked for Jack because Jack himself is haunted. Had some spectral ghoul of a bartender shown up to ask Wendy (Jack’s wife) to beat the family to death with a mallet, she would have fled in terror.

Where's your character? Characters in stories, short and long, are composites of their reactions and tendencies, just like the rest of us. It is important for writers to understand both sides of the word “character.” Remember, it refers to both the physical person in the story and the essence of his being. Ask yourself: “Do my characters have any character?”

Depending on our inherent character traits, we can react to things in any of a hundred ways. Someone on the sidewalk asks you for a dollar – what do you do? Give it to him? Feel pity for him? Tell him to get lost? Now what would your brother do? Or your grandmother? Your boss? Your minister?

We should meet your characters in the same way that we meet people in real life. Think about how you feel when you start a new job or go to a party and someone you’ve never met immediately tells you his whole life story – his divorce, his politics, his thoughts on race relations, sex, and music. If you’re sane, you’ll be put off by a guy like that.

Likewise, we don’t want to learn everything about your characters on page one. Part of the fun of fiction is to be surprised, and that goes for readers and writers in equal measure. A character’s journey is a discovery. She has to face things she never thought she’d face and deal with them. She has to learn things about herself as she goes, and so do your readers.