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Characters are bogus, and Plot is second-rate: a new approach to writing
(or, Why Your Characterization Rants are Wrong)



On this forum, I see a lot of people going on about how to write: should your stories be character-based, should your plots dictate how the characters are formed? How well should you know your characters? Recently, I saw a thread asking how to improve characterization, the author felt her characters were too much like her own personality. She got a lot of advice about finding out who characters were by filling out personality quizzes.

Every time I see one of these threads, I want to hurl.

The fact is, I consider myself a fairly good writer. There’s a lot that I can improve on, sure, and I have betas that let me know these things regularly. I also hang out with a lot of fairly good writers, and we write together, not on the same stories, but in the same spaces, stretched out on each other’s beds, sprawled across couches or curled up on cushions on the floor. Six or eight people in the same space, just writing. And in spite of fairly frequent interactions with various writing communities, I don’t think that anyone I know has produced worthwhile work while writing off character sheets, or fretting over whether plots are character-driven or vice-versa. No one writes well while worrying about whether they know their characters well enough (in fact, people who know their characters too well often have more problems than are necessary).

The fact is, I think this forum is trying to capture something for beginner writers, and is going about it the wrong way. When I sit down to write a story, I don’t think “Well, today I’ll write about a vampire and… let’s see, a leprechaun, that’s something different. And the leprechaun will feel guilty over losing his family, and the vampire will need gold to keep from being evicted from his house. Now, does my main need another flaw?” That’s the way to write a character driven story (albeit not a very good one), but it’s not the way to write well. Instead, I start at something more basic than plots, something more fundamental than characters. I figure out what story I want to tell, what message I want to write.

I can hear people think “More fundamental than plot or characters?” Yes, here’s what I mean. When I sit down to write, I think to myself, “What is interesting to me about people? What do I want to explore?” The answer to this question is not a plot, but instead is a message, a way of looking at humanity. The easiest way of illustrating this will be by example, so here’s the message ideas I started with for a few of my more recent stories:

- I want to know what it’s like to build an entire worldview around the love and presence of one person, and then lose that person and have to cope.
- I want to know what it’s like to have utterly blind faith in a sibling, even if that person doesn’t return it.
- I want to know what it’s like for a fundamentally moral person to commit unfathomable moral atrocities, and then find a way to be okay with it.
- I want to know what it’s like to lack respect for someone you know will be a leader, and support them anyway, by deliberate choice. I want to know what it takes to cope with that choice.

None of these things are plots, I could fill them in with any number of characters, in any number of genres (incidentally, one of the above turned out to be a historical drama, one turned into magical realism, one turned out sci-fi, and one became a sort of fable). And none of these little quips dictate the kind of character traits I could fill out on a personality quiz. But without the foundation of these very fundamental ideas, no characters I could drum up out of my brain, and no plot that I could outline would make for a very good story. Why are these messages so essential? Because these are the foundational ideas about what it means to be human that I’m exploring. These are the heartbeat of the story in a way that even plot and character can’t be. I think that a lot of writers forget that we write to reflect things about ourselves: why we are how we are, whether we could be better or differently. These are the ideas that make the audience think after they finish reading: Does it have to be this way? Do I see aspects of this in myself?

Once you’ve got a message, then you can build plot and characters in service to that message. Take one of the examples I mentioned above:

I want to know what it’s like for a fundamentally moral person to commit unfathomable moral atrocities, and then find a way to be okay with it.

In this case, it became a sci-fi story. The MC was an Irish spaceship captain who immigrated to another planet, and eventually blew up the Earth. He blasted the planet apart, killing a lot of people in the process, and came to terms with the decision. The plot grew organically out of my original message: I wanted to know what it was like for a fundamentally moral person to commit atrocities, so the plot filled in the ‘what’ of the message: what atrocity he commits.

Characterization also grows organically out of the message that you’re writing. In this case, I needed someone who was moral, who was respected and deserved that respect. I made him a ship captain. Other aspects of characterization also arise from the message: I’ve got his motivation for the whole story down pat in that one little statement. I don’t need to worry about what his mental state will be like, the message tells me: he’s going to be conflicted, but ultimately okay with himself. At this point, I fill in a few peripheral details (where in Ireland he grew up, whether or not he was married, what his home on another planet looked like) and I’ve got a full-fledged character. Not only that, but I very rarely have difficulties with getting characters to do what I need them to, because their characterization and the plot that I have planned for them all come from the same basic source. Writing based on messages is a more holistic way of writing stories, because all your story elements are derived from one very basic idea. It creates a very focused piece of writing, and a style of writing that lends itself to the inclusion of things like metaphors, because you always know what the goal is, you’re always aware as an author of what story you’re ultimately telling.

Other nifty things that I see people on this board wrestle with can also be easily derived from a clear idea of what the message of the story will be. In the case of my example story, point of view was a non-issue. Since I was focusing on the moral struggles of one character, the story would be either tight third-person or first-person. I chose tight third, because my style works better with that. Either way, I find that I rarely have debates with myself over how I’m going to write a story, because details like that fall out of the message that I have in mind.

I’m not advocating here that everyone write in the exact style that I do. I am, however, stating my firm belief that this board all-too-frequently puts the cart before the horse. People discuss how to write characters without the context of the story they’ll be included in, discuss plot without benefit of knowing how the writer is going to tie that to an exploration of the human condition. I think that this very piecemeal approach to writing cannot, in the end, create writers of real quality, because it doesn’t create stories that hang together seamlessly. So the next time someone on this board asks “how can I write better”, don’t give advice about characters or plot first, ask them what they’re writing about, whether they have a firm idea of the message they’re exploring through the medium of story.

It's generally assumed, I think, that they already have a driving concept or a "message". They do, really, because it's what characters and plots sprout from. If there's no soil for a flower to take root, it doesn't grow. Some just don't notice it. It is something constantly overlooked in this forum, I do not deny that.

But it doesn't disprove what all the characterization rants have said. In a way, you are backing them up. You speak of the foundation of it all, they speak of refining things that have sprung from that foundation.

But many of those plots and characters don't have that foundation--which is part of the reason that they are never finished, or, if they are, the reason that they are no good.

I'm sorry, [Alphabravo], but I've lost all respect for you. sad

Sorry.

Oh, my, this has gotten some varied responses! I'll try and address everyone, but it may take me a few posts.

@Sathe: Well, I'm kind of hoping that the ones who know the difference will read it, and that we can talk about it and figure out how it fits into what gets told to new people when threads like "help me fix my characters?" pop up. I really wrote it because of a difference I see between how the OP/L tries to mentor new poets and how the main writer's forum tries to mentor new prose writers. The OP/L tends to be a lot more holistic in their approach, and I was curious about how a different approach than the usualy piecemeal would be taken here by the people who regularly deal with such things.

@Sho-Shonojo:

Yes, that's it exactly. I got really frustrated with the one-thing-or-another approach. I was writing the part of the process that I think gets ignored a lot.

@ Fidei: You had a thread about this? Hmmm. I must have missed it (my Gaia attendance tends to be spotty, and my main writers forum attendance spottier).

@Luxerne: You're right that I don't disprove much of what's written in the big characterization rants. I actually agree with a lot of what's written in threads like Veive's, though I suspect I agree with a lot less than most people on these boards. What I'm really trying to take issue with is their implied emphasis on character as the aspect on which stories need to be built.

@ x_haphazard_x: You mean the exchange between Ace and Calviness on messages getting drilled into people's heads? I thought about that while writing this actually, and I tried to make clear with examples that I'm not really talking about morals, per se, but about just ideas of what needs to get explored ("I want to know" statements that leave things more open instead of "You should" statements that turn into closed moral wrecking balls). It's possible that I didn't make this clear enough. Sorry. sad

Responses, continued:

@ Panthino: It's funny, but that's usually exactly how I start when I'm building poems! I really start with those on a really clear, really striking image, and it might not even show up in the final produst, but that's where it all begins. I tend to be a lot like you in that I don't know stuff like eye colour and physical quirks. I sometimes don't even have names before a second draft. To each his own, as far as style goes, really. I kind of tried to write this in the style of other rants on this forum ("thou shalt", rules for writing, and all), mostly because it's the easiest way to provoke discussion.

@ x_haphazard_x: ... okay? I'm curious as to why you'd lose all respect for me. Because I haven't replied to poeple yet? Because it's a different way of writing (that I presume you view as harmful, or silly)? Hmmm. sad If nothing else, it'd be good to know what mistakes not to make again.
ETA: Oh, haha, you'd already replied (I am SLOW). Okay, gimme a minute on that one.