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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Options for Suspense – Hitchcock’s bomb

How many ways are there to write suspense into a scene? It’s a major question—especially since really tightening the tension can be some of the heaviest lifting in a story we thought we’d already planned out. And don’t we want every scene to do more to pull the reader in, not just with danger but that any kind of scene builds that “what’s next??” eagerness about whatever’s going on? Still, let’s explore this through Alfred Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb ticking under the table.

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

(No, this is not another discussion about Surprise versus Suspense. It’s less about how to use a given plot thread than about how many things you can twist, so you can apply the Master’s method or his challengers’ to whichever you want.)

So, about that bomb…

What I always ask myself is to take the whole chain of events that are needed for a thing, and ask “What could go wrong?” In this case, that means about keeping the bomb and the people together, and what else could affect them. And for each idea I get, I then ask “What am I assuming?” to look for more variations on where to twist.

Hitchcock talks mostly about the bomb’s targets not knowing what the audience does, and making the audience mentally scream at them to get up from that table and run for their lives. Of course that’s because the obvious thing about a bomb is that it’s not obvious until it blows, that the victims have no idea what’s about to happen. And so their survival probably comes down, not to outfighting or outwitting the problem, but to blind luck about whether they’re in the blast or not. –Which is about as scary as it gets, of course.

So the purest way to write that bomb scene would be to use nothing but the petty details of the moment. How many small, everyday things just might make someone get up and walk away to safety? It might be as simple as them starting a meal and either hating the food or deciding to linger over seconds. Or does someone have to take a phone call—although to really apply Hitchcock’s logic, even the call shouldn’t come out of the blue, it should come from factors we can watch changing before our eyes. (Now if the table discussion is actually whether one guy’s girl is going to call to forgive him for a fight, or if someone says he might get a call but then gets so into the conversation he stops to switch off his cell phone…)

Of course the real roller-coaster of stay/go factors is probably the people’s conversation. So we can work out the excruciating twists and turns of how they’re deciding the fate of the world or planning their futures, or just who walks the dog tomorrow, so the reader follows all this knowing that whether they have a future may depend on how they drag things out or maybe spiral into a fight and storm off to safety. This grounds the thrills because we’re probably all more interested in things depending on people than in if the roast is burned, and a detailed conversation is easier to write twists in anyway. (Then again, really blind luck has its own chills.)

But here’s one assumption within that: thinking of people moved around by conversations or other issues, does it have to be only the people already at the table? You can change the whole scene by calling someone else over into the bomb’s reach—maybe some Much Less Expendable character, or the bomber himself so he’s struggling to find an excuse to get away again.

And there we’re moving into another dimension: characters not just affected by chance but the consequences of those who do know about the bomb. It might still start with the same people and/or luck, maybe the old “drop the fork, what’s that under the table” if you can explore ways to either prolong the scene or have other excitement despite it. (Say, what if the woman who spots the bomb actually wants to STAY near it a bit longer, to test if the man she’s sitting with knew about it…) Or is someone else figuring out the bomb plot meanwhile, or racing across town to warn them? (Okay, racing to escape the villain and grab anyone with a cell phone.) Is the bomber having second thoughts, maybe because the wrong person is too close to the bomb?

Then there are assumptions about the bomb itself. It goes off, but when? Hitchcock’s example tells the audience when and puts a clock in the background so we can take in everything in terms of that image. (Though of course, this is easiest as a visual method; in print we may have to look for reasons for characters, unlike camera angles, to keep noticing the time. Or just write 5:49. John said…) But writers have done more convoluted tricks like “oh, that clock’s five minutes slow—boom!” or made the scheme something like “it blows when the birds fly” so our hearts stop when a flock of pigeons is startled up but then realize that next door the Midtown High Hawks are about to get out of practice. Maybe the subtlest way of all is to never show the time, if you can really manipulate the feeling in a vacuum that it must be about to run out…

Or does the bomb even go off right? One recent story (no, no spoilers which) actually had the much-built-up bomb misfire… of course, the bomber had time to re-rig it so it was just a stall, but this is the kind of thing you can get away with if you think your story’s good enough that readers forgive the obvious manipulation and then love you for showing anything is possible. (One reviewer called it “a magnificent cheat”, which about sums it up.) –Of course, it always helps if it’s being plotted in terms of the bomber using shoddy materials or rushing his work.

Another assumption: must the blast kill everyone, if you can make it convincing that a victim’s standing just at the edge, maybe behind a big shielding truck? Or if your story actually has a character that’s invulnerable, you can do whole different things with the bomb plot, probably about him revealing his power or mourning the people who do die.

There’s one more assumption to vary here: besides what makes someone live or die, we can also plot around how the reader cares about that death. A conversation could build toward a couple baring their souls and getting engaged, or a petty scumball looks like he’s about to reveal who the killer us. –After all, if the readers see us raising or changing the stakes, the very fact that we bother to do it also looks like a sign that we’re about to push the button. Similarly, what if one of the prospective victims is revealed to be a killer himself, and about to go do something villanous, and the reader hopes he stays for the explosion after all? We could even walk the line of making him only unsympathetic but layered, so the reader starts wanting him to die but is aware he’s wishing death on someone just for one fallible sin…

I do love a subtle explosion.

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Plot – Just Three Tools?

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

Greetings and welcome to the first post of my evolving Theory. I could take a moment to introduce myself and plug my novel… or I could dive right in to what’s been the most useful principle for me to look at a story.

I mean the broad process of fitting everything together, building a forest so you know where each of those trees belong, and if that makes you ready to line up their branches too.

The plot.

Plot’s the kind of thing where we find either simple advice (“rising and falling action”) or so many people’s different toolboxes I used to make myself crazy wishing I could compare more than a few tricks at a time. People even give us different ideas for what’s most important about plot:

it’s conflict…
it’s keeping events logical…
it’s the character following a goal…
it’s him making choices…

Or people say plot matters but never as much as presenting a vividly-detailed world, or a memorable character, or revealing a theme or inspiring an emotion in the reader.

–Never mind forests and trees, describing writing can turn us all into blind people examining the proverbial elephant! Most of it must be the good times we’ve all had digging trenches with the tusks or clearing roads with the trunk, but still, is there a whole picture of the animal that we can see or not?

I think there is.

To take that wish list –conflict, logical, goal, choices, world, character, theme, reader emotion– I’d say you could line them all up to say:

plot is “how a Character and his Goals come in Conflict with the World, especially creating Themes and Reader Emotions through how Logical his Choices are.”

In other words:

someone’s Choices.

Doesn’t everything else fit around that? Choice is how the character (and her most active part, her goals) deals with the world; conflict and its lack are how the two mesh. And most ways to bring the reader to the right emotion that are just following what the character learns will and won’t blow up in her face, and why.

I think choice is the root of it all. We hate villains for their bad choices, struggle alongside a detective to choose which tool to crack the case, and savor a book that puts us so deep in the world we start to intuit what’s behind how someone handles his day.

So, if it comes down to choice, how do we writers use that?

Well, so many stories focus on problem-solving: how do you get the girl, or track the terrorist, and so all the classic forms of “what helps/hurts it next”? In other words, the chance that a goal will simply fail, its Difficulty.

But if you think of that a moment, you’ll probably add “or the times he finds the goal’s price is too high.” True enough, especially since Cost is an easy other way to complicate a goal in progress. (If I can’t see what a character’s giving up for his goal or how it hurts someone else, I know I’m just not trying.)

And then there’s the third side, the Reward of the goal itself, that he hopes makes the Cost and Difficulty worth it. In many ways this might be the deepest level of internal conflict–or at least the hardest one to mess with without reconsidering everything else. It’s also the easiest to cover in adventures (the reward is you don’t get killed), and all too easy to leave it fuzzy in lower-stakes tales.

Again: Difficulty, Cost, and Reward. If a plot just establishes those three, then everything else relates to the balance of those, in two ways:

Alternatives, and
Changes

A choice isn’t much of a choice without an Alternative, some different way to change the Difficulty or adjust the Cost or try a different goal with a different Reward and its other factors–known as “taking a longshot” or “taking the bullet for your friend” or “settling” or whatever it may be. And of course, a story is always “what comes next” so you’re presenting these by having them Change, the whole process of building suspense or maybe revealing a new option to tempt the hero or slowly raising the cost he’ll have to pay.

Really, is there anything that doesn’t come from some combination of these?

Tales of courage? just show how high the Cost is and that there is no alternative to its Difficulty.
A mystery? work through all the Alternatives about what might solve its Difficulty.
Learning one lesson? it might be the same plan as a mystery: only one option works.
Theme? isn’t that showing how one factor or one pattern within them keeps coming back? (Betrayal, betrayal by one guy, coping with betrayal with forgiveness…)
Making one shocking point? keep the reader busy with one set of choices and then spring the real one, so they’ll never forget how you’re saying that in this situation, This Just Happens.
Or you can lay out a progression through all of these sides of choosing, to really capture how wide this slice of the world is and how your hero grows in dealing with it all.

Try it. Look a story’s plot: how much of it is pushing the Difficulty up and down with changes and alternatives there? When does it tear at the hero by bringing in a Cost, or make the heroine grow by seeking a more mature Reward?

See how much of your story it pulls together.

Next time:

Conflict — or, How many sides to the Dark Side?