Who’s the daddy: character or plot?

Like it or not, it’s your characters that drive your work. Getting them right will make the difference between writing a masterpiece and an episode of Days of Our Lives. Try to imagine ‘Great Expectations’ minus Pip. Or ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ sans Holden Caulfield, ‘The Great Gatsby’ without Gatsby, Emma without Emma, Harry Potter...you get the idea – if you don’t get your characters right, your work won’t work.

If Aristotle and E. M. Forster ever meet in the Great Beyond the encounter might just end in fisticuffs. These two had a great deal to say about the written work, but didn’t always see eye to eye. Aristotle famously stated that plot was more important than character when it came to dramatic effect. Forster, on the other hand, claimed that in order for literature to work it has to be driven by its characters. Most writers side either with Aristotle in the red corner or back Forster in the blue. In other words, you either have organic characters in mind who are born into your fiction and left to develop much like real people, or you have the action in mind and carve your characters to fit. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but one of the similarities between the plotdriven story and the character-driven story is that in both cases the cast has to seem genuine.

Strong, well-developed characters can become so real in your mind that they drive the story. At one point in my own writing career I thought it impossible for the author to lose control, but while writing one novel I was amazed to find that the characters I had created didn’t always want to follow my plan of action – like your own children finally learning to talk back. When they become ‘autonomous’ in this way, let them lead for a while. You might be pleasantly surprised where it takes you. Be warned, however, that when you let your characters off the leash they may wander errantly in circles and end up accomplishing nothing but boring a reader to tears.

For those of you thinking of approaching from the other side of the fence, a plotdriven narrative can be equally tricky. Writing your characters around a plot will almost always ensure that they do enough to sustain the reader’s attention. The problem here, however, is whether they will do so realistically. Just like bespoke furniture, your characters can look a little artificial, as though they were constructed to fill a particular role and have no existence or history in your written world outside of this.

While literary fisticuffs are always entertaining, a healthy balance between plot and character is the path to success. Or, as Henry James put it, ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ Plot is basically the result of human activities and adventures, and even if you don’t know what’s going to happen, your characters’ actions will drive the narrative. In other words, if you’ve got a detailed enough understanding of your characters, the plot will evolve itself. If, on the other hand, you’re building your fiction around a plot, then this depth of character is still vital. Remember, even if you know what your plot will entail, your characters still don’t. The incidents that occur in the course of the story will enable them to evolve and grow much like real people, and they must behave and respond like real people in those situations in order to seem real. If you don’t have a grip of who your characters really are, then it doesn’t matter how exciting the action, or how seamless the narrative: none of it will be convincing because the cast won’t seem real.

Blowing your trumpet

If you’re like me, some days you probably think there isn’t much floating around in the memory department of your brain except for a few old episodes of Thundercats. But learn to dive in deeper – your past can be the key to great writing. I’ll bet when Proust was dipping his pastries in his tea that morning the last thing he expected was his whole life to flash before his eyes. Yet this goes to show just how many memories there are in each of us, a vast tidal wave of experience that could break at any time and flood back into our present consciousness. These memories – these stories – are what give us the power to write realistically and evocatively. The key is learning how to harness them.

Yesterday… all your troubles seemed so far away. And not just your troubles either. Memory is like that: how are you supposed to recapture events or conversations that now exist only in the murky depths of your mind? I don’t know about you, but my memory is hopeless. I find it hard to remember what I was doing last week, let alone last year (and unfortunately this has nothing to do with alcohol). But my memory, or more precisely my history, is the foundation of who I am. When Wordsworth said that the child was the father of the man, he was emphasising that the sum of your past experience, including your childhood, is what makes you uniquely you.

I compensate for my fuzzy mind by keeping diaries. They’re nothing special. Most entries are random observations from events or meetings rather than detailed accounts of treasured moments. These scraps of text only mention the odd scent, like Charlie Red on a date, or a tune, like ‘Abide With Me’ from a funeral. But I don’t need any more than that to remember the event. The senses are the key to unlocking your memories. How many times has a taste or smell dragged you back to a precise moment in your past, often so unexpectedly that you have to gasp for breath? Powerful fiction is based on thoughtful use of all of the senses and the emotional memories they evoke.

These sudden, immensely powerful flashbacks are an essential part of writing, and can be miracle cures for a text that is lacking in emotional or descriptive depth. Of course a piece of writing that only features your memories is autobiography, and won’t always interest a reader, but they will enable you to paint a much more vivid picture of your characters and their setting. Your memories enable to you to construct an image that is unique to you, that resonates with your own history, even if ostensibly the plot you’re working on seems a million miles away. This attention to detail, this engagement with elements from your past, can be transplanted from your mind to that of your characters, creating a much stronger illusion of real people. Incorporating the memorable sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touches that mean so much to you will create a tangible atmosphere in your work, one that might feel like a real memory to everybody that reads it, as well as to you. Building memories into writing is a key to writing powerfully, it is why something that isn’t real can have the strength of something that is.

It’s always fascinating to look at what the mind remembers when asked to do so spontaneously. What about your five senses: which seems most important? Visual, most likely, but what other sensory reminders come into play? And how do you express your emotional experience of an event? Look for the strings of associations in your mind that help memories flood back to the present. When they do, make notes, capture the salient details, and allow your mind to follow along the path the memories lead: where were you, what were you doing, how were you feeling? Expand and write a little about yourself and the people you knew back then. What’s changed? These ‘oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that!’ moments are the details that can be inserted into your work to make it that much more convincing.