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.
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