JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #6
June 25, 2020
This week I want to talk about Plot and Character. Or Character and Plot. Which is more important to a story? In his Poetics, Aristotle puts plot above character. By the latter half of the twentieth century, the dominant opinion among the literati was that character should take the superior role. You might even hear the strange claim that "literary" fiction focuses exclusively on character without plot. About ten years ago I would have agreed with the assessment that character dominates plot. But recently I’ve changed my mind.
For the most part, we all agree that plot and character and both necessary for story. Although we can point to successful fiction that eschews one or the other (see the episodes on "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin in the Why Is This Good? podcast archive), character and plot are faces of the same coin, inextricably connected, and both required for a story. You can’t have a character in a story without a plot, and you can’t have a plot without a character.
In order for there to be a plot, something has to happen in the story, and the only way anything can happen is if a character does something. Although a tree may fall in the forest, if no one cuts it down and it doesn’t land on anyone, there’s no story. Equally, if someone lives alone in the woods, unless they step outside their door and choose to do something, there’s no story.
Some writers begin with plot. But those plots require characters as fuel. Someone has to get the story going and keep it moving forward. Other writers begin with character, but a character requires a plot to be fully realized. If the character doesn’t have to make choices and do things, how do we know who they are? They’re not a real character.
When you’re writing a story, you have to discover both character and plot for your story. You have to find just the right character to propel your plot, the person who will make the choices that makes the plot possible. And you need to find just the right plot that will reveal the full scope of your character, to allow the reader to know fully who they are. Neither can exist without the other, and neither should be put above the other.