JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #82
January 13, 2022
Returning now to these Ruminations after a little hiatus (I should have marked it with an asterisk or octothorpe, thus: #), I thought I’d briefly outline the definition of story that has guided these ruminations. Since Aristotle at least, literary analysis has divided story into plot and character, and while Aristotle put plot above character (saying, in the Poetics, "character comes in as subsidiary to the actions"), in the twentieth century character was seen to be superior to plot. I’m sure my Ruminations are not alone in putting the two at the same level, and I’ve been guided here by the idea that story emerges from the intersection of character and plot, when a character is forced into the kinds of actions that will spawn a plot. In a fully realized story, according to this analysis, you cannot have one without the other. I’ll leave the caveats aside except to say that I think it’s sometimes useful to take any apparent "rule" as a writing prompt to break it.
So, when in these Ruminations I analyze the myriad problems of craft that come up in the writing of fiction, I think about the ways in which a plot impacts a character and how character drives plot as the twining drivers that will determine probable solutions. Many of the common guidelines and advice for writers of fiction can be shown to emerge from identifying the locus of story in that convergence of character and plot. When to show and when to tell depends on character and plot, as do questions of point of view, of structure, of good story openings, and where things should come to an end, even how to structure the crisis and resolution. Length-defined genres of fiction differ in the relative proportions of character and plot, with novels requiring a heavier dose of plot than, say, flash fiction, which can rely more heavily on character. And yet, if what we are writing is a story, we should always keep an eye on the two fundaments of character and plot, how actions and events, spurred by a character’s choices in reaction to a conflict driven by internal (character) motivations and external (plot) pressures, push that character toward a moment of crisis, when they either decide or fail to change--and act upon that change. There are many caveats, embellishments, and complications that might be lain across this framework, but this, I would argue, is the basic outline of a fully formed story.