Character is the engine of story
I sometimes hear my students say things like, “I’m no good at plotting.” I get that. Plot can seem like a complicated thing, especially when people start showing plot charts and graphs. Yikes. (Those are useful, but I save them for revision. We’ll get to that. But not yet.)
Think of plot the way you think of a roadmap. Let’s say you’re driving from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale. You’ll never get there if you aren’t headed in the right direction. This is why I always have some idea of how I want my story to end before I start. Things might shift on the way, but when you know WHO your story is about, then that helps you decide roughly how their story ends. It’s happy, it’s sad, or it’s a bittersweet mix.
But that’s it, really. The beginning of the story implies an ending. So that’s the general direction you steer.
With any destination, there’s not just one way to get there, right? There are choices. Even if there is a single road, there are still choices—how fast, how far in a single day, how long to go before refueling.
The driver makes choices for reasons deeply embedded in their character. What happens on the drive itself is a result of those choices, as well as result of the choices of the other drives on the road, the weather, and additional calamities (like closed roads and collapsed bridges).
It’s the same way with story. You have a destination in mind for your character—a meaningful one that will require some sort of transformation. That destination narrows your plot choices. How might your character get to this place (which is probably an internal emotional state + a new physical state)?
Your character will make choices and will react to other characters and conditions. That’s what plot is, and the harder the choices are for the character, the higher the stakes of your plot will be.
Sometimes, we confuse high stakes with a lot of action, but to me, this is like the end of most Marvel movies—there’s a big fight scene, but it’s not all that interesting because the decision to fight evil is not a hard one. Duh. Of course they will fight the bad guys.
I get more emotional zing from a story where the physical action is quieter but the personal stakes are higher.
That bit in Six of Crows where the character who always wears gloves removes them to hold the hand of the girl he loves? Incredible emotional payoff because Leigh Bardugo made that simple, beautiful action emotionally difficult for Kaz Brekker. It’s a transformative moment and all it really involves is hand holding.
So, returning to character: When you are focused on a protagonist, when you love them and let them have flaws and vulnerabilities and metaphorical blind spots, and when you have a destination in mind for them—and they have one in mind for themselves—then you have the most important part of your story. You have built its engine. (You might want to review the questions here as you work to understand your character.)
Everything that comes next emerges from your character’s central nature, as well as where they want and need to go. And as I continue to talk about character, I’ll share more about how you can optimize those obstacles. For now, though, your work is to understand your character. To connect what you know to be true about life to them.
What makes life and stories hard and beautiful is not what happens to us, but how we respond … that is always a choice of character, and that is why readers read. Not for the events of plot, but for what they mean to the character experiencing them.
