Without plot, a piece of writing is not a story—it is a static description. Plot is what gives the story locomotion. And stories must move or they are not stories at all. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, and they have characters that stretch and grow.
So the plot moves and the characters move. Which one drives the story?
As old as the battle is between those who love character-driven books and those who love plot-driven, and as hotly as that debate sometimes runs, I'm convinced it doesn't matter. It's as impossible to answer as the chicken and the egg question. Which came first? Who knows and who cares?
A story must have character and plot. That's all we need to know.
We Care about Characters
Reading a book with all plot and no characters would be akin to watching clothes flop around in the dryer. There's plenty of action. So what?
Without compelling characters the best plots in the world are forgettable. Who cares if an entire city is poisoned by terrorists squirting chemicals into the water supply if we don't have a character to zoom in on, to know, to love, to weep with, and to root for? Think of those disaster films—Poseidon Adventure types—they always focus on individual characters before the disaster. That's because we can't care about a faceless crowd the way we can care about an individual. The widower and his daughter, the college student on her way to he wedding—those are the characters we worry about and root for. If we just watched the volcano erupt and didn't know any of the people running for their lives, we'd not be sucked into the story.
Plot Pounds on the Hero and Shapes Him
On the other hand, reading a book about characters with no plot would be like sitting up all night staring at a corpse laid out for burial. Maybe he has laugh lines around his eyes and he's dressed in his best suit and he looks like an interesting fellow. Who cares? He's just lying there. How long will we sit and watch him before we get bored with it?
We can't fall in love with characters who have no plot to move around in because without a plot there is no way for us to get to know the characters well enough to love them. Plot is the furnace that the character goes into. And it's the blacksmith who pulls him from the furnace and pounds on him with a hammer. After he walks through the flames and withstands the beatings, he comes out, hopefully, a strong-backed hero with an iron will. (Conceivably, he could end up as a puddle of molten metal, but if that happened he wouldn't be the kind of character most readers care about.) So plot molds the character and the reader is vicariously molded—changed—as he suffers alongside the character.
The Character Fights Back
Plot is more than a furnace working on our characters, though.
Just as much as plot shapes character, character shapes plot. Because our character is more than a corpse awaiting burial. He's more than a lump of metal waiting to be formed when the blacksmith pounds on him. He's a person who fights back. And when he fights back, he changes his life story.
The plot is the action of the story. It doesn't lie still, it moves. But it doesn't move around in a circle like a washing machine agitating clothes. It moves in a line. The best plots, though, move in jerky lines. Something comes at the character and the character dodges. He sets off in a new direction, pushed off course by the plot. He pushes back, sets off to solve a problem and the plot gods throw him another problem. And he dodges again.
You might think of a plot as a line graph where the character starts at A1 and he ends at F6, but in-between he does a lot of zigging and zagging.
We'll look more closely at the finer points of the zigging and zagging in future articles.
