I got in a conversation not long ago about character-driven vs. plot-driven stories.\u00a0 We were mainly talking about short stories, although it seems as though when most people ramble on about the distinction (as I’m about to) they are referring to novels and movies.\u00a0 Interestingly, many of these folks insist that despite what you may think, character-driven stories are just as good as plot-driven, while others say the opposite.\u00a0 So I think we can all agree that neither term is pejorative, even if most people seem to think everyone else thinks one of them is.<\/p>\n
Anyway, leaving aside for the moment whether or not it matters, how do we tell the difference?\u00a0 Obviously the whole thing is on a continuum, since a story that relies completely on plot and has utterly uninteresting characters would be pretty horrible, and two fascinating characters sitting around talking for no particular reason with no conflict would not exactly set the world afire either. There are lots of definitions floating around that try to at least peg the stories on one side of the continuum or the other; some focus on presence or absence of character growth, others on “high concept” vs. “small stories”.<\/p>\n
It is tempting to define it based on how an author “got started” (well, tempting if you like talking about this sort of thing, anyway – I have a feeling most readers are utterly uninterested in a writer’s motives or process).\u00a0 If a writer comes up with some neat characters and throws them out there to see what happens, it is character-driven, while if they come up with a neat idea for something that happens and make some characters that can get them there it is plot-driven.\u00a0 By this definition, a lot of what I write is character-driven, since I honestly have no clear idea what is going to happen in a story I’ve just started writing half the time.\u00a0 While I’m fine with having written character-driven stuff (see paragraph 1, above), I’m not sure it works.\u00a0 If I come up with a single image of some conflict happening between two characters and just go from there, is it really character-driven just because I don’t know how it will end?\u00a0 Or is it plot-driven because that initial idea of conflict is the driver?<\/p>\n
I have finally developed what I call the “Hmm-Huh Hypothesis”.\u00a0 According to the HHH, if you describe the plot of a story to someone in a few sentences and they make an interested “hmm!” noise, it is plot-driven, while if you can’t really do it, or do so and the listener responds with a neutral “huh.”, it is character-driven (or plot-driven and just bad.\u00a0 Or you’re not good at summing up plots.\u00a0 There are some bugs to work out, here).<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best thing is to just ask an author whether their story is character or plot-driven.\u00a0 You’ll make their day; just be prepared to listen to them talk about “just sitting back and letting the characters do what they need to do” or “building the connections that allow the characters to come alive” for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got in a conversation not long ago about character-driven vs. plot-driven stories.\u00a0 We were mainly talking about short stories, although it seems as though when most people ramble on about the distinction (as I’m about to) they are referring to novels and movies.\u00a0 Interestingly, many of these folks insist that despite what you may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}