Hello, I'm new and would like to ask a question.

It seems to be largely accepted that stories should be character-driven rather than plot-driven, at least almost everything I read tells me so. And whilst I do see that this can be a good approach, is it always necessary to approach fiction this way?

I came across a quote from Evelyn Waugh recently:

'I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.'

Now, I haven't read Waugh but I believe he is generally accepted to be pretty good. And, whilst my forays into writing are so far limited, my reading is fairly extensive and I seem to be attracted to writing which takes his approach, rather than delving too deeply into character (although, of course, interesting characters must be there, but perhaps drawn in a fairly superficial way?).

Does the panel think . . . is it just a matter of taste in writing/reading, or is it really a case of Character-Driven Good, Plot-Driven bad?

I have a particular fondness for the well-drawn set-piece, I think. Small but significant actions, building a very visual scene.

Any views on this will be read with great interest. Thank you!

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Of course, drama, speech and actions will grow out of character, but perhaps not all of it has to be firmly tied back into a laboriously drawn character type?

Hi Snoopy, and welcome to WW

If you're thinking in terms of a novel that will be published, then plot is king at the commercial end of the market, and as you get more towards the literary end, other things such as character development, ideas, and the sheer quality of the prose, begin to be more important. Which isn't to say that narrative drive doesn't matter at the literary end of things, only that crucial 'what will happen next?' can be about characters' internal development, as much as physical action.

Emma

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Having said that, there's a big difference between a book which is character-driven, in that it's how people behave, and their subtle interactions with each other, which is the chief interest, and a book which endlessly psychoanalyses the characters. The latter has slabs of analysis, the former might not talk directly about character at all, but carry it all in dialogue and action.

Thank you, Emma, for such a quick answer!

I'm sure you're right. The more I think about different books I have read and enjoyed (or otherwise), the more my brain hurts thinking about what made them work or not.

As a f'rinstance, I absolutely love 'The Great Gatsby' which romps along with lots of stuff happening. I am pretty clear in my head about all the characters apart from the narrator, who is very sketchy, but then it's not really about him, is it? He needs to be a bit shadowy or he'll steal focus. Fitzgerald gets the characters over to me in a few light brush strokes, but they are still rounded and real.

I have tried to read 'Tender is the Night', but can't get into it. Of course, this is definitely about psychology - quite literally.

I would call both of these books literary, though. The prose style of 'Gatsby' is of very high quality. But it moves, too.

I think, as readers, we bring to a story our knowledge of different types of people we have known so that, when a person is described as seeming to look at something interesting balanced on their chin (the girl in Gatsby), we can creatively fill in the details of that person. This could perhaps lead to imagining stereotypes, but other touches of action, dialogue etc. humanise the character, without the author needing to know (or, heaven forfend, describe!) their favourite colour or what they had for breakfast.

Yes?

You're welcome.

I think when it comes to writing you can't do better than Fitzgerald, though when it comes to pitching your work to agents and editors, there's no point in taking examples (or defining 'literary' and 'commercial' from say more than ten or twenty years ago.

Gatsby I would call character driven, in that everything that happens is driven by who these people are. Plot driven is what Martina Cole and Marian Keyes and Dick Francis are. LeCarré is a rare bird who manages both, and excellent prose too.

Emma

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That smiley was once a closing bracket. But it looks quite friendly.

Yes, it's a huge shame that, were Gatsby written today, it might not find an audience.

You're absoluely right, Gatsby is character driven. I suppose what I'm really driving at is the difference between lightly but effectively drawn characters and those that are so internalised that the action is slowed down or even missing. I use the word 'action' to mean events, however small.

Is this a fair analogy: Rear-wheel drive (character-driven, literary) as opposed to front-wheel drive (plot-driven, commercial)?

Are you familiar with Waugh's writing? If so, do you agree with his own assessment of his approach or was he fooling himself?!

Thanks again, Emma, and thank you for your welcome - including the smiley bracket! It's interesting here.



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Characters can be developed in ways that shape the plot without bogging the whole thing down, and the novel can still be literary. I think this is the balance I like.

Hi, Snoopy, and welcome to Writewords.

It depends on what genre you're talking about. As Emma says, thrillers and crime, and to a certain extent SF and Fantasy, amongst others, are largely plot driven. While Chick-lit, lad-lit, womens fiction, etc, are largely character-driven. Others are a mixture of both, but even in plot-driven novels it's best to aim for a well rounded figure rather than a one-dimentonal stereotype.


- NaomiM

Hi Naomi - thank you. We crossed in ether.

Yes, characters must be believable, well-rounded and interesting, and they must develop.

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At least, the main character must develop.

Is this a fair analogy: Rear-wheel drive (character-driven, literary) as opposed to front-wheel drive (plot-driven, commercial)?

Yes, that's an interesting way of thinking about it.

Naomi's got a point, in that some commercial genres are more plot-driven, in that the story is chiefly about external events with fairly basic characters who don't change much, and others are more character-driven, in that an important part of the story is how the character changes and how that affects what happens

But both kinds are plot-driven in the sense that lots happens, whether it's grenade attacks or school-gate rows.

As you get towards literary, I would say, both plot (as in events) and character become subtler, and how it's written becomes a value in itself (as you might appreciate the brushwork in a painting, say), expecting the reader to do more of the work of picking up clues, putting the story and ideas together, and perhaps above deciding how to take things.

Emma

Snoopy

I think Waugh was being disingenuous in the quotation you have read. He developed character brilliantly but did so obliquely through the dialogue and unfolding events rather than through explicit comment. There's no better example than his Sword of Honour trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Sword of Honour). It's probably his most serious work (although always entertaining and amusing) and definitely one of the best pieces of writing ever to have come out of the Second World War. Read that, and follow his development of the main character, Guy Crouchback, especially the build-up of his aspirations and subsequent disillusionment, and of the unforgettable subsidiary character Apthorpe, and you will certainly disbelieve Waugh's claims to have 'no technical psychological interest' and not be involved with 'investigation of character'. It's a masterpiece of both.

For what it's worth, I'd say that a plot has got to be pretty fantastic to stand up without being substantially character-driven. It risks being more of an extended synopsis rather than a novel that involves the reader.

Chris

I suppose, in the end, it's a balance between character and plot - four wheel drive? - and the tastes and inclinations of the writer dictate the emphasis on each.

And the writer has to be ballsy enough to do it his or her way - with a weather eye on publishing requirements, of course.

Hi Chris, just crossed with you, too.

I thought that might be the case, I think a lot of writers (people?) are incapable of self-assessment, not to mention being a dab hand at the throwaway line!

I will try to obtain the books you mention, thank you.

Yes, I suspect that outrageous plot twists and cliches are employed by some writers in place of subtle character revelation (because they are incapable of the latter, I expect). Sadly, they seem to be the ones making all the money (mentioning no names).

I blogged about this question a while back, and Mark Lawson's obit for Michael Crichton, which is what I jumped my post off, (link there) is worth a read to.

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2008/11/storied-creatures.html

Emma

Thanks, Emma, interesting blog.

Can I ask a further question? How narrow are publishers' expectations of novel type, these days? Is it really true that Gatsby wouldn't be published today? If so, that is chillingly depressing.

Surely there's always room for a brilliant novel, even if it doesn't quite fit the 21st century genre parameters?

P.S. Did Jackie, your respondent, really mean 'good quality' when she typed 'there must be a god quality to the writing'? Because, either way, she kind of has a point!

Well, if Gatsby wouldn't be published today it would be for the same reason that Tennyson wouldn't be published today, or Monet: the artform has moved on. Or because never occurred to the dumb journalist submitting it under another title, that the slushpile reader recognised it for what it was, and threw it back at the plagiarist.

The changes that came over the book trade when the Net Book Agreement died transformed everything, including acquisitions policy. The market became much more polarised into mega-sellers, and mini-sellers, and the bar that new writers have to get over of potential profitability was raised much higher. (90% who get over it still don't make significant money for the publisher, mind you. It's just that no one knows which will be in the 10% which do). And now that publishers are owned by big corporations, their masters are much more demanding of how the balance sheets look. There's also nowhere to hide poor sales, as everything is laid out on BookScan for everyone to see.

So, yes, books have to be a much surer bet than they used to. Which translates as one of the following:

1) by a known and successful novelist
2) by a celebrity non-writer
3) by known and successful non-fiction writer
4) a killer concept: terrorist hijack planes and fly to New York
5) something the reading groups will like: intelligent, substantial, not too scary, appeals to women
6) a reassuringly familiar genre read, which will do just what it says on the tin for readers of that genre
7) a clever combination of reassuringly known elements into something sort-of new (hence descriptions like 'Possession meets Birdsong'
8) amazingly weird, so could make a cult classic
9) just staggeringly good Booker and Costa hopeful

7 and 8 are the ones that most editors got into publishing to find: these days they need to get Publicity, Marketing and Sales to agree that it's a goer. Obviously they're at the literary end of things. (There's a rather snide sub-category of 'faux lit', which look beautifully written and thoughtful and yes, character-driven, but are actually not hard to read, just reassuringly clever-looking. I gather The Lovely Bones is the archetype).

Towards the commercial end, 5, 6 and 7 are the ones where you're trying to simultaneously to supply the appropriate satisfactions for the genre, and find something new and fresh within them.

Emma

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7, 8 and 9are the ones that most editors got into publishing to find:

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I've been a member of WW for half a decade, and I still never remember that a ' and a ) turn into a smiley...

Thanks again, Emma.

What I meant was, if Gatsby was written today, exactly as is, not plagiarised. Yes, the artform has moved on, but Gatsby is still hugely enjoyed today, as are Tennyson and Monet. However, I get your point. An 'in the style of' Monet, etc., is not the same as the real thing. It hasn't grown out of its time, it becomes an unimaginative throwback.

However, the quality of the writing can't be disputed. That quality, even out of a strict genre, should still find an audience today, but perhaps wouldn't.

Anyway, at the risk of labouring the point, I'd like to talk again about character v. plot. Please bear with me, because I'm going to quote the opening paragraphs of two stories by John Updike, one of which I think is great, the other not so great. Admittedly, the first is a short story, the second a novel, but I don't think that matters much.

The first is from 'Snowing in Greenwich Village':

'The Maples had moved just the day before to West Thirteenth Street, and that evening they had Rebecca Cune over, because now they were so close. A tall, always slightly smiling girl with an absent-minded manner, she allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and scarf even as she stood gently greeting Joan. Richard, moving with an extra precision and grace because of the smoothness with which the business had been managed - though he and Joan had been married nearly two years, he was still so young-looking that people did not instictively lay upon him hostly duties; their relutance worked in him a corresponding hesitancy, so that often it was his wife who poured the drinks, while he sprawled on the sofa in the attitude of a favored and wholly delightful guest - entered the dark bedroom, entrusted the bed with Rebecca's clothes, and returned to the living room. Her coat had seemed weightless.'

Then this, from 'The Centaur':

'Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night's washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. the pain seemed to be displacing with its own hair segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at the their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise.'

In the first example, I am quickly and deftly painted a picture of Rebecca, and Richard's attraction to her is clear. 'She allowed . . . gently greeting Joan' suggests to me that they are having, or are about to have an affair, and that the brazen removal of her coat is tantamount to their conducting it right in front of his wife. Again, 'entrusted the bed with Rebecca's clothes' and 'her coat had seemed weightless' show Richard's feelings towards Rebecca. All in one paragraph, without fuss and with brilliantly deft 'brushstrokes'. The third sentence is very long, and perhaps a bit clunky, but I still prefer this opening to the long, rather pretentious description of a man's physical pain.

Maybe, I realise as I type and read, read and type, that what I actually object to is purple prose. So rather than character v. plot, I should be talking deft and revelatory v. over-writing.

I apologise for the length of this post, and for musing out loud, but I really want to get this straight in my head.

Thank you for reading it and please do set me straight, if I've got it all wrong! I'm groping my way a bit, it's true.