Plot or Character first?

Deciding whether to create a plot or a character first can be a challenge. Writing fiction can feel like going around in circles, constantly changing your mind about which element to focus on – plot or character.

There’s a short answer and a long answer. Here’s the short answer: character.

Now here’s the long answer:

Perhaps you’ve spent years on a story and you’re still not finished. You’re still editing. You know it’s still not right, yet you can’t find the work-arounds that will get the manuscript to feel ‘done’. It feels a bit empty, somehow. 

I hope this blog has found you before you’ve got that bogged down in it. I hope you’re still early (ish) in the writing process – ideally still on your first draft or beginning to revise it. It’s never too late to fix a story, but all writers want to take the most direct route, yes?

The problem of not being happy with your story is likely to be because you’ve had your focus too much on plot. You’ve probably been spending too much time thinking up new things that could happen to your character and not enough time considering what your character would do about it. 

Character -based plotting

By using a character-based plotting method, you move towards considering the character and what they would do and how they would think and feel in various situations. It doesn’t mean that you forget about plot entirely. There’s a very small readership out there for novels which are all about the depth of a character’s soul but in which nothing happens.

Character-based plotting means that you get to know your character so well that you know what they will do in whatever situation you throw at them in their story. It means that your readers will care about their suffering, their victories, their sacrifices and the strength they have developed by the end of the story.

It’s your characters that your readers really care about. Start there.

I can’t be the only one who is more interested in what a villain gets up to than the struggles of a goody-two-shoes hero.

We are taught from the time we are very small that we ought to be kind to others, aren’t we? That we shouldn’t take advantage of those weaker than ourselves? That it is wrong to cheat, lie and steal?

Of course we are. Of course it is right that we are. But when we write a story, we can have our ‘bad guys’ do anything we want them to do. We can have them commit audacious crimes, incite them to terrible deeds, and make them lie glibly through their teeth, all without any of the pangs of guilt a ‘normal’ person would feel.

We can make our creations do any, or all, of those things, without the risk of detectives knocking on our own doors.

The enduring appeal of a villain, from Count Dracula to Big Brother, Bill Sikes to Sauron, Moriarty to Voldemort, is his (or her) complete embodiment of evil in the story to which he belongs. Never sorry for his deeds, never tempted to mend his ways, he is the fascinating dark side of our own selves. Exploring this dark side within the safety of the covers of a book is a brave adventure.

A braver adventure still, though, would be the creation of a villain of your own. What heinous deeds could find their way from your brain to the page? Could you dare to explore the dark side?