Plot driven / Character driven, and a hybrid of the two

Hey, thanks for weighing in @Set2Stun . I agree, I'm not interested in baggage (that sounds like some heavy stuff that just gets dragged around), or in melodramatic over-reaction. For me it's more about a dynamic character that reacts to the plot events and is capable of some growth. At least in certain stories, But as I mentioned on my progress journal, Season of the Witch doesn't seem to have a character-determined arc. Well, partially.

But anyway, thanks to this little foray, I'm a lot more open now to plot-driven stories. I get it now. The change doesn't always have to happen inside a character, it can happen in the plot. Cool with me.

Found another one:

• Forget plot-driven vs character-driven—good stories are both

The idea is that the stories and movies that really stick with us involve a character who is deeply connected to the plot events, and affected by them. If there's no such character, then you've got a bunch of things happening, but it isn't affecting anybody profoundly, or you've got a character flailing around pointlessly in an empty room. Our minds are wired to respond strongly when a person we identify with is pummeled and buffeted by circumstances. Internal and external conflict strongly intertwined.

Now I remember K M Weiland mentioning this, but I don't remember her framing it as plot-driven vs character-driven, or it just slipped through the cracks for me. Now I got it.

Oh—and there is no plot vs character. They are one. It's only at the extremes they become separated.

A few more. No need to do little write-ups about each one:

• Character driven vs Plot driven Stories: Which is Better?
• Plot VS Character Driven Stories (What’s The Difference and Which Is Better?) @ Abbie Emmons
  
• How to Tell if Your Story Has Too Much Plot, Not Enough Character @ K M Weiland

Abbie Emmons takes sides pretty strongly. She straight up says "Character is better." And she never really says "Good stories use both"—not in so many words anyway. But it becomes clear toward the end that it's what she believes, she just presents it through her own bias for character-driven plot first.

And as usual, K M Weiland has the best and most well-presented case. Yes, I decided to search her blog and did manage to find it.

MICE

I discovered a book on my Kindle I had bought some time ago, must've been when I was looking more deeply into POV, that I had only started to read and then forgot about. It's called Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. It's now become one of my favorite books on writing. Not only does it go into great detail about some excellent techniques for getting to know your characters in depth and presenting them that way, while also letting them drive the action (if that's what you want them to do), but it also presents his MICE concept. Millieu, Idea, Character, and Event.

These are elements in every story, but generally one will dominate and the others will fall into secondary (or even lower) prominence. Since (I think) the beginning of the 20th century, character has become the go-to standard, to such an extent that many people believe it's the sole point of any story or should be, and often if it's an Event story or an Idea story, people will call it bad writing. I must admit to falling into this paradigm myself. But now I see how these types of stories fit into place, and that character is not the most important element in most of them (though it will often be the second-most-important).

But an Event or Idea story will be far more memorable if the event or the idea profoundly affects a character that the readers can identify with or sympathize with.

Here's a nice breakdown of the concept: Using the Mice Quotient to Plot Your Novel
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And now it's clear to see that Beastseekers, being a coming-of-age story, is about character growth, while Season of the Witch is an event or idea story. And Passing Strange—I knew intuitively it was OK for the main character not to be the driver of it, but I couldn't articulate why. Now I know it's because it was a milieu story like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, which is about a strange outlandish place, and they often begin when the MC enters that place and end when he or she leaves it. And, as is common in milieu stories (like Tolkein's), the strange place is often filled with strange outlandish characters who seem much more powerful or interesting than the MC. The MC acts as sort of a tour guide and should be dependable and relatable and quite normal. Again, my writer's instinct told me that was true, but I couldn't reason out why.

I've been looking into this Orson Scott Card person, and he strikes me as a sort of modern-day Aristotle. Aristotle is the one who wrote the Poetics, giving us all a structure on which to build our stories. Of course he didn't create it, it was always there—he discovered it. One of the major things Aristotle did was to begin by categorizing things into a system, making it much easier to think about clearly. He created the taxonomy system still in use today (in somewhat modified form), breaking living things down into categories like genus, family, phylum, species etc. Yeah, that was him. Pretty smart guy. I think his outstanding insight was his desire to organize his thinking very clearly, and in s0 doing he discovered the organizing systems at work in nature, including in our minds (such as the way we organize our stories into acts and scenes).

Clearly Orson Card is similarly intelligent and has made many important discoveries of the same type concerning story. Reading through his book I keep getting angry that I've never run across these incredible ideas before. They should be in ALL the writing books! This stuff should be standard knowledge! And it is, to anyone who's been lucky enough to run across it and recognize its brilliance.

Here's a nice long conversation he did with Ben Shapiro, who is obviously a big fan of his work:

"And now that I think about it I remember a certain show I used to watch where an episode really focused on a character's feelings."

There can be other reasons people don't like it too. Maybe it was too melodramatic for some, like a soap opera? Or maybe it broke the tone of the story too much.

"So I suppose you have to be careful. You don't want to create a really good plot that has people hooked and then put it on hold to let a character drive the story for a bit. People apparently find that annoying."

I would be careful about putting plot on hold to concentrate strictly on inner conflict, or doing the opposite. Ideally you keep both moving. It's more of a parallel development, rather than leap-frogging between two separate things.

This is done in several ways. There's the scene and sequel approach, where after a scene you have a character reflect on what's happened and they have an internal reaction or response to it. That's kind of like putting it on hold, though only briefly. But it also reflects realitym, mbecause when something really big happens we need to sit quietly and think about it,, and important stuff is happening inside. I've found I can't get things like this done in the context of a scene where external stuff is also going on (that's now how we do this kind of thinking anyway—it's meditative, we need a quiet place for it). I think for major inner developments this might be necessary. But usually you can have character development happening bit by bit in little pieces of ineternal monologue interspersed between chunks of plot. And of course character development doesn't only happen in inner monologue. It shows in reactions, actions, dialogue, and everything else, including subtext.

"Although it's also true that you can't always please everyone."

You can never please everyone. Write what appeals to you, and guaranteed, unless you're really weird, a lot of other people will like it (people who are like you). Just avoid being too self indulgent. K M Weiland did a really good post about this: How to Spot and Avoid Self-Indulgent Writing

"unless of course the story is fully character-driven."

I don't believe there is any such thing. It's a sliding spectrum, like hot and cold or light and dark, and the absolutes at the far ends are theoretical. We can only experience a certain range of heat and cold before it goes beyond what will kill us. That range is the human range. Same for light and dark, below a certain level of light we can't tell when it gets darker, and beyond a certain level of brightness we just can't see at all, so more would be unnecessary. Those points mark off the human range for the dark/light spectrum.

I don't think it's possible to write a story that's completely character-driven, with no plot at all, or vice verse. On the one hand you'd just have an endless stream-of-consciousness monologue (otherwise there's going to be some plot), and on the other hand there would be absolutely no glimpse into the inner world of the charater's mind or feelings. It would just be a story about cars and buildings and guns or something. I suppose either one could be done as an experimental piece, but they ain't gonna be bestsellers, let's just put it that way.

I remember a short story I read in a class once called (I think) What They Carried. If I remember right, it was basically an inventory of items soldiers carried into war (something like that anyway). On the surface it seemed to be purely about physical objects, but of course the trick is that through the objects and what you can assume they meant to the people who carried them, a human story of deep feeling emerges in the subtext. Besides just government-issued weapons, ammo and equipment, they also carried pictures of their wives, kids, or grilfriends, parents, and little items given to them by someone they loved. Or maybe some didn't have anything like this, making the reader feel very sad for how empty and lonely their lives must be.

So even a story that seems to be only about objects (objective), actually subliminally is a story about suffering, loneliness, friendship and love. If it didn't include that subtext it would never have become well-known enough to get read in school classrooms.

^ To expand on what I said above, a 'plot-driven' story does include some elements of character, but they're rather shallow. And a character-driven story also includes some plot, or it wouldn't be much of a story. It's really just a matter of which one dominates—which one the main focus is on. Some stories might alternate from time to time, tilting one way and then the other. This would reflect life pretty accurately. At times our own focus shifts more outward, onto other people or events, and at times it draws inward to our own inner development, or our problems or struggles.

And I think the most engaging stories balance the two out nicely, with neither one dominating too much. Usually though it will lean one way or the other to some degree, more so at times.

"My idea of a character-driven story is when there are no external events happening like inciting incidents."

Our ideas about this stuff seem to be very different. The way I understand an inciting incident is, it's an event (usually external), that kicks off conflict for the MC, usually external and internal. But I know for a'pure' action movie or certain other genres, some people prefer mostly-external plots.

Yes, it's often said that genre stories tend to be mostly plot-driven, and litfic tends to be more internal and character-driven, but that's really just a stereotype. In some cases it's true, but the stories and movies most people like include good plot and good character development.

Plot-driven and character-driven are not on a spectrum the way light/dark and hot/cold are. The only way to increase cold is to decrease heat, and the same holds true for light and dark. In each case, one is the opposite of the other, or its negation. To be more precise, cold is the absence of heat, and dark is the absence of light. So there's no way to increase one without decreasing the other.

But character-driven and plot-driven are not opposites, and one doesn't require the absence of the other. They're like two separate slider switches. You can crank both up all the way, or adjust them however you want. Add more character development and more plot if you want. Turn one down for a while, then back up. They're independent of each other, though many people seem not to believe this.

KM Weiland is all about intertwining character and plot, and building it all around theme. Here are a couple of her best posts on the subject:

• How to Intertwine Plot, Character, and Theme in Every Scene
• Plot, Character, and Theme: The Greatest Love Triangle in Fiction