Many writers are familiar with the long-standing debate over whether character or plot is more important. If you’re into Greek philosophers, Aristotle believed that, when speaking of tragedy, plot is more important and character is secondary. Others, who are not Aristotle, argue that character is the most important. What is the answer? It’s a trick question, of course. There is no right answer. 

As someone who reads and writes literary fiction, I place more importance on characters. If I love the character, I’ll follow them anywhere. If I don’t, I’m not so sure I care too much about what’s happening to them. As a writer, I place more importance on character since my stories live or die on the strength of my characters. 

Not one reader has ever said to me, “I loved when that happened in the third chapter.” Readers say, “I love James and Sarah” or “I was surprised by Jonathan.” Perhaps you agree with Aristotle that plot is more important since to you it doesn’t matter how interesting the people are if their problems are boring. I would venture a guess that the best stories have a good combination of both fascinating characters and intriguing plots. 

The Plot Trap

Plot-first thinking feels organized, as if you as the author know exactly what you’re doing. You know what happens so you have a story. A detective is framed for the murder he’s investigating. A group of strangers must survive after their plane goes down in the wilderness. That’s a story. The problem is that these ideas aren’t stories; they’re situations, which can be useful starting points, but they aren’t stories. The situations become stories when we care about the specific people living through them. 

Think of a plot you love from a book or film. Now imagine that same plot happening to completely different characters who don’t have any particular quirks or contradictions or desires. Does the story still work? Most likely, it doesn’t because the plot is just a situation we don’t particularly care about. 

What Character First Actually Means

Putting character first doesn’t mean you abandon plot or that your story can wander away without structure or purpose. Just because some literary fiction is experimental, the reality is that many literary works still have meaningful plots. The difference is that in literary fiction, the events of your story grow out of your characters, including their fears, mistakes, and desires. In a plot-driven story, things happen to the characters, but in a character-driven story things happen because of the characters. See the difference?

Plot-driven stories can be gripping, but they can leave us cold afterward since we didn’t live inside them alongside the characters. Character-driven stories are the ones that stick around when we still think about them days later. Plot should be a machine used to apply pressure to a character’s internal problem. Actors are taught to ask themselves, “What does my character want?” as a way to understand that character from the inside out. Writers should do the same. Outside events matter because they force the character to confront what they’ve been avoiding or to reveal something important. Choosing to do nothing is also a decision that reveals character. 

But My Genre Requires a Strong Plot!

As the former executive editor of a literary journal, a writing mentor, and a long-time author myself, I’ve heard that a lot. And it’s true that there are some genres with high expectations as far as plot goes. And they’re not wrong to say that readers of these genres expect to be constantly propelled forward by high stakes and constant momentum.

I think it comes down to a matter of personal preference. I prefer to read novels that have stood the test of time. I mean the novels that people reread for decades. They are, almost without exception, the ones where the plot is in service of a character whose inner life we’re invested in.

A murder mystery is a puzzle, but the best mysteries are also a portrait of the characters involved. Agatha Christie understood plot better than most, but I love her Poirot novels because Poirot is fascinating. He’s fussy, impatient, melancholy, and yet perceptive in ways that confound those closest to him. Strip away Poirot and the puzzles become just puzzles. While they may be interesting puzzles, I can’t say that they would be worth reading about on their own.  

The Practical Implication

Whenever I find myself stuck in the plot of my story, my problem is almost always the lack of deep characterization. If you’re writing something new and you find yourself stuck, ask yourself three main questions: what does your character want, what do they fear most, and what are they wrong about?  Creating living characters in fiction isn’t about ascribing hair and eye color and adding a few personality quirks, although that can help on a superficial level. 

Characters who are flawed, who want things, and who are operating under some mistaken belief about themselves or the world, those are the characters that make or break a story. Such characters surprise you, and that’s when as readers we know we have found a story that we want to remember.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I spent the first year of writing The Professor of Eventide thinking I had a plot problem. I knew what scenes I needed, but for some reason they weren’t clicking. I kept rearranging events like furniture, hoping that would make the house feel lived in. Finally, I realized that it wasn’t a plot problem. It was a character problem. I didn’t know my cast of characters well enough yet to bring them to life on the page so that readers would care about what happened to them.

I knew my main character well enough for reasons that I will here leave unsaid. But the other characters, the characters newer to me yet essential to telling the story, were still unknown entities. Once I understood them clearly as fleshed-out invisible human beings (some perhaps not quite human), everything else sorted itself out. Suddenly, the scenes came alive in a way they simply hadn’t before, because real, multi-layered people were moving through them.

This is the number one lesson I try to teach new writers. Get the characters right, and readers will follow you anywhere.