"Your Book's Plot Doesn't Matter"

That YouTube heading caught my attention, and Abbie Emmons’ accompanying blog challenged my thinking about plot construction. (You can read the entire post here.) She said:

Your plot doesn't matter; only your characters do…

In fact, the characters--more specifically the protagonist--are your story.

 

Most writers think that…the most important part of your story is the plot. They think the plot is what drives the story and the characters are just along for the ride. Actually, it's the other way around. I've said it before, but it bears repeating a thousand times: Story is not about what happens; it's about how what happens affects and transforms the characters.

 

This is the backbone of story. It's the foundation, the life blood:  Characters and how they change as a result of their journey.

 

My first impulse was to brush this aside, but the next day I came across this passage in the autobiography of best-selling Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope: 

I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots…The novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creatures of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures. This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy.

They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here in our outer world, we know that men and women change—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them…

Twice challenged, I reflected on several novels I had read and movies I'd seen. I could recall the overall theme of each story, and I could visualize the protagonist of each one (at least the image I had constructed in my own mind). I also remembered a few major events that revealed the character qualities of each person. Beyond that, Abbie and Anthony were right: A novel's characters took center stage, while its plot became their background.

I’ve often spent painstaking hours trying to construct a plot worthy of my characters. But didn't that simply confirm that my characters drove the plot? On the other hand, when I became familiar with my characters, they told their own stories.

I'm curious to know your experience. Which do you develop first, character or plot? Do you agree that your plot "doesn't matter" if your characters are engaging enough?

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

Touchy, Touchy, Touchy!

Anthony Trollope (1815-82) is best known to American readers for the "Barchester Chronicles," a series of novels about church life in a nineteenth-century parish. Although Trollope did not call himself a Christian author, he often dealt with moral and spiritual themes. One of his attempts aroused the ire of a well-known churchman, and illustrates the kind of trouble we can encounter when we deal with touchy subjects.

Trollope wrote about a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage in his novel, Can You Forgive Her? He later commented:

It must ever be wrong to force a girl into marriage with a man she does not love--and certainly the more so when there is another whom she does love. In my endeavor to each this lesson I subjected the young wife to the terrible danger of overtures from the man to whom her heart had been given...leaving for a while a doubt on the question of whether the lover might or might not succeed (Trollope, An Autobiography, chap. 10).

He received a letter from a distinguished Anglican minister who said he usually enjoyed having one of his daughters read Trollope's latest novel to him, but this story had gone over the top. The disgusted clergyman had told his daughter to put it away, and he scolded Trollope for writing a sensational book to gin up sales. Surely the author didn't think a wife contemplating adultery was a fit subject for his readers!

"I asked him in return whether from his pulpit, or at any rate from his communion table, he did not denounce adultery to his audience," Trollope wrote, "and if so, why it should not be open to me to preach the same doctrine to mine."

His critic invited Trollope to spend a week as a guest in his home, where they could "have it out," but the author never accepted this invitation. The novel ended with Lady Glencora staying true to her marriage vows, yet the churchman never learned how the story turned out. He might have forgiven a woman of adultery, but he couldn't forgive someone for having the temerity to write about it!

My crit group is now reading a young adult novel in which the teenage protagonist gets pregnant out of wedlock. It's skillfully written and portrays the girl's quandary in a most authentic way, but I've cautioned the author to expect a cool reception from Christian publishers, because the subject itself will draw a lot of flack.

What are some of the most touchy subjects for your fiction genre? Have you tackled them anyway? How did prospective agents and publishers respond?

 

Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana Chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.

When Characters Come to Life

While spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day at the Abe Martin Lodge in Brown County, I was surprised to learn that the renowned tourist attraction is named for a character of fiction—a cartoon character to be precise. Hoosier artist Kin Hubbard conceived Abe Martin as a backwoods philosopher who commented on the political scene, family life, and a wide range of other topics with more candor than a proper editorial writer could have. You’ll find sketches of Abe and his cohorts all over the inn, as well as the nearby tourist haven of Nashville.

I wonder how many other states have named public works after characters of fiction. Indiana may be unique in that respect. Hubbard drew the character so clearly and expressed his opinions so winsomely that Hoosiers now give old “Abe” as much deference as a real person.
While there, I read the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, a 19^th century British satirist who is best known for the Barsetshire Chronicles, a series about the foibles of clergy in an imaginary Anglican parish. Trollope says that the series “failed altogether in the purport for which it was intended” (i.e., to end a system that allowed clerics to use endowments for the poor to feather their own nests). “But it has a merit of its own… The characters of the bishop, of the archdeacon, of the archdeacon’s wife, and especially of the warden, are all well and clearly drawn. I had realized to myself a series of portraits, and had been able so to put them on canvas that my readers should see that which I meant them to see. There is no gift which an author can have more useful to him than this.”

Most of Trollope’s work is now forgotten, but the Barsetshire Chronicles remain in print and became the basis of a “Masterpiece Theater” series by PBS some years ago. These characters still live in the imagination of millions of readers and TV viewers.

How do such characters “come alive”? In these blog posts, we talk a good deal about the techniques for evoking them, but notice Trollope’s comment about how his characters began to take shape: “I had realized to myself a series of portraits,” he says. He visualized each of them as vividly as if he were standing before their portraits, studying every eyelash and wrinkle with appreciation. Only when he saw them in his imagination did he “put them on canvas” so that readers could see them as well.

Do you see your characters that clearly? In Trollope’s opinion, it's the most useful gift an author can have.



Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana Chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.