Does anybody still write with these?

Plotting is the hardest job a writer of any kind of story is called upon to do, and so much fiction - of all kinds - fails in this regard because plotting is the hardest thing to teach.  Style, voice, diction and psychic distance can all be easily shown on a mechanical level and learned through study.  Even a prevalent problem like passive voice is easy to spot and fix once your attention has been called to it, but plotting is more ephemeral.

Partially this is because plotting has to do with values beyond simple quality of prose: ethic, morality, and drama.  Some of these are suspect to a modern mind, and some are hard to define.  Thus their study remains esoteric, even in an era where we have more writers and would-be writers than at any other time in history, and the market for advice on "how to write" is enormous.  Now a lot of this advice is really an attempt to answer the ancient question "How do I get published?"  To which the only answer that means anything is "Get lucky".

But I'm not a guru about publication, I'm talking here about the actual writing process on the assumption that the person reading this either wants to become a better writer or is at least interested in the nuts-and-bolts of it all.

So: Plot.

Plot is in essence the answer to the question "what happens?"  The answer you come up with for that is your plot.  Except this is, in itself, a misleading way of looking at it.  A plot where things just happen is weaker than a plot where our question is not "What will happen next?" but "What will X character DO?"

So many people get a setting and characters and then they cannot think of a plot, and this is because they are thinking about it backward.  If you have characters in mind, then who they are is what will determine what happens.

Agency is the watchword here, and it means just that.  Your character must DO something.  They must take action - or attempt to - and try and change their world.  That in and of itself is not enough to make a story good, but it is always good to look at any story idea in light of this principle.  A character who only reacts is not a protagonist, but a victim.  Whether or not they are able to handle the events that take place on a bare physical plane, they are not driving the plot.

This is what is meant by Character-Driven, which is a word that gets thrown around a lot in discussing supposedly good fiction.  It's a bit like "All-natural" or "Homemade".  It's not often true, but it gets tossed in to make things sound better.

A genuinely character-driven narrative has events which directly arise from the actions of the characters, and these actions are motivated by their personalities.  An approach like this means that your character's persona and motivations directly shape the world and what happens in it.

So building a plot should begin with character.  Who are your characters?  What do they do?  What do they want?  You have to know these things or you won't get anywhere with plotting.  A sign of a bad plot is one in which the characters could be removed, replaced with other characters, and it would either make no difference or genuinely improve things.  So often we think of worldbuilding as the jumping-off point for a story, especially in genre fiction where the world may be very different from our own.  We get attached to other people's fictional worlds, and we want to go and live in the best ones.

It's natural then, when we begin constructing our own worlds we start with maps and names and magic systems and exotic cities and races.  All these things certainly have their place, and I love them as much as you do.  But what gets us interested and keeps us reading or watching is not a setting, but the characters we get to know.  We get invested not only in them, but in their stories: what they want, what they fear, what they are trying to do.  These are the things you have to focus on.  Ask yourself these questions about your prospective heroes: What do they love?  What do they hate?  What would be the worst thing that could happen to them?  These are not frivolous matters, they are what will shape and inform your story - they will determine your answer to the question.  What happens?

Next Week: Playing Fair