I serve as a mod at a writing forum on the web where this question comes up, over and again, in many guises. The most popular guise being the, “I have this character. I know everything about them. I love him/her. I just don’t know what to write about them. Help!” thread, which for me is like saying that one has an actor who is in need of a script.
When you set to writing, which comes first for you, personally? The story or the players. And when I ask “which comes first” I mean literally, within the chronology of you writing your work, not necessarily what you would think is the ideal.
I guess I’m just looking for some fresh perspective away from the community where I spend the majority of my time.
If you don’t know what the story is, you don’t really know everything about the character. Story comes from either the character seeking what he most desperately wants, or from trying to avoid whatever he most sincerely wants to avoid. Drop a disaster (literal or figurative) on his head and see how he responds: there’s your story.
In my own writing, I tend to start with situations. The situation comes from my imagination, and then I try to figure out who the characters are, how they got there, where they are going.
I only just started my first real writing project, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I’ve always come up with the world or situation first, then tried to figure out how people would react to said world. Personalities and characters come out of that.
I generally start with a character and a situation, the the story and more of the character build out of that.
Actually, I frequently start with five random words, but with those I make a character and a situation, then decide if I want to take it further into story.
I usually start with a character, but if a situation (usually a problem) doesn’t develop around him/her instantly, I start over. So it’s character first, but only by as long as it takes to figure out who the character is. Should happen in the first fifty words.
Protagonist VS Story? My primary experience is with short stories and poetry. I write the best short stories (best for me, not necessarily the best) when the character comes first and then I let the character tell me the story that needs to be written. I don’t really understand how it happens but the story just comes out.
I purchased Scrivener to help me organize thoughts and pieces for a full length novel that I am working on and with that I do have an overall idea of where the story starts and where I want it to end. The middle parts are still vague at best. But even with this project I do have the main protagonist clearly developed–it will be up to her to reveal to me how she gets to the end section. Will this work? I don’t know. It’s the only way I know that works for me.
It seems to me the middle is always the most difficult. Always. You’ve got characters, a start and an ending, but how do you delay that ending for several hundred pages whilst retaining the reader’s interest? I’ve heard some people state that crafting that delay is the central challenge of fiction writing. Not sure I agree, but not for nothing is the middle in books and movies sometimes called “the long second act”, or more optimistically, “fun and games”.
That’s why, sometimes, a protagonist “allowed” to tell her own story is not enough. Complexity needs to surround her from the start, so that you can re-weave that complexity and your protagonist’s relationship with it in the middle of your tale.
The late Larry Brown spoke directly to this issue when he said (paraphrasing, although I could seek out the exact quote I’ve got from him) that he sits a character down in a place typical to them and then “starts throwing shit at them” until they do something about it. (Although Larry wrote some pretty graphic realism, I don’t think he meant that he literally tossed feces at his characters, merely foetid situations.)
What so many beginning writers forget is that on its own story, like a character, doesn’t do anything. Even in character-driven pieces, it is the plot that moves the story forward by addressing the questions why?; what then?; how? … these things require conflict. And the greatest character in all fiction doesn’t matter if they aren’t presented obstacles they must struggle against.
Story and Character should be integrally linked together, but what pushed each in any direction is the conflict of plot.
As EM Forester wrote:
Story = The king died then the queen died.
[here we have characters and story but we know nothing about it]
Plot = The king died then the queen died of grief.
[why did the queen die? because of grief. why was her grief such that she died from it? because… (the plot pushes the story to reveal this sorrow)]
A couple of pennies thrown out there. Keep em if you need em, if you don’t just pass em on.
