Many years ago, when my cherubs were but sparkles in my eye and I was slogging away at my writing dream in the cracks of life around work, I sat in a panel session at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival (when it was at the Malthouse Theatre, that’s how old I am!) that had my resting thinking face on overdrive.
I can’t recall what it was called, but basically it was about what comes first, plot or character?
The arguments were characters need something to happen to them, aka plot is more important versus who cares what happens if we don’t care about the character? And thus this thesis contends that characterisation is more important, which at the time had me almost fist pumping in agreement. And look at me go: I just used fancy words in a paragraph. Anyhoo, as I’ve matured like a fine stinky cheese from the depths of a Parisian cellar, I’m a little less binary with my views about this, or perhaps I’m a little more conflicted?
Here’s the thing: I’m a sucker for an outline. I love spending a fairly decent slab of time staring out the window and thinking deeply about the genesis of an idea. For example, what if a feisty feminist singleminded school girl wants to spend the entire summer doing nothing but prepping for the upcoming school year, Year Twelve, the year that will make or break her future, but is instead facing a summer of chaos at home thanks to renovations by no other than who she calls a neanderthal surfer, someone she’s pointedly avoided for years? From this central idea, that of two young people’s world clashing, I can start playing around with all the what ifs of a plot. Why is she so keen on getting a head start on year twelve? Why does she place such importance on it? Why is he such a hindrance? Why do they have beef? As I’m thinking about these questions, and others, plot ideas start coming to me. What if this happens? What if she thinks this? What if his core belief is that? I capture these on index cards but I’m loathe to lock them down into an outline or a synopsis until I have a relatively decent idea of what’s happening to these characters, and to do this, I need to know them, their drivers, their flawed ways of thinking, their quirks and their strengths before I can think of anything other than a vague plot. I don’t know the points of conflict, or the beats of the story: I just have a growing pile of cards with a scribble of an idea scrawled across in messy handwriting.
I actually love this stage of the creative process. I love generating a big list of ideas of what could happen, without thinking too deeply about the why. The why comes of its own volition as I write the story and know the characters in greater depth. It’s this what phase that generates some magic, such as new characters that pop up, such as a grumpy storekeeper, plot events, metaphors or images that repeat enough in my head for me to spot them as potential motifs. Just as sleep begets sleep (or so they say) they often lead to new discoveries and inclusions.
Once I feel like I have enough to both excite me and start actually bringing the story to life, knowing at least a who and a what, if not a when, I shuffle all the ideas, captured on the index cards, into a logical, coherent order of, wait for it, beginning, middle and end as an outline, which often becomes a synopsis to work from. This doesn’t necessarily mean the novel will have a chronological structure, but it gives me a framework to start writing the shitty first draft. For example, if I have flashbacks and back story dumps, I can write these now, wherever and whenever, and figure out the structure later. I know that some writers would hate this, and I have no idea how I’d go about tackling a duel timeline. I’d probably do the same process, but twice, and end up with two outlines?
Outline, schmoutline. I don’t use them as a blunt instrument.
I absolutely deviate from these because that’s where the creativity woo-woo happens, particularly as I don’t have a lot of detail in my outline. It might say ‘goes to St Lucia chapel’ which can lead me in a new direction as I accidentally stumble upon an opportunity to add a whole level of dramatic tension that I didn’t anticipate in my idea generation, or a new character coming into the novel’s world to stir up some trouble.
All of that said, even if I have a stack of 100 index cards with different plot points, I don’t consider myself to be a plot-driven writer. At the core of things in my novels there’s no real threat to the end of the world, there’s no bomb to be disarmed. There’s no fight to the death. There’s real people, young people, navigating les petites tragedies of their lives. Is this any less extraordinary? I hope not! The nuances of daily life are, well, life, aren’t they?
This brings me back to the start: could I add dramatic tension (aka plot) without knowing the character(s) well enough to know that the tension is going to make their lives a whole lot more difficult, and give them some tricky feelings to navigate as they make sense of it?
What’s more important: characters or plot?
I’m sitting firmly in Switzerland with this one. Even the most plot-driven stories need a strong protagonist driving them, otherwise who gives a flying you know what? So too with less pacy plots: if the character is doing little other than naval gazing as they consider their future, unless I care about them, I don’t care. Looks like the resting thinking face isn’t going away any time soon!