Who Exactly Is Driving This Thing?
I got in a conversation not long ago about character-driven vs. plot-driven stories. We were mainly talking about short stories, although it seems as though when most people ramble on about the distinction (as I’m about to) they are referring to novels and movies. Interestingly, many of these folks insist that despite what you may think, character-driven stories are just as good as plot-driven, while others say the opposite. So I think we can all agree that neither term is pejorative, even if most people seem to think everyone else thinks one of them is.
Anyway, leaving aside for the moment whether or not it matters, how do we tell the difference? Obviously the whole thing is on a continuum, since a story that relies completely on plot and has utterly uninteresting characters would be pretty horrible, and two fascinating characters sitting around talking for no particular reason with no conflict would not exactly set the world afire either. There are lots of definitions floating around that try to at least peg the stories on one side of the continuum or the other; some focus on presence or absence of character growth, others on “high concept” vs. “small stories”.
It is tempting to define it based on how an author “got started” (well, tempting if you like talking about this sort of thing, anyway – I have a feeling most readers are utterly uninterested in a writer’s motives or process). If a writer comes up with some neat characters and throws them out there to see what happens, it is character-driven, while if they come up with a neat idea for something that happens and make some characters that can get them there it is plot-driven. By this definition, a lot of what I write is character-driven, since I honestly have no clear idea what is going to happen in a story I’ve just started writing half the time. While I’m fine with having written character-driven stuff (see paragraph 1, above), I’m not sure it works. If I come up with a single image of some conflict happening between two characters and just go from there, is it really character-driven just because I don’t know how it will end? Or is it plot-driven because that initial idea of conflict is the driver?
I have finally developed what I call the “Hmm-Huh Hypothesis”. According to the HHH, if you describe the plot of a story to someone in a few sentences and they make an interested “hmm!” noise, it is plot-driven, while if you can’t really do it, or do so and the listener responds with a neutral “huh.”, it is character-driven (or plot-driven and just bad. Or you’re not good at summing up plots. There are some bugs to work out, here).
Perhaps the best thing is to just ask an author whether their story is character or plot-driven. You’ll make their day; just be prepared to listen to them talk about “just sitting back and letting the characters do what they need to do” or “building the connections that allow the characters to come alive” for a while.
Interesting, but for determining character-driven versus plot-driven stories, I’d go with the Woody Allen/ Micheal Bey movie conjecture. Essentially, is the story closer to a Woody Allen movie, lots of talking, sitting around, coming of age, revelations of character, angst, wry humor? This indicates it’s probably character-driven. On the other side, is the story closer to a Micheal Bey movie, were there is an explosion ever few minutes, a deadline, why won’t these bad guys just die, Obi-won is our only hope, if the kid doesn’t befriend the car we’re all going to die? This indicates the story is plot driven.
Yeah, what Lincoln said. Everything else falls in between and I suspect most stories do just that.