And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
After blogging three times per week for most of the last year, it's been nearly one month since my last blog post. The main reason is that I've been pursuing a traditional career position, and the interview preparation and attendance took up the time I had been spending at the writing desk. The good news is my career pursuit is nearing it's climax, and I should hear one way or the other on the position by the end of next week. So until then, I'm returning to writing mode.
Although I haven't been writing during the last month, I have been reading at my usual voracious pace. I've noticed something about character development and how it can dictate plot choices during that time, and I think it's going to make me a better writer.
Drama arises from conflict, which is a powerful story driver. The best plotting, I think, results from conflict that affects the main character as well as the other protagonists in the book, but in different ways. Let me give an example. Let's say Jill decides to hire Frank to find Mary, who has gone missing. Jill is Mary's older sister, and she's afraid that Mary, who is just 18, has been duped into running off to join a cult. Frank is a private investigator who hasn't met Jill or Mary before. Frank never knew his father, because his father didn't marry his mother because his father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant, and back in the 1950s, Catholics faced severe religious penalties for marrying outside of their faith. These penalties were too threatening to Frank's father, so he refused to marry Frank's mother. So, Frank was raised by his mother and aunt. Once Frank was old enough to understand that it was religious dogma that kept him from knowing his father, he developed both a deep disdain for organized religion and a deep sympathy for any innocent people who suffered as a result of it.
So when Jill tells Frank her story about Mary, Frank is moved and accepts the case. The point here is that Mary's running off with the cult affects both Jill and Frank, but for different reasons. Jill is agonizing over losing her little sister and any harm that may come to her, and Frank is motivated by wanting to liberate Jill from an oppressive religious dogma. This makes the story much more personal to Frank than if Jill were simply another client who walked through the door, and opens up all sorts of plotting possibilities to play on both Frank and Jill's emotional vulnerabilities.
I literally made up the previous two paragraphs as I was typing them, and there would have to be a lot of refining done to expand the plot of Frank, Jill, and Mary's story into a compelling novel. Objectively, though, I think good plotting and good character development are inextricably tied together by idealism. The main characters in the story must be idealists, hold strong beliefs according to those ideals, and then have those beliefs challenged early and often by the events in the story. The goal would be to have the shared circumstances of the story – in this case Mary's disappearance – threaten the ideals of the main characters in different ways, and the playing out of the plot allow the characters to question and develop their personal beliefs further as a result of events in the story. This creates an emotional and developmental arc in the story for the main characters, and is what compels the reader to come along for the ride.
Think about your favorite books or stories, the ones that kept you up way past your bedtime because you couldn't put them down. Were the main characters idealists? Did they hold strong beliefs? Did the plot of the story threaten those beliefs early and often? I'll bet they did. Setting up characters and plot lines this way is a great place to start when you're thinking about writing your next story.
If the traditional career choice works out, I'll be blogging less. If it doesn't, I'll be blogging more. Either way, read a great story today and see if the main character is an idealist whose beliefs are being challenged. It makes for great drama! Thanks for reading. -Jon
