When Plot Leads Character

You can feel this problem in a book, movie or TV show, even if you aren't exactly sure what's wrong. Most of the time, it ends up feeling like the characters aren't doing anything. Some of the time, it feels like the characters are just reacting rather than propelling things to happen. Or the end of the story can just feel meaningless or flat because the audience wasn't as invested in the outcome as they could have been. Sure, there are stories in which that is what the author intends. But most of the time, it's not.

If you have a cool idea about the climax of the story, you might have this problem. If you are thinking about stuff that happens rather than the characters, you may end up with this problem. If you are planning the book around a particular popular "plotting" method, you may end up with this problem.

The solution to the problem? It's usually painful. It means starting over again (most revision means this, by the way). It means going back to the beginning and figuring out at each turn what your character wants and how your character would uniquely solve the problem of the world or people in the world not giving in to what she wants immediately.

Now, you may be thinking that your main character doesn't know what she wants at the beginning of the story. Or that your main character wants something very different at the beginning of the story than she turns out to want at the end of the story. And this is actually very much a part of plotting with the character at the forefront. This is called character change. It's what the audience expects, and yet it can also be very satisfying and feel like an exciting  "switch" at the end of the story.

Still, as a writer what you have to do is have the character (no matter how unsure or how wrong at the beginning) driving each scene as it unfolds. If you are doing a multi-character arc, then the way you choose which scene to tell from which pov is by showing the scene from the pov of the character who is propelling the action in that scene, or who has the most at stake in the outcome (at stake meaning they have the most to lose or they want the most out of the scene).

I feel like one of the biggest problems I see in story telling is that the main character is rather bland, a sort of character who can be fit into a plot already imagined. This kind of character wants rather broad, generalized good things, like "justice" or "to save the planet" or "to change the world." Yeah, well, I think readers want a very specific character who is propelled to change the world in a very specific way. You tell the story about one specific character's hurts and losses and it propels the reverse of the story, which is trying to correct those hurts and losses.

Maybe this isn't always realistic, but isn't that why we crave story, because story is our way of changing the world when it won't change in any other way?