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The False Dichotomy of Character vs. Plot Driven Stories [1]
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Date: 2022-07-09
This conundrum isn’t a problem that plagues everyone. The cab driver needn’t worry himself over it. The woman operating a rivet machine isn’t necessarily haunted by it. Or, should I say, it is a small issue that neither would likely put into words because neither are professional story tellers, even if they consume the yield of such story tellers. Only in this sense might they happen upon this fork in the road. How it may effect them? They may have a preference and vote with their money for their preference. But in only some stories do critics offer up their exertion for the consumer on the back of the book jackets. In others it’s not even a consideration, and the critic’s focus is on other key elements of the story. Perhaps the story’s unique structure, perhaps its balance regarding the protagonist and antagonist, or perhaps the writer’s technique mostly attempted in the sci fi genre yet this time bizarrely applied to a literary fiction about jazz.
Why is it that critics pay attention to this conundrum sometimes and not others? Clearly, because with some stories said critique is inapplicable. And why might that be? Lawrence Kasdan’s Raiders of the Lost Arc was not a story critiqued for its Character vs. Plot balance. Neither was Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Nor was William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Emma Donoghue’s Room wasn’t. Nor was Luc Besson’s The Professional. What made these immune to this critique?
I am neither a cab driver, riveter, nor anyone who’s only connection to stories is as a consumer. I’m one of the creative writers who generate said stories, and so I have a more intimate relationship with this conundrum since the fruit of my labors might be judged by the critics for this dichotomy. Though I’ve never been published conventionally since I look at self-publishing as the road last travelled (that is, the path of last resort). Why I feel this way about self-publishing I’ll need to address in a follow-up article. However, as someone who makes regular conventional pleas to literary agents, it is in their bios that I find this distinction: Plot-driven vs. Character-driven vexing me. Agents reading this? If you take the time to cross examine one another you’ll see the question of Plot-driven vs. Character-driven is hardly a granular issue only brought up once in a blue moon by your lot. It saturates nearly every agent’s bio. Any agent that devotes at least a little time in that bio to what they want to see in a story when they’re reading it addresses this. But you surely know not all stories make the author’s choosing either/or necessary. And it’s not the agent who’s at fault for drawing this distinction. They’d never feel the need to bother if you, my fellow creators, didn’t make them feel such a choice need be made. So I will give you my simple formula for slowly but surely eroding these agent’s concerns like Coumadin erodes a DVT in a patient’s vascular system until it’s so small it’s no longer an active factor in a patient’s blood pressure.
The answer is a matter of agenda.
Example: The last sci fi I worked on the lead character’s first action in her life is killing her mother. 2359. Atro City. Virginia Merchant is a little woman with eclampsia and Eurydice Merchant is born 10 lbs. 12 ozs. A lot of baby to deliver breach. But Virginia was a big believer in water birth. She doesn’t survive it, perishing in her bathtub.
Fast forward twenty years.
Eurydice discovers her father, Markham, comes home haunted from work as a juvenile corrections officer, but he won’t talk about what had happened, whether or not he’d seen a fight or been in one, whether someone told him something or he saw something. He’s mum. And he’s drinking more every day. In the morning. Morning after morning. Stuff that could degrease a twelve cylinder engine. She watches him physically shrink as she keeps growing, now 5’ 10”. And she becomes afraid of losing the one parent she has left. She tries to gently pry her father open like an oyster, but he won’t crack, until one day, they fight. When she sees how he had ample reason to keep what he’d seen to himself she realizes the only way he’ll free himself from this bugbear is to air it. She encourages her father to leak this important data to the public for municipal good. However – little known fact among the denizens of the future – even though they all know big brother is almost everywhere, it’s not common knowledge that all the leak sites are also conglomerate owned (have been for over a decade, in fact, by the same one). Her father is skeptical that it’s safe, but she attempts to show him there’s no danger by leaking a false story about the debtor’s prison regarding its sanitation conditions (this prison is also a subsidiary of the same conglomerate). The story publishes the next day. “Huzzah! Dad, we stuck it to the man. See? No S.S. No truncheons. No bear mace. Go into a McD’s with a hoody over a baseball cap and big shades. Order a Happy Meal and leak that story. Then it’s away with you. Take a complicated way home. Take off the hoody, cap, and shades. Shower and shave your face. Heck, shave your head too. It’ll grow back.” Markham actually does it. To get unhaunted. He’s arrested the next day at work, renditioned off world.
A slimy lawyer comes into Markham’s co-op and knocks on the virtual reality tank Eurydice’s bathing in to offer her a choice, “You can either sue the Neb/Roft Conglomerate for damages vs. ‘The galaxy’s most formidable legal threat,’ exposing yourself to a countersuit for libel, character defamation, and wrongful litigation, OR you could sign a few NDAs and accept this N/RC check for ¥5 million. We’ll pick up rent and taxes. You’ll be a protectorate of the company.” Eurydice demand’s “WHERE is MARKHAM MERCHANT?”
“So that’s your decision?” asks the attorney. “To refuse our offer? Not wise, but noted. Get yourself a lawyer. Go cheap at your own peril. After you see that none will take your case? You’ll regret not having accepted our offer, and if you make a public clamor about it? We will sue you until you’re drowning in so much debt, debtor’s prison will be your only recourse. There, you’ll languish until you finally pay back 75% of your debt and are paroled with a garnishment on your wages for the next ten to fifteen years. Your daddy will be the least of your problems as you look for housing and a job. Neb/Roft won’t hire you, and you’ll find little isn’t Neb/Roft owned.”
Eurydice bitterly accepts the graft and signs the forms, crying. She feels responsible for having killed her father – matricide and now patricide – hating this lawyer and the conglomerate for whom she advocates. But now she realizes the only way she’ll find out what became of him is to go underground and off-grid, assuming new identities using her VR chamber to occupy fabricates that have less and less connection to her and greater and greater access to Neb/Roft until she can infiltrate this corporate giant and pry open its secrets to be lain bare before a leak site she’ll need to have custom developed.
What has happened here? Why am I not afraid of an agent’s evaluation of this story being too Plot or Character-driven? The answer is: Agenda. My character is agenda driven by her life path. She makes the plot because I expose an insecurity about her size murdering her mother. Then she sees her father shrink from physical debilitation of alcohol poisoning as she shoots up like bamboo in late onset puberty. History is repeating on her even if she only knows this pre-consciously, but she fights desperately to prevent it – goading her father if necessary to expose what he knows – because if she doesn’t know how can she diagnose the problem to form a prescription? Only after she discovers what it is she realizes her father’s actually right to worry. The secret is frightening, and the only answer she can think of is nature’s most effective disinfectant. Sunlight. She insists her father leak this information both for the world’s welfare as well as for himself to get unhaunted. She even takes the jump to demonstrate how there’s no imminent risk. And he finally does it. Sure enough, the following day, he’s singled out and plucked off. She then faces off with one of the devil’s minions who offers her a boilerplate carrot and stick scenario – the stick given the most detail – showing her that fighting the conglomerate is near suicidal, yet in either scenario she would be under amplified surveillance for the rest of her life. Assuming I ever attract an agent, I will have achieved making a large portion of readers feel sympathy for (perhaps even empathy with) this character while at the same time making the plot a consequence of her agenda.
Now let’s go back.
Raiders of the Lost Arc. It’s the mid 1930s. Here we have a professor who’s made it his personal mission to collect rare if not unique antiquities because, as a youth, he’d seen how mercenaries endeavored to collect these for private buyers rather than have them curated in a museum where they could become municipally appreciated. He’s acquainted with at least one of these mercenary competitors (Belloque) in his mature years and pits his archeological skill-set against him because he is his natural antagonist. One day he and one these curators are approached by government men who share with him a confidential U.S. concern regarding the archeological find of the century. Someone’s guessed roughly where the Hebrew’s Arc of the Covenant has wound up. The dig’s already begun, but it’s the Nazis this time that have begun it. Hitler himself has personal interest in these fetishes of symbolic power and wants to possess them all for the superman. Once again, agenda synthesizes both character and plot.
In Lost in Translation Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an actor fading into obscurity and obsolescence takes a gig promoting a liquor brand by starring in a Japanese commercial. Charlotte, a graduate student, travels with her photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi) who himself is very agenda-oriented even though she is not. Not here. Japan is a vacation for her, though a strange one where her agency is paralyzed significantly by her husband’s abandonment of her for his agenda. This leaves her to either watch Japanese TV in her apartment (which is obviously not going to suitably stimulate her) or hit the bar on the first floor of her hotel where Harris has already taken up residence, himself a giant in this world fashioned for denizens of a much shorter stature. They both feeling their alienation in this foreign backdrop, from their significant others, in a bubble of limbo, begin to take an interest in one another. Charlotte, a newly wed, has obvious reservations getting emotionally involved with Harris who’s old enough to be her father, and Harris, though obviously charmed by her physical presence, is himself aware of her nuptials and his own age co-efficient. Yet, their social options limited, they’re both kind of boxed in, and despite their situations each become quite charmed with the other. Emotionally invested, and physically tempted to act on those emotions. In this story who’s to say which drives the story more? Obviously both characters are adorable and ones with whom we can sympathize. Yet it’s their extenuating physical situation (the plot) that places one another in this taboo love story.
The Exorcist is an obvious example where each character is so palpably tortured. A priest, Lankester Merrin, obviously haunted by his past and on nitroglycerin, has taken a long sabbatical from the church to help in an archeological dig in northern Iraq where ominous occurrences are visibly happening all about him. These feelings of a sudden preternatural force steer him away from his present path and back to the Vatican. Another priest/psychiatrist who’s conflicted by a mother who needs obvious palliative care but refuses to leave her Georgetown apartment (a theme to which many older adults, both parents and their grown children can certainly relate), until she’s finally hospitalized and then dies there, but not before laying the mother of all guilt trips on Father Damien Karras. And, finally, Chris McNeil, veteran actress who’s within only a few days begun to notice a psychological decline in her daughter, Regan, indicating some pathology, but the growing number of diagnosticians she’s fain to consult are all stumped by her daughter’s condition. The imaging technology (really only in its infancy in the early ‘70s next to what’s available now) reveal no growths or lesions no matter how much they magnify them. Other diagnosticians can only offer pure speculation what’s happening inside her, and as they speculate on her condition she not only takes on a marked hostility but leaves Chris feeling her daughter may not be entirely alone in her room – the shaking bed (“…Ms. McNeil, the problem isn’t her bed, it’s her brain.”). It’s only after a hospital boardroom suggests that she speak with an exorcist (and herself getting belted in the face by her daughter) that she considers this, and taken by Father Karras after having seen him in her Georgetown neighborhood plying his trade as psychiatrist, appeals to him to see her daughter. Himself feeling his faith ebbing, ironically there’s a presence haunting all of Georgetown. A statue of Mary is found totally desecrated and McNeil’s director is suspiciously thrown from Regan McNeil’s window which leads to LONG procession of concrete stairs below. His head is found turned 180˚ around. So, though Karras’s faith is ebbing, and he is extremely skeptical of Regan’s “possession” in spite of what seems to the audience ample support, he finally speaks to higher authorities who themselves speak to higher authorities and soon after Father Lankester Merrin is summoned to perform the exorcism with Karras on standby (as “there should be an accompanying psychiatrist present anyway…”). Only, at the end, the devil’s resolve is stronger than Lankester’s physical health, as he suffers a fatal heart attack, and Karras – once ebbing in faith – now brims with it and draws the devil into his own body. His very first urge is to kill Regan, but in a magnificent force of will he throws himself out her window, now the second victim to that long flight of stairs. He dies and Regan remembers nothing the following day.
Was The Exorcist story-character or plot-driven? How could it be only plot-driven with this magnificent cast of tortured characters? How could it have been character-driven if not for the emergence of this undeniably diabolical force generally taking root in Georgetown and specifically in Regan McNeil’s body? Without the antagonist’s emergence there would have been no shared agenda on the parts of those protagonists to team up and drive the devil out. The characters and plot needed one another.
Room is a compelling story about a women named Joy Newsom who’s kidnapped as a girl seven years earlier and locked up inside a toolshed to be transformed into a sexual slave by antagonist, “Old Nick.” This results in Jack, their offspring, a boy who’s hair is long because Joy obviously can’t be trusted with sheers. This movie begins when Jack is five-years-old. When “Old Nick” comes to deliver her food he blames her for reproducing (as though he had nothing to do with it), and she hides Jack from Nick, telling him to pretend he’s asleep in a wardrobe. Jack has many questions for his mother who, in an effort to keep her son from having to live with the traumatic truth, lies very creatively to him that the things he sees on the television are magical, having no basis in reality, that the food brought to them by “Old Nick” also comes from magic, and that there is nothing that exists outside this 10’3 space. Only as Jack gets older does he begin to question his mother’s fantastic answers, and they begin to lock horns. At one point Joy realizes if Old Nick were to die on them they would starve in the room and that attempting an escape from the toolshed is more than simply a choice. It’s their only means of survival, even though a part of her dreads escaping because the only thing more frightening than Old Nick is an unbridled environment to which she’s unable to know whether or not she can tolerate or control.
Again the characters are remarkable. Old Nick is remarkably horrible, kidnapping, confining, and raping Joy until she has his baby and then colder than a stone, having no desire to see the son he fathered, in fact, angry at Joy for having given birth to him, forcing him to increase their rations and acquire toys. Joy is a remarkable character for developing a fictitious universe for her son’s peace of mind even though as he matures he’s progressively less satisfied with her answers to his questions. And then there’s Jack himself unaware that Old Nick – this monster to fear – has anything to do with his very existence, unaware that anything outside of “Room” exists, at first blissfully, and later at odds with his own feelings as he’s only coming to understand that he’s been confined. At first he blames his mother for the angst he’s experiencing, and she then must tolerate pressure from both her son and her jailer/rapist. This finally leads to the inevitable escape attempt, which succeeds, and both Joy and Jack are saved. Yet not without concerns and trauma from the outside world, as now, they must interface with the world after having the enforced sanctuary of Room from it and this winds up being a challenge of its very own. All the news organizations want Joy and Jack to illustrate for them their extremely difficult story, and Jack must metabolize that “Ma” – his everything – had lied to him about everything his whole life and understand why. Certainly the characters drive this story but only because of the plot, that they were both captured and had to escape if they were to survive, transcend, and evolve.
The Professional. It’s one of Luc Besson’s purist stories, least cluttered with extraneous characters. Twelve-year-old Mathilda stands in the epicenter of it having just met her reclusive neighbor Leon, for whom she resolves to help get groceries as he’s a foreigner and unable to read English – a major disadvantage in the middle of Manhattan – if not for Tony (played by Danny Aiello) he’d be unable to get hit jobs and store his earnings. Living in a nightmare family with a nightmare father, who’s obviously entangled with the mob; a nightmare stepmother and older sister who needle her and both obviously love the money that their father brings home. The only person she loves is her little brother. DEA Agent Stansfield, an addict himself to some drug that comes in capsule form, threatens her father to come up with more vig as he’s light this time around, and her dad fails to make it materialize the next time Stansfield comes a-knocking. Mathilda is out in the hall at this time just outside of Leon’s adjacent apartment, back with Leon’s milk, but Leon is not opening the door. There’s a cloud of gnats in the mojo. Leon senses this. He knows if he opens that door he’ll unnecessarily expose his position and open himself up to danger, and yet if he doesn’t he will condemn Mathilda to it. He ultimately takes the chance, and Mathilda and he hug for the first time. Then there’s gunfire everywhere, one apartment over. She collapses because she’s just lost the only thing she loved, and yet she’s gained someone also. It is another taboo love story. Not that Leon takes things to that level. He’s a decent enough person, but Mathilda’s own feelings for him swell, and she has no doubt about them, which makes things difficult because, despite her age, she’s an incredibly stunning thing. She decides to pay Leon with her father’s money to take out Stansfield, endeavor his calling as a “cleaner,” for which, she will continue to help him mesh with the world. He finally agrees. The rules are simple: He will teach her the tools of his trade in an order that begins with her being furthest from the target – the scoped long range rifle – then weapons that bring her in more intimately with the target until finally the switchblade which brings her within melée with the target. All appears to be going well, but Leon has been getting around and making more noise, telling survivors of his targets, “No women, No Kids.” This acquires Stansfield’s attention, and he comes to Tony looking for answers. It’s when Mathilda decides to chance catching Stansfield unawares in his very own building with a packages of “Italian Food,” that she herself is caught, winds up his hostage, and taken back to Leon’s present apartment. Only he taught her a secret knock to gain entrance, and when the DEA agent asks whether or not she has one of those coded knocks she nods, but gives him the wrong knock when he asks for it. This is when the story explodes in denouement, and the audience sees all of which Leon is truly capable, which is considerable for a single man. He manages to hold the interlopers at bay, free Mathilda of her abductors, escape the confines of the apartment and down a ventilation shaft, and finally himself, acquiring the DEA uniform and concealing headgear to don as he nearly walks free. It is only when Stansfield recognizes him that he’s put down, and even then he surprises Stansfield with his conclusive move, the ignition of several grenades, killing Stansfield. Mathilda finally goes to Tony to exclaim her interest in becoming his next cleaner, but he erupts, telling her he has no need for a twelve-year-old executioner. He finally gives her some money, explaining his relationship to her like he’d explained it to Leon. That he’s “…Like a bank but better than a bank because banks get knocked off all the time, but not Old Tony…” She finally takes up an option she’d passed up in the beginning of the story which was to matriculate into a school for gifted girls.
Once again, determining the balance of this story is (to me) easy. Character-driven? Or plot-driven? That there’s a fully fleshed out character development arc for both is beyond reproach. This story has all that. Leon, who engages in intense regular exercise, is extremely physically capable. Fast, resourceful, exacting. But he also has a handicap in that he can’t read English, making him alienated from American culture and with a somewhat boyishly naïvety. Mathilda isn’t physically powerful at all, but she’s precocious, driven, and extremely mature for her age which helps offset Leon’s immature sensibilities and alienated nature. While he doesn’t physically take advantage of what she’d probably give away, she has in him what amounts to both a father-figure and lover. Almost like having her own personal genie. This all comes to a head when they finally must let one another go, literally, as he dangles her over the slide of a ventilation shaft for deliverance from certain death. She pleads with him not to let her go as she knows he’ll be killed the moment he does, and he swiftly argues, “No, Mathilda, you have shown me life. You have made me become alive, and I will always have you to thank for it.” Though circumstances tear one another apart, both are left branded by the other, and while Stansfield and Leon neutralize each other, Mathilda is now a legacy figure who’ll surely take lessons she learned from Leon and act with an unfair advantage next to other girls her age. Yes, this story is surely character-driven. Yet, that it’s plot-driven is every bit as true. Had not her father been a drug dealer he’d never had a relationship with Stansfield. Had Stansfield not come tolling, her little brother wouldn’t have perished, nor would she have begged Leon to save her life. If not for Leon’s soft spot for her he would not have opened that door, and if not for A. Caring so much for her, and B. her putting up the cash to assassinate Stansfield he would not have taken her on as a pupil, roommate, save her life yet again, and ultimately avenge her little brother. It was largely her agenda that led this story down the path it did, but it was also because of Leon’s agenda to see no harm befall her that she survived long enough to see her own agenda consummated.
So fellow writers, though it is possible to generate a story that is either “Character-Driven” or “Plot-Driven,” realize that both the agents who would represent you and the audience to whom the agents are your gatekeepers – whatever they may say in their bios – would really prefer a strong synthesis of both character and plot. You’ll both have all that if your protagonists/antagonists have or are affected by an agenda. Only then do character and plot become one.
[END]
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