Xenagia: Third Person Perspective #3: Driving Fiction

Third Person Perspective #3: Driving Fiction

One of the Xenagia editors, Stace Dumoski, asked me recently: What is character-driven fiction? Is it really more popular with readers?

After mulling it over for a few days, it occurred to me that there's a bigger question here. How do you 'drive' any piece of fiction? What does it really mean, and what are the differences between the methods?

I decided to examine this in-depth and try to weigh up the pros and cons of each.

First we need to establish what 'driving' really means. It almost couldn't be simpler; the drive of a story is what keeps things moving to their conclusion, the primary focus from which the narrative derives. If our story was a car, the drive would be its engine. A story without a drive is just a set of words without any kind of purpose. The drive can be anything that fits this basic guideline, but most commonly it's one of two things: character or plot.

When a story is driven by its characters, the characters' choices and decisions are what creates the narrative, and as a result the narrative centers around the characters' actions and their consequences. This is usually combined with a focus on the character's thoughts and feelings, providing (hopefully) compelling reasons for the things they do and say. It's easy to empathize with character-driven fiction because it makes the characters in question feel active and important, doing rather than having done unto them. It's the difference between active and passive writing on a much larger scale.

Characters are a fantastic drive for virtually any story, and genre fiction in particular. They're the effective writer's number one way of 'selling' unfamiliar material to his or her readers. The thing that people can most easily relate to is another person, and therefore a character that puts readers at ease will often be their anchor in strange seas. It gives them a frame of reference through which to interpret the new setting. It also allows you to filter the setting information into small, easily-digestible chunks, and helps determine what really needs to be 'on camera' and what you can afford to leave out for the sake of brevity and flow. After all, a character that's already familiar with the setting he or she inhabits won't feel the need to describe everything all the time. Even a character that isn't familiar with the setting won't constantly notice every detail.

The other common drive used in fiction is plot. In a plot-driven story the characters are not fully in control of their own fates but are pulled onwards through the narrative by an external force, be it a big baddy's master plan, a prophecy involving the main character(s), or some other compulsion to make the characters respond in a certain way. This external force is what moves the story—the plot will continue to require the characters to perform certain actions at certain points in the narrative in order to keep itself going. In a nutshell, the plot shapes the characters rather than the characters shaping the plot, and the main focus is on what happens rather than who's doing it.

While not inherently inferior to character drive, the plot drive is more difficult to pull off convincingly because the characters are more restricted in what they can do within the confines of the plot. They have more difficulty doing anything believably unexpected, have less personal responsibility for their actions due to the constraints and compulsions placed on them by the plot, and can often spend a whole story just uncovering hidden clues about said plot rather than creating their own narrative. It's a more straightforward journey from beginning (plot engages main character(s)) to end (plot is resolved one way or another), and while you can deviate from that formula for a time, there will always be some kind of resolution waiting to happen. Everything up until that resolution is just build-up. The characters are fully dependent on the plot to keep drawing them into specific situations and so bring them to the story's conclusion.

For example, characters on a quest to defeat a big baddy can decide to build a big cannon, can design an elaborate scheme of distraction, or even sneak into the baddy's fortress, but these actions all result in one situation: a plotted final showdown. It doesn't matter what the result of that showdown is. Something has to happen to that big baddy or the story would have no plot, and therefore no drive.

Any well-constructed story can mask plot compulsions as believable character decisions, but it's slightly easier to do with a character drive because a character-driven plot does not exist independently of the characters. If it's plausible for the characters to pursue the plot thread in question, then it's perceived by the reader to be the characters' decision, and the plot is still perceived to be flowing from those decisions.

The plot drive can be very effective for things like allegory, where your setting and story are symbolic of something, meant to provoke thought or emotion by themselves and not just through your characters. It's also a good option when the story is larger than the characters, having taken on a life beyond what a series of finite viewpoints can convey. Conversely, it's harder to use it for character pieces and personality-focused stories because it's more difficult to empathize with characters who are acting in a story rather than creating one.

Now, for the question of one being more popular with readers than the other . . .

It's a thorny one. Character-driven stories can have great plots, and vice-versa. Employing one drive isn't exclusive of all other elements, but the other elements don't control the narrative. The chosen drive is what the story is about, and that will always take center stage.

I've mentioned that as a rule it's easier to empathize with characters taking an active role in their lives. It's a very basic human thing; we like to think we're in charge of our own stories, filling the pages with what we want and what we choose to do. Even if it's far from the truth, we'd quite like it to be that way, and the element of wish-fulfillment in fiction appeals directly to that sensibility. A badly-written story can lead people straight down the opposite path, neither seeing ourselves in the characters nor wishing to be in their shoes. The plot drive can be especially disastrous for this. Very few people in this world have their stories created for them, and even fewer actually want to be in that position.

As a writer I don't believe the character drive is inherently superior. The trick is in how it's used and executed. It's easy to write a bad story regardless of what drives it. It may be slightly more difficult to create an enjoyable story with a plot drive, but the detailed characterization you need for a good character drive is no walk in the park either.

As a reader I do favor the character drive because I think plot drives are incredibly overused in genre media, particularly bad genre media, and when churned out by the ham-handed corporate machine (be it in the form of books, films, games, whatever) they tend to result in boring pap full of predictable twists and hollow characters that leave me without one shred of empathy.

In the end it doesn't really matter what you drive, as long as you keep both hands on the wheel.

Ryan A. Span is a UK-based SFF author, game designer and professional grump. Amongst other things he writes the STREET series of cyberpunk novels and treks out to exotic places across the world just to taste the wildlife.

If you have a question for Ryan or an idea for a TPP article, please e-mail them to cs -at- streetofeyes -dot- com, subject THIRD PERSON PERSPECTIVE