Plot or Character
H ow do you know if a story is character-based or plot-based? Maybe what I should be asking instead is how should a writer determine whether a story should be written as character-based or plot-based? I think a lot goes back to the inspiration for the story. Yesterday, I mentioned The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . The selling point for that story is that it is about a guy who ages backwards. If that’s all you know about the story, you would be interested in it. I had no idea that it was a love story until I watched it. It didn’t surprise me that it was, since most movies have a love story in there somewhere, but that wasn’t the reason I wanted to watch it. Contrast that with Die Hard , which is a plot-based story. If I tell you that it’s about a New York cop, you don’t have a great urge to go watch it. As great as the guys in the NYPD may be, they’re ordinary when it comes to stories. We aren’t particularly interested in how they handle ordinary situations, so until we know what t...