Timothy's Thoughts

P revailing wisdom seems to be that an author should find the worst thing that could happen to a character and throw that at him or her. James Scott Bell suggests asking this on page 42 of Plot & Structure . The idea behind this is to make your characters squirm and see how they get out of the mess. Prevailing wisdom isn’t always right. What I don’t like about this approach is that it produces very dark fiction and nothing else. I have a character who owns a restaurant. It would be a terrible thing if I burned that thing to the ground. She would survive, but it would be bad. But would it be the worst thing? What if she were raped before the arsonist burned it to the ground, with her family trapped inside? That would reveal her character, but the story would be extremely dark, not to mention the fact that I don’t want to do that to her. Instead of asking what the worst thing that can happen to a character is, why don’t we first define the antagonist and ask what is the antagonist w...

There are a couple approaches to writing a novel. Some people like to write novels by the seat of their pants and just write, while others like to develop an outline. Forgive me if I generalize a little, but it seems to me that seat of the pants novelists favor character driven stories while outliners favor plot driven stories. For our purposes, let’s define these two terms. Character Driven Story – a story in which the author creates interesting characters with a natural dislike for each other, throws them together and sees what happens Plot Driven Story – a story in which the author creates an interesting plot and then goes and figures out what kind of characters would do such a thing In a character driven story, the author might say he has a company owner and a union boss as characters. You can pretty much bet that the plot is going to have something about union negotiations, since that is what normally brings these people together. Or if you go at it form the other direction, i...