It’s become an old adage of writing advice that, in a great story, character and plot are inextricable from one another. Character doesn’t dominate, and the plot doesn’t dominate. Rather, the seeds of conflict lie in the character, and the chain of events that unfolds couldn’t possibly exist in the exact same way, or have the same repercussions, for someone else.
In his recent essay for Glimmer Train, novelist and writing teacher Joshua Henkin comments on the how the roots of character grow the branches of plot. He says:
My graduate students often tell me they have trouble with plot, but what they’re really telling me is they have trouble with character. I remind my students to ask themselves a hundred questions about their characters. Better yet, they should ask themselves a thousand questions, because in the answers to those questions lie the seeds of a narrative.
Read the full piece from Henkin.
Also this month from Glimmer Train:
- On Dialogue by Rowena Macdonald
- All of Old. Nothing Else Ever. Ever Tried. Ever Failed. by Silas Dent Zobal
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
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Quite right. I start by spending a bunch of time creating my characters and the initial conflict, and getting chapter one just right. Then I spend a roughly equal amount of time writing the rest of the first draft, because my characters tell me what they’re gonna do. If I hit a so-called block, it’s usually because I wasn’t listening.