Character verses Plot

[StarDragon77]

This is the point, as a writer, where I get rather confused.

In the book "On Writing", Stephen King describes plot as a tool to excavate a skeleton in the ground and how plot is very clunky.

I may be looking at it backwards (and maybe that's what makes me a bad writer) but would it be more accurate to say that plot isn't a tool but rather the skeleton itself being excavated and the characters are the tools bringing it out?

[Bryan James]

It's all about the story. And the story is what the characters (or setting, if you have no characters) in a scene require.

One character, a thousand, it doesn't matter how overboard you go with character development if there's isn't a strong story.

Readers want to know what happens to Jack and Jill after they started up the hill.

Plot is not the same beast as story. Plot has, well, been plotted, planned, it's a well-laid plan. Fa, a long, long way to run? Some writers draft several outlines and refine them before they even start writing. Ken Follett's "Pillars of the Earth" is a great book. I think he writes that way. After he scored the Oprah, his followup book blew donkeychunks.

Plot is straightline. Point A to point Z.

STORY gives us the bumps, hills, and valleys. It lets the writer go back and read a few pages and cry over his own work as he thinks "THAT IS WHAT I WANTED!!!"

Y'all know I'm just writing this to myself, right? If it helps anyone else out, that's a bonus.

~BJS

[wally wonder]

i guess i'd try to apply the directions to what has been done. seems like tool could be applied to many things. i've only read on writing once, fanned through it, too. something about a magnifying glass therein. if you ever used a magnifying glass you know that depending on what you want to look at, you have to position it. it can be kind of clunky to use, and i spose, too, you're familiar with what your eye looks to someone else on the receiving end of the glass, big ole eyeball, and you have to wonder, man, he can't see anything through that thing. so maybe you could say plot is the manner in which the magnifying glass is used, clunky, back and forth, til you get it set at the right distance and can actually see something...and the characters are a kind of magnifying glass, as well, and where they're deployed, close, far, whatever, brings the picture into focus.

if the characters don't have a clue...dunno, maybe that's satire...and yeah, okay, plot, skeleton, the analogy works i guess.

dunno...i've tried teaching peeps things and i've found the best way to teach is to let them hammer themselves on the thumb a time or two, then, when they drop their hammer and start howling, thump!...you come out w/you dropped your watch! had this one guy, listening to him, HA! HA! HA!, bent over, framing a wall, nailgun, bang!...bang!....bang!....ouch!...you don't want your fingers too much in the way of your work....let the tool do the work for you.

[Rosehay]

I sometimes kept reading because i either loved or hated the characters and wanted to 'know them' more. I think King builds great characters, it always really comes down to good versus evil, but i love the way his 'good' characters have their flaws (Barber in 'Under the Dome' and the cruelty he was capable of during his time spent in the Army for example) and the bad guys always seem to have one saving grace, somewhere (Jim Rennie singing a lullaby to his dead son).
My daughter is in her final year of University (dual honours in English and Philosophy), and has recently discovered a talent for writing, she felt that her characters lacked depth so i introduced her to King, She read 'Blase', here was a character that had been abused as a child and had grown into a criminal, a very vulnerable man. He punched an old lady in the face, and kidnapped a baby, and yet at the end of the story as he was being hunted, and he was running through the woods with the baby that he had come to love, you were rooting for him to get away. Such is the power of Kings Character building. When your interested in the character, you want to hear their story.