Hey, who's driving?!

Hey, Who’s Driving?!

by Nils Osmar

Part of the fun of writing comes in exploring the range of approaches you can take as an author.  Short stories and novels can be driven by plot, ideas, characters, or other factors.  A  story that’s driven by plot will have a different feeling, and will tend to unfold along different lines, than one that’s driven  by characters or ideas. (The same basic story can turn out very different, depending on who or what is "driving" it.)

In character-driven stories, events are shaped and determined by the nature and interactions of the characters.   If you’re writing a character-driven story and go into it with a certain ending or certain plot twists in mind, you may be frustrated.  You’ll either need to change the characters to make the plot come out as planned, or stay true to the characters and let go of some plot twists and turns you had in mind when you started the story.  

Genres which are driven more by plot than by character include mysteries, murder mysteries, and  time travel stories(in which cause and effect are intricately intertwined, and can run in both directions).  In plot-driven stories, the plot is the decisive, overriding element.  The plot shapes and determines the characters.  

If your plot involves three people breaking into a bank vault, for example, you might ask: what kinds of people would break into a bank vault?  What circumstances or events in their lives would make it seem natural for them to get into that line of work?  Are they driven by poverty, fantasies of glamour, genuine human needs, or greed?   Why in the world are they robbing a bank?  How’d they get there, anyway?  How did they end up meeting, and working together?  The characters’ personalities and background come from attempting to answer these questions.   (In plot-driven stories, you work backward from the plot to find your characters.)

A  movie called Deathtrap is an example of a plot-driven story that was developed into a stageplay and feature film.  The plot twist and turns are intricate, and the characters were created to serve them.

In character-driven stories, you start with strongly defined characters, ones you can feel and know on a gut level, and let the heart of the plot unfold from their spontaneous interactions.  Some of the finest and most moving stories are driven by characters who feel as real to the author, and readers, as anyone you might meet in “real” life.

In idea-driven stories, events are shaped by the author’s desire to communicate or put forward an idea.   If your premise or idea is that some technologies are inherently dangeous (such as Jurassic Park), the events in the story will be shaped to support that idea, and the characters will be defined in a way that supports it also.  If your premise is that workers should rise up in a revolution and throw off capitalism, you probably won’t have many subtle, sympathetic owning-class characters in your story.  If your premise is that capital punishment is inhumane and should be outlawed, your story may explore the emotions of a person on death row, about to be executed for his or her crime.  (Your main character might be a woman or man who committed a murder and has been trying to atone for it since, or someone trying to save him or her from the electric chair.)  If your premise is that society is too gentle on criminals, and that killers should be executed, your story might explore the emotions of the family and friends whose lives have been disrupted and torn apart by a murder.  (Your main character might be a widow or widower whose spouse was killed, struggling to surive and find justice.)

Stories can also be driven by events.  Event-driven stories usually center around events that are larger than, and transcend the concerns of the individual characters (such as wars, earthquakes, forest fires, terrorist attacks, etc.)   Disaster movies like Dante’s Peak, Titanic, and The Poseidon Adventure are event-driven.  

Mood and emotion can also be a strong driving factor in some stories.  

If you’d like to learn more about writing, a fun, easy and affordable way to do it is to take a class.  One that’s coming up soon is my five-week workshop, Writing Fiction and Short Stories  For more information, visit http://www.classesandworkshops.com

© Nils Osmar 2009