Character Driven = Driven Character
By Donald Maass | September 4, 2024 |
Problem: you’ve got someone or something to write about, but you’ve got no plot. Perhaps you’re not that kind of writer. Perhaps you dislike plot templates. Perhaps the tricks and tropes of genre fiction turn you off. What will keep your readers reading, you might hope, is the magnetism of your prose and the inherent fascination of your subject…except…
…except, well, there is that sinking feeling that readers may not actually be lit up by the same things that light you up. They might not relate. They may lose interest. They might want things to happen in your novel, more than you know how to devise. Which brings you back to the basic problem: no plot.
So, what do you do when there is no overt problem for your protagonist to solve? What if there is no dead body, dragon or danger to avert? What if what interests you is a multi-faceted human being? What if it is relationships, the human heart…heck, the human condition that you want to write about? Isn’t plumbing the depths of people as important to write about as saving the world?
There are many approaches to non-plot driven storytelling, the kind of novels that center around not events but people, what in editorial parlance is generalized as “character driven” fiction. What human beings go through is interesting…or rather, unhelpfully, interesting to you but not necessarily interesting to readers.
If you think about it, readers have plenty of their own things going on. They have families, hurts to heal, secrets to keep, situations which are deeply felt. Readers undergo the full range of human misery and joy. Grief. Loneliness. Longing. Desire. On and on. Readers have their own dramas underway, so why do they need your story?
They don’t. That is, until they do. What is it that causes readers to value a story about someone who could be anyone? Someone regular but whose experience, in your mind, but not necessarily theirs, requires exploration and is special enough to merit in-depth treatment?
Drive
My daughter just started college. One weekend this past summer, I took her on a father-daughter bonding trip to the Six Flags amusement park in California. She’s a thrill seeker and so we rode roller coasters, or rather she did. I bailed on most of them. Luckily after a day of hot California sunshine, she was done. The next day I drove her down Rodeo Drive and through West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the canyons, Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
I pointed out the headquarters of Paradigm talent management on Wilshire, with whom we sometime co-agent, but she wasn’t interested in that. She wanted to see the big houses and enjoy the car I had rented, a luxury-loaded Mercedes. (There was an option for Alfa Romeo, but sadly she’d never heard of that brand.) She wanted me to put the car through its paces and so on an evening drive out to Ventura Beach to see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, we hit an empty stretch of Route 126 and I floored it.
Say this for Mercedes: It’s a helluva car. It flattened us back in our seats as it shot down the highway, flexing its muscles, sprinting for the gold or possibly for its life. It was, as they say, a rush. For half a mile we were flying, superheroes, free from speed limits and everything ordinary. It was a thrill better than any roller coaster not only because it was fast—and because it lacked inversions and rolls—but because for that brief stretch of highway I wasn’t just Dad, that eye-rolling relic of yester-yore, but a father making his daughter’s dream of speed come true.
We were driving fast. We were driven. My daughter by a feeling of freedom coming within her reach. Me by the aching need never to let her go. In that moment the Mercedes gave us momentum, literally a moving moment, racing—for me–too fast down the highway that’s inside.
Which brings me back to your character who has nothing to do…but everything to seek.
Yeah, But Seek What?
Okay, back to your plotless novel. It needs a framework, a reason for the story to be told—and read. How, then, in the first place do you set a problem for a protagonist who overtly has no problem? What can give the reader a sense that this human life or situation matters and must be explored? Let’s look at an example of a character about whom, overtly, we have no reason to read or any reason to care.
Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True (1998) is a novel that I resisted for years only for the shallow reason that I hated the title—I mean, I actively despised it. So pretentious. So self-proclaimed lit-TAH-rary. (Pronounced that way.) Nevertheless, the book was an Oprah pick and was adapted by HBO. There had to be something there, so eventually I caved in, read it, and I’m glad that I did.
It’s the story of Dominick Birdsey, whose twin brother Thomas Birdsey has paranoid schizophrenia. Dominick’s life sucks in other ways too: a failed marriage, ae dead child, a hated stepfather, an unknown birth father, a faithless girlfriend. Talk about stuck. After Dominck’s twin brother cuts off his hand in a public library (a protest, Thomas imagines, against the Gulf War), Dominick hasn’t much to do except navel gaze, get therapy and read the autobiography of his Sicilian grandfather. Not much plot there. Not much reason to read about Dominick either, except that Wally Lamb knew that he needed to make Dominick stuck situation something that matters to us.
Lamb works on that toward the beginning in this recounting of the death of the twins’ timid mother:
My mother slipped out of consciousness on May 1, 1987. Ray and I kept a vigil through the night, watching her labored, ragged breathing and thwarting, until the very end, her continual attempts to pull the oxygen mask from her mouth. “There’s a strong possibility that someone in a coma can hear and understand,” the hospice worker had told us the evening before. “If it feels right to you, you might want to give her permission to go.” It hadn’t felt right to Ray; he’d balked at such an idea. But ten minutes before she expired, while Ray was down the hall in the men’s room, I leaned close to my mother’s ear and whispered, “I love you, Ma. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.”
Him being his schizophrenic twin, Thomas. A few pages later, first-person Dominick offers this perspective to the reader:
When you’re the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands—the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you’re into both survival of the fittest and being your brother’s keeper—if you’ve promised your dying mother—then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman’s gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin—the guy who beat the biochemical rap.
The tricky thing about saving yourself…there we have it. Dominick is seeking something. He has a plot goal. In simple terms it is this: survive. The only way to do that is to do that. This Dominck does, learning a lot along the way. He learns about paranoid schizophrenia. He learns about twins. He learns about his Sicilian heritage. He learns the identity of his birth father. He learns how to cope with loss and his failures. His drive is to survive and everything he goes through carries him toward a realization that finally saves him: When there is nothing else to cling to, Dominick at least he can hang on to what he has learned is true.
(BTW, that title which I found so pretentious turns out, like the title of Colleen Hover’s It Ends with Us, to reflect not to the novel’s problematic situation but rather but its ultimate conclusion.)
There is Always a Plot When Your Character Wants or Needs
One of the workshops that I offer addresses the middle muddle, in particular the agonizing challenge of characters who are stuck, immobilized, trapped and lacking agency. Such characters are suffering, which by itself is not dynamic or particularly interesting. It only gets interesting when suffering is transformed into seeking.
Briefly, some of the tools that I recommend to help stuck characters get moving are these: 1) a crisis, meaning that which makes being stuck and suffering no longer bearable, 2) A task, scheme, gamble or plan, 3) complications, 4) an enemy.
There is also the powerful tool of right now, which is expressed in questions, a couple of which are:
- What can the protagonist do right now to get what he or she wants or needs?
- Who right now can help with that?
- What must the protagonist do right now to gain that help?
- Where right now must the protagonist go to get what’s needed?
There are many variations of the right now question, the underlying point is that there is always something that a stuck protagonist can do next. What kinds of things? Here’s a short list:
- There is somewhere to go.
- There is something to get.
- There is someone to seek.
- There is evidence to bury or destroy.
- There is damage to repair.
- Sin must be confessed, forgiveness found, atonement done, time is short.
- An offender must be confronted, accused, shamed—and right now, or it will never happen.
- An opportunity arises: seize this opportunity it’s the last one you’ll ever get.
- An unlikely person arrives to help, challenge or in some way shake things up.
- There is a temptation too good to resist.
- A plan is hatched or a scheme is devised—with whom?
- There is a way to put things back to the way they once were, all that’s required is–?
Conclusion
When a character has no plot to follow, there is still something to tackle. When there is nothing to be done, there is still something to be accomplished. When there is nowhere to go, there is still somewhere to get to. When there is no agency and no hope, there is still oneself to work on.
There is always something that matters. Call it motivation. Call it a problem, a goal or anything else that you like. When we feel a protagonist’s need, want, urgency and desire, then whatever moments you sense that you need to portray in a novel—even speeding down an empty stretch of highway—can achieve meaning.
A “plotless” novel can still have plenty going on. Narrative drive arises when something matters greatly to a character. It is the discovery of meaning that provides the sense of movement. It’s those ways in which a novel becomes truly character driven.
Your WIP may have plot, or not, but either way what is it that drives your protagonist? How are you making that matter to that character—and to your reader?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
My WIP takes place in a haunted asylum surrounded by a dense sentient forest where a disturbed teenage mother, unable to cope, abandons her autistic six-year-old daughter.
The hyper-sensitive child, physically and emotionally set adrift, is DRIVEN to feel safe by retreating into her extrasensory imagination, the only resource open to her.
She handles her fears the only way she can, safe inside a world populated by her invisible friends – storybook characters from her favorite books. After seventeen years of confinement, she is released, DRIVEN to find menial work.
For 38 years she continues to age by refusing to grow up as her friend Peter Pan advises her, until a disembodied voice on a bus makes an offer to rewind her life.
Now she is DRIVEN to restore the life she was meant to live.
“My daughter just started college. “ WOW.
Another phase. Same daughter. This is when you find out all—okay not all but some—of the advice/wisdom/ DONT’S you thought went right in one ear and out the other, did in fact stick.
From the sound of it, I think you’ve got it, Veronica.
Yes indeed!
If a moment doesn’t have a Right Now worth covering… we can simply look closer. “Just a day at work” becomes a lot more specific if it’s right to focus on how satisfying it is to help a customer, or how *un*satisfying it is when you can’t, or how much you depend on a friend covering for you or get through the day thinking of what’s after it. Just narrowing the moment down to a priority can reveal a lot.
Or, it might not be enough. Looked at honestly, not every moment in a character’s day has a Right Now that’s equally worth showing. And if it doesn’t…
Then don’t show it. Another essential for a character-driven story is remembering how many moments need to get driven right past.
“…not every moment in a character’s day has a Right Now that’s equally worth showing.”
Spot on, Ken. May I steal that?
Steal away, steal away. I like to think of the “speed bump principle,” that the journey as a whole runs along but it’s mainly the jolts that are worth noticing, in drama and in life. (That and the good moments, but those are more self-contained.)
What drives my character changes over the course of the present tale, at least on the outside. But the inside motivation stays the same. She just doesn’t know that until the end. I kept thinking that the ‘something to do now’ that leads to narrative drive might be plot’s shirttail cousin. Much to digest here. Thank you, as ever. And kudos for flooring that car. I’d have wimped out. You are your daughter’s hero!!
Well, this is my 18-year-old daughter we’re talking about, so I don’t think “hero” is the noun that would come to her mind with respect to her dad. (Not yet.)
Not to sound trite, but your story of racing with your daughter brought tears to my eyes. You are good at this writing thing.
My characters seem to always be artists of some type (including con-artists) who grapple with a responsibility, if any, to use their talents. To create, or not, that is the question.
This post gives me writing-related hope. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a thriller plot or a check box beat romance. Today I need some hope, so thank you, Don.
You’re welcome.
I love this point, so succinctly stated: “Narrative drive arises when something matters greatly to a character. It is the discovery of meaning that provides the sense of movement. It’s those ways in which a novel becomes truly character driven.”
I’ve been wrestling with my WIP because my MC doesn’t have a long term goal of which she is aware – she must discover it over time so it has made plotting much more difficult. I have the added difficulty of her being frozen by grief and ultimately acting out of character, and somehow, I have to let the reader know this isn’t normal for her. That this new reality is propelling her down a path she doesn’t understand and she cannot see the consequences at the end of it. I’ve been aiming to create that urgency through a series of unanswered questions about her past, and I think(?) it’s working…I hope? But I really like this idea you’ve pinpointed as the “right now.” That’s exactly it. A series of smaller needs she seems to meet will also help propel the narrative forward. I’ve done some of this intuitively, but I can see where I might sharpen that a bit. As always, your posts come at the right time! Thanks for the insightful post, Don!
I hope that Mr. mass won’t mind, but I’m jumping in here Heather, to say that I’m facing a very similar challenge in my WIP.
The middle section is a back story sequence in which a young American woman goes to Paris in 1952-53, working in the foreign services support section (typing pool). She wants…well that’s the challenge. She doesn’t exact know, just that it’s something undefined. The sequence is there to show how she will come to make a key mistake that will trigger the suspense scenario hinted at in the opening section and which plays out in the third.
The way I’m handling it is to make the undefined wanting an undercurrent, a drive to discover the direction her life should take. So far readers have had a swell time with that part, so I think it’s working.
In any event, this is to say stick with it. There’s always a way.
A passing thought: is there another character in her life she feels responsible for, or is an example she tries to live up to? She might find that even in the middle of grief and lack of purpose, she knows she’s letting *that* down, and it gives her some one-day-at-a-time drive even though she knows it’s not an insightful answer that will change anything. And it might get harder and harder to stick to that, so it’s clear she won’t just “fake it till you make it.”
Thanks, Don. Love the echoes of drivers…Ventura Highway is one of my favorites, but you and your daughter had the better view! And our characters also need a VIEW, so that they can see ahead. In the crisis of one’s novel…and in order to get INTO DRIVE, there must be a vision, a goal, something to desire and want to increase the drive. In my forever novel, a child disappears. My MC cannot continue to help deliver the infants of others, unless she can find her own child. That is drive, that is desire, that is movement in a story.
So as always, thanks for your post that will DRIVE me back to querying. I’ve written a novel that propels my MC forward to find her child…along what specific road is what the reader needs to learn.
Beth, the technique is to make whatever the drive is felt. Not just a plot motive. “I must find my baby!” But a felt need, sunk deep, the heart of a human being. Keep at it!
This California girl has sped down Route 126 many times. Six Flags is a family landmark, and Los Angeles will always be home despite my current Kentucky address.
Plotless wonders are my specialty, but I’ve learned over the years to deny my characters the “fun” of pontificating over endless cups of coffee. Love the concept of “right now” as a way of kicking them off the couch and forcing them to take action–to do something that the reader can see and worry about.
As always, thank you for adding to my writer toolbox.
You’re welcome!
Hi Don,
Thanks for this column.
I’m working on a nonfiction project that’s part history, part family saga, and part memoir. (Somewhat off-topic, but still relevant, I think.) While I don’t yet have 100% clarity on my answers to your questions, this was helpful for me to think about while I’m structuring the story and doing the research. Why does it matter to anyone other than me?
I hope you and your daughter enjoyed Ventura. : )
MG
And, why does it matter to a story’s main character? That why is the drive.
Donald, another great post. My book sequel starts out with a protagonist’s problem to establish the Who Cares element, it reveals what her goal in the plot scenes. Maybe a story could be a balance of plot and character driven. The conflicts, the internal monologue, the twists, the success, etc., bring the characters along in the story. Always with the focus on the protagonist’s agency. Think I got it figured out.Thanks. 📚❤️ Christine
Sounds like you do. Plot goals tend to motivate from the outside. Inner drive is personal and from the inside. The latter, ask me, is stronger.
Hi Don, this is another meaty, thought-provoking post. I loved I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE. It offers a great example for your chosen discussion.
Since literary criticism has shown us that story can be subject to varying interpretations, even when it comes to key story structures, I’d like to put forth a different way of looking at what story goal drives Dominick’s actions in the plot. Yes, the help he seeks for suicide ideation suggests he hopes to survive, but to my way of thinking, stories that are not based on a persistent threat to the protagonist’s physical self (as in thriller, suspense, action-adventure), survival comes across as a motive too weak to drive a compelling plot. In manuscripts, the lackluster result at the resolution suggests that the author has not yet fully dug down to the protagonist’s true motivation.
Let me explain my perspective. First, as a premed biology major who studied genetics and the amazing cellular structures that keep us alive, I learned that our bodies can sometimes make emergency use of backup systems that ensure our survival. Embryology is a science full of processes that could go wrong in anyone of thousands of steps— and yet, for the most part, things tend to go right. The human body is a wondrous system that, with some care from us, is inherently built to ensure survival.
In Lamb’s book, I believe the measures Dominick takes are driven by something more: a deep need to know that the challenges to his survival, which are magnified in the mirror of his twin brother’s face, are worth enduring. I believe the difference is more than semantics.
As the wife of someone who died by suicide, I came to see that survival is not always enough of a goal to drive a climactic fight. Survival can be hell on earth for those whose mental, physical, and spiritual health has been severely compromised. That survival story, in fact, could be made out to be a tragedy. As author Priscilla Sibley (a NICU nurse who wrote THE PROMISE OF STARDUST) once told me, “Believe me, there are a lot of things worse than death. I’ve seen them.”
When inner torment is the primary antagonist, survival isn’t enough. But even in thrillers, where the protagonist’s physical peril is always on the line, the goal is usually beyond survival—say, to vanquish evil or seek justice or protect home and hearth. To my way of thinking, a story is always stronger if the intent is to survive “in order to”…what?
I recognize that this philosophy could also be a function of my generally optimistic nature, but in the manuscripts I read, even minimally plotted novels have benefitted by having the protagonist (eventually) reach beyond survival towards some higher goal that will put their pain in perspective and make life worth living.
[Also, FYI, in answer to a comment you left for me a while ago, I just emailed you—yes, yes, a literary agent with an overflowing inbox—with the idiotic subject line, “My manuscript.” Don’t delete, lol!]
I think this is supremely well put: “…the challenges to his survival…are worth enduring.”
I think your interpretation is superb, and born of a deeper understanding than most of us can imagine. Thanks so much for that long and thoughtful comment.
Beautiful post! And what a gift you gave your daughter in that Mercedes. You gave your lesson on what drives the characters perfectly. Thank you. My young characters have a need for fairness, for justice–it’s what drives them. Too bad that oftentimes there’s no justice here on earth, and in my YA novel, the MC will eventually have to leave it to Divine Justice. It is a revelation to her that living her best life is the greatest revenge.
Perhaps next time, your daughter will try the Alfa Romeo (my husband had one many years ago, but it was a car made for me, lol). I have sweet memories driving up and down the Pacific Coast Hwy.
It’s an ambition of mine to drive the entire coast highway. Envious. Someday!
Don, the same sentence that Heather noted also drew me, “… when something matters greatly to a character.” My story has a Daddy/daughter relationship, with a focus on photography, Madeline Island School of the Arts, and, a more recent rabbit hole, the Ansel Adams Gallery. Now, how to have readers care and feel empathy/anxiety for a character with a mild plot.
Those kids…and the transitions we grow through. It’s been mystifying and wonderful to shift into friendships with adult children.
When the plot is mild, whether the story matters to readers is a function of how deeply it matters to a main character.
I love this, Don! Such a clear and practical way of approaching character development. I often write about digging deeper than standard goal and motivation to find what really drives your character, because as you say, that’s the engine that will propel the story and propel them through it, and that’s what makes the reader want to come along. I will be sharing this in my newsletter for authors.