Character Driven vs. Plot Driven

Io9 had a recent blog post about Story vs. Plot, which was interesting (though I’m not sure I buy the argument it posits, but that’s another post for when I’ve had more sleep) and embedded in it is this little bit of commonly accepted wisdom I decided to take issue with:

When people talk about a “plot-driven” science fiction book or movie, they’re usually implying that the characters are as wafer-thin as the exploding mint in Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life.

Yea, the woeful canard of the Plot/Character duality, that has way more currency than it should. I don’t know where it originated, but it rightfully deserves to be stomped. If your story has paper-thin characters that just move around your authorial pinball machine bouncing from plot bumper to plot bumper, you don’t have a plot-driven story. You have a story with rotten characterization. Plot and character are not opposing poles on some creative spectrum, they are not mutually exclusive, any more than setting and narrative, or dialog and exposition, or any of the other ingredients of a full blown work of fiction. If any one of these ingredients, as written, suck, well the suck will affect the story. This applies to the cardboard action hero as much as the deeply introspective antihero in plotless literary porn.

The real difference between a plot-driven and a character-driven story is not one that implies (or at least it shouldn’t imply) any value judgment of the work. Plot is primarily the cause and effect relationship of the events within a story. The difference then becomes the degree to which the character’s motives, desires and personalities influence that cause and effect chain. While cardboard characters will by default result in a plot-driven story (after all, they fail to affect the events of the story in any meaningful way) this does not imply that the converse is so. Almost every mystery ever written is plot-driven, and claiming a lack of characterization solely on that basis is kind of silly. Likewise, the fact that a character’s personality, hopes, and dreams is the prime motive force behind a stories chain of events does not mean the story has to have a weak or non-existent plot. If that were the case, romance novels would have no plots.

Wolfbreed, I think, is a powerful counterexample to pose against this false Character/Plot dichotomy. It has action all over the place, plot up the wazoo, even opens on a dramatic attack on a medieval castle— and the plot engine is tied up all in one person’s guilt, love, and desire for redemption. Without that one character, there would literally be no story.