No, this isn’t a post about chickens (I wish!). It’s not about eggs, either.
I was cruising around on the internet recently- surprise!- and came across an interesting commentary on GenZ storytellers. The gist of it was the younger people tend to create a character first, then send the character on adventures, rather than creating the story first, then bringing characters into it.
It made me think a bit, and since I’m in no one’s head but my own, I can’t say whether it’s precisely true or not. But character-driven stories do seem to be more popular in recent years/decades.
And I can see why. Character-driven stories have, to my mind, a more cozy, friendly feel, and tend to draw the reader into the characters’ lives in a more emotionally intimate way than a plot-driven story. A lot of people are searching for that type of social connection in their lives, and they end up reading or writing stories to fill that niche.
Personally, my stories tend to be character-driven in as a whole (I’m told this is a very female thing to do; as with all of this, YMMV) but in terms of the order of outlining, I’m not strongly on one side or the other. It depends on what I’m writing. I usually start with a tiny thread of plot- and it can be as simple as ‘someone is murdered’ or ‘this is a romance,’ but the characters come into the mix almost immediately and the two elements feed off each other from there. On the other hand, one could say that Gavril the mercenary, a masculine character if ever there was one, started out as just that- a character. I essentially woke up one day and said to myself, “I should write about a monster hunter,” and it was all downhill from there. Character archetype first; plot comes later for his stories.
Just throwing this out there- I wonder if this phenomenon is partly related the popularity of D&D and its offshoots. I’m not very familiar with it, but my understanding is that players create their characters first, then the game master reveals the plot to them as time goes on. Correct me if I’m wrong; my experience with gaming is… limited, much to the annoyance of my social circle. Sorry, guys, (she said, smirking) it’s just not my thing. I like writing that type of story, it’s the part about sitting around a table for long periods of time that gets to me.
Gaming aside, plot, characters, and setting all should work together in balance to create a story. If you have only a plot, it’s a to-do list. Only characters, and it’s a gab session that doesn’t go anywhere. Only setting, and it’s a geography and social studies textbook. Which comes first is less important than whether they all show up eventually, and whether the balance is right for the genre and the specific story you want to tell.
No matter what you write, someone will want to read it. And someone else will hate it.
Which comes first in your writing process, characters or plot? Do you lean strongly in one direction or the other? Does your initial process correlate with what’s on the page when you write ‘the end’?
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Which Came First?”
It depends. For a long time, it was always characters first. Then I needed–if not a plot–at least a situation.
For the book I’ve got coming out in September, I had the situation, but my main character showed up hard on the heels of the situation and sat around patiently in my head for two years while I finished a series.
He was most unhappy when I toyed with the idea of continuing the concluded series and putting him off. There were duels, harangues, everything.
So it was a nasty shock to find that as I left the world and people of Nwwwlf, where I’d spent many years, that the new guy was still opaque. I knew his opinions. I knew his situation. I even knew the plot. But I didn’t know him. Fortunately, when he clicked, he clicked.
I’m currently stuck in a weird place, exploring* how different personalities would deal with essentially the same problem.
*exploring being the polite term for the Muse not letting me get back to what I should be finishing, or refreshing my mind with a visit to the Asteroid miners or something–anything–else!
“The gist of it was the younger people tend to create a character first, then send the character on adventures, rather than creating the story first, then bringing characters into it.”
This is exactly what I do, but I’m Boomer not a Zoomer. ~:D
I did try doing it the other way, starting with a story and bringing in the characters, but it always ends up with me following them around with a camera, filming the action.
I’m probably doing it wrong, but the books do seem to come out of it so I’m satisfied.
I usually start with an action. A mother throwing her child out of a burning house to the people below, a young man and girl meeting by fate and knowing instantly that they are each other’s life partner, a man throwing a fireball.
Things just snowball from there.
Maybe part of it is trying to describe things, and how they view “character”?
Because I tend to have …not quite scenes, there’s more downloaded context than that, show up in my imagination. The clip will be really short, often a quick instant, but I know a lot.
Is that the character?
A big, cheerful himbo standing up and tossing aside the small spaceship that landed on him, then turning to grin at the viewer and holler hello, in English.
Standard cheesy ’80s cartoon type character introduction during the theme song.
If this guy knew what the A-Team was, he’d have their theme song playing in the background. He’d totally dress as Almight given a chance. But he’s very clearly got scales, not skin.
So…is that a character? Or a setting? I don’t think it’s a plot, although there were more details in there.
In my experience the two tend to go hand in hand. Setting and character that is. I tend to have a hankering for a particular kind of setting long before I know any solid details or who goes with the setting, then the hero or heroine show up (sometimes both of them together) and accounting for why they are the way they are gives me enough supporting cast and setting details to get started on, and enough story tropes to have a vague inkling of where the plot might be going.
I generally don’t get an idea where the plot is going, but — they make me care.
And that’s the important part! As for this guy in particular, maybe what he needs is a worthy opponent 🙂
Mine ended up dragging in his foil/best friend almost immediately, and I like him, too.
Awesome!
I seem to have psuedo characters first, and that sets the world, until I bring other characters in to populate it.
‘Genies’ came from a cmapign setting I sketched, but when I moved the changling into the Bishop Ring it stuck to him and formed part of the setting, but the Bishop Ring and its mad gods came from needing space for a character from another fic. But that character wasn’t mine, so they never actually saw that world.
But the changling and the failed monster can’t run about on their own, so other characters had to exist too.
And it’s not like he got plucked out of nowhere. Though the only reason Noir York was magic was otherwise a changling wouldn’t fit.
I suppose it is a rolling cycle of characters making places and places calling forth characters to fill them, who, in turn, call forth new places.
I’m strongly a “character in a situation” joined by other characters that aid or impede the primary as he figures out what he has to (wants to) do and starts to figure out the how.
First off, D&D. There is no necessary plot. Indeed, it’s notorious that players may insist on going haring off something absurd rather than taking the most obvious actions.
Let me see — o yes! — here is the long version
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/the-dm-vs-the-writer-and-the-railroad
As for me, I start with what I start with. One work started with the thought that a certain common superhero trope is metaphysically ill-founded. Hence Through A Mirror, Darkly. Another started with the thought that a certain hero’s tragic backstory was too interesting to throw away like that. Hence A Diabolical Bargain.
Here’s the long version of that.
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/you-start-with-what-you-start-with
[…] language, and exposition: in moderation. You do not need nor want pages and pages of this. Now, as Blake wrote about a day or two ago, a character-driven plot may be differently constructed than a world built, then populated by […]