the craft. character, plot, and dialogue.

Recently, I’ve come across a few conversations on character and plot. I’ll also add in there, dialogue. So this week, I wanted to talk a little bit about these concepts and what I’ve found to be helpful approaches.

I think it’s important to understand what the plot is because I think we often complicate it. Plot is what happens. I mean that is the simplest form of what it means. The death of a father brings together his three children to decide what to do with their father’s farm. A female rap group comes back together after twenty years. Teachers in an urban school district try to make a difference. Hopefully, you may be able to guess these shows by those simple descriptors. Plot needs to be able to be broken down that simply. Shoot, I’ll give you mine, an aspiring songwriter’s calculated world is thrown into a frenzy when she meets a rising star. You get the point.

Character then, is essentially, “who all gon be there?” Who are the people involved in this storyline? Who were they before the story started? Who will they be after? How can we make them as multi-dimensional as possible?

Often I’ve heard this question around what’s more important, plot or character? I’d be remiss to say that one is more important than the other, however, I tend to think that great characters only strengthen a plot.

At the end of the day, I’m of the school of thought that there is nothing new under the sun. I mean seriously, how many stories are essentially Romeo and Juliet? However, our unique perspectives always bring something slightly different to stories that have been told for ages. To me, it’s the nuance in our characters. Our experiences change how we construct the people in our stories. Their quirks, insecurities, outlook on the world.

I remember someone asking me about trying to think of a cute meet for their characters. My advice to them was that the characters should drive the cute meet. Where would it be most natural for these characters to be for them to meet one another? It’s less about deriving some masterplan as much as staying true to the characters. In my debut, my two main characters meet at a concert. He is the new client at her full-time work and she and her boss get invited to his show. In my full-time work in music, we often get invited by an artist’s team to their shows, voila!

Plot then becomes asking ourselves, what happens in this story based on who my characters are? I will say this, the plot comes to me first. I often ask myself “what if?” What if fame was actually a spirit? What if a recluse artist decided to make a comeback after ten years? What if a playboy falls in love? Once the idea comes, I then go to flush out the character. I have to think about their main objective. Plot comes from everything that gets in the way of that main goal.

Lastly, I’ll rope dialogue into this equation. Dialogue should essentially help move a story forward. Now some books are more heavy on dialogue than others, depending on the genre, however, characters should say things when necessary, not for the sake of saying something. Honestly, I think we as people could take that approach more often, right? Dialogue is about how the characters would express themselves. It’s important to differentiate between voices and for dialogue to tell us something about the character, their past, their motive, or what’s to come.

The more real our characters are to us, in my opinion, the easier it is to develop the plot and to write dialogue for them. So maybe I am saying that character is king. However you get there, whether it’s secondary like me or right from the start, exploration into who your characters are will help you so much in the long run. Sometimes we try to get too creative or to contrive situations and it’s not going to make for a well written story unless it’s authentic to that character.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still learning a lot about character development and plot in both my literary writing and projects I’m working on for TV and film. But I wanted to share a little about what I’ve come to know so far!