A Plot Problem Is A Character Problem

If a story seems a little dull, if the plot doesn’t seem to be very engaging, you could deal with it by having more stuff happen, more people running around, new characters, additional subplots and so forth.

Usually, though, the problem is not in what’s happening, the problem is who’s doing it.

If the character hasn’t been created with enough depth, what they get up to will feel arbitrary and unsatisfying. If the plot isn’t holding people’s attention, the first place you should look is character.

Let’s say my story is about a man who sees a murder being committed. He goes to the police but then he becomes a target for the murderer.

Pretty standard sort of story. Maybe seeing the murder will be a suspenseful scene. And once the murderer comes after him, things will probably be quite exciting. 

But what about the bits in between? How do we stop all the setting up we need to do from feeling mechanical and perfunctory? It’s part of the story, you can’t just skip it.

Thing is, at the moment our character is just ‘a guy’. We don’t really know anything about him. 

Who would be a good person to have witness a murder? Maybe someone who is also committing a crime at the time, say a thief. So he can’t really go to the police. Come to think of it, why would he care anyway? Well, let’s say there’s a big reward. He’s a thief, he likes money. But the police might ask awkward questions.

Maybe he can tell a buddy what he saw, the buddy can tell the cops, collect the reward and they split the money. But then the murderer targets the buddy and kills him. Now our thief is pissed off and feeling guilty...

I don’t know how many movies I just ripped off there, but as I developed my main character, the story automatically developed a more interesting plot.

He went from being some guy to being a thief who has a close buddy, he feels guilt and wants revenge, plus he has a particular set of skills and contacts in the underworld. The options for what happens have become more specific but also more interesting.

On the other hand, maybe I start with an MC already in mind. Let’s say I’m getting driving lessons and my driving instructor is a bit of a character. I think he’d make a good lead in a story. I already know what he looks like and the kind of sarcastic jokes he makes, all I need to do is slot him in fully formed.

So, I come up with a story. A driving instructor is giving lessons to a woman, but she insists on being picked up at strange times from strange places. Eventually she confides in him that she’s learning to drive in secret so she can get away from her abusive husband. If he found out, he’d kill her.

Our hero is glad to be of help. But then one day she misses her lesson and then she turns up on the news dead, her husband crying and vowing to hunt down her killer.

I could probably come up with a reason for the instructor to go to the police or even confront the husband directly, but I could just as easily not. Why wouldn’t he learn of her death and just shrug his shoulders? Making him go after the husband because that’s what I want him to do won’t necessarily make sense.

Why would he pursue the guy? Maybe he’s an ex-cop who was kicked off the force for sticking his nose where he shouldn’t and driving instructor was the only job he could get. Maybe the husband is connected to organised crime, the same crime organisation that arranged to have him fired.

That’s a little corny, I know, but my point is I can still keep the qualities of my real life driving instructor, and work in more specific qualities that make his actions more plausible.

But it’s worth bearing in mind that the things I’m coming up with are designed to be relevant to the type of story I’m telling. That’s not by accident. I’m also coming up with other characteristics and rejecting them.

My driving instructor could have been captain of his high school football team, loves pickles on everything and have a mad crush on Dame Helen Mirren, but those things won’t have much effect on how he deals with his dead student.

I could keep all those little details if they appeal to me, certainly they’ll give me a fuller picture of who this guy is, but I’m aware that they won’t make the plot any more interesting—so I need to come up with something else, either instead of or as well as.

Or at least, I can’t see how it would affect the story. You might see it differently.

If the story was about a girl in love with a guy who rejects her, and she was captain of her high school basketball team where she was infamous for playing dirty and winning at any cost, then that approach to life could very well affect how she behaves as a grown up.

The important thing is to add depth through things that change the way a character behaves. You can also add other details, but it’s the behavioural idiosyncrasies that are going to help the story become more interesting. If it doesn’t affect their actions, it won’t impact the plot.

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