Character Centric Planning 101 · 12:23pm Oct 1st, 2014
Every author dreams of writing "living" characters -- characters that leap off the page, impress the audience, and drive the plot instead of the other way round. The problem is that "living" characters are like children: for every amazing moment, there are four other rage-filled replotting sessions as you realize that by giving your characters permission to be themselves, you have allowed them to completely foil your carefully established plot.
However, there are a certain group of unfortunates who must brave this exact situation every week: the humble game master from your favorite table top gaming group. These brave few must sit down every week to plot out the next part of an adventure whose only certainty is the presence of four to six characters who want anything but to go along with the plot. From their pain, authors can gain wisdom.
You are giving your characters a story
Every story has an author and an audience. The author wants to share something with their audience, but on the flip side, the size of the audience is determined by however many people care about the story. In the world of tabletop games, this means if you want to have a gaming group, your story must appeal to the players, and by extension to their characters. As authors, this is a lesson we rarely have the opportunity to learn: the more your characters want to be in your story, the more alive they will be. Your story is for your characters, not for you to be oh-so-clever with your symbolism and your plots and your sharp as glass 3edgy5me backstories.
On the flip side, if you are not invested in your story, then writing it becomes a chore. You will end up cutting corners, auto-piloting, and generally having a bad time. If the author is checked out, the story will be also. This suggests that before a story can begin, we must know two things: what is the essence of the story you want to tell, and what opportunity does this offer to your characters?
Note that I said "essence", not "details" or "content". Knowing how to compromise with your characters in a spectacular fashion is 90% of storytelling. The key to compromise is having a clear, concise idea of the bare minimum that must be present in the story. For a GM, or author, this generally takes the form of high-level concepts: setting, style, and what kinds of situations we are aiming to get into. What this does not include is any presuppositions of what the characters are going to do. If Rarity wants to write a story about high society politics, she might decide that it must take place in Canterlot, and anypony without impeccable manners will suffer the consequences. What she may not do is mandate that Rainbow Dash sit quietly and sip her tea like a lady, because only Rainbow Dash may decide what Rainbow Dash does.
Rarity now has two options: she may leave Dash out of her story entirely, or else ask what Dash might want to get out of it. This is a slightly different problem than deciding motivation. Anyone can throw a Wonderbolts backstage pass into Canterlot and watch the rainbow contrail zip away. It takes more effort to ask what methods of acquiring said pass would give Dash an enjoyable experience on the way. If a setting of snooty nobles is going to cramp her style, she might want to wipe the smug looks off their faces with her awesomeness. She wants to compete and win, or run into the Wonderbolts themselves and team up, or any number of things that may have nothing to do with actually getting the macguffin but provide ideas for where the route may lead that gets the job done.
Now that we know what everyone wants, we can see the seeds of compromise. If Rarity wants manners, she can give Rainbow Dash the choice: sip your tea like a lady or risk embarrassing Spitfire in front of her wealthy sponsor and spoiling her shot at joining the team. In return, perhaps this sponsor is the shady type who Rainbow might later get the chance to bring to justice. The more your characters are allowed to do things that they like rather than being assigned situation and motivation willy-nilly, the more energy the story will have.
You must ensure they have what they need to participate in your story
Energy is good, but it needs direction. If Rainbow Dash is going to Canterlot, she is going to need something to go on when she gets there. Again, this is more than motivation: this is logistics. What does Rainbow have right now in Ponyville that tells her that the macguffin is in Canterlot and convinces her that she wants the macguffin? At the moment her hooves touch pavement in Canterlot, what will she know to do next? Does Rainbow know where to go or who to ask to find a lost backstage pass? The spirit may be willing, but if you cannot give your characters the pieces and the method to go forwards, they are going to wander aimlessly. GM experience says as time spent wandering aimlessly goes to infinity, the probability of the general surroundings surviving goes to zero, or at least the possibility of getting mixed up in spontaneous subplots involving blackjack and monetarily incentivized snugglebunnies becomes very real. Rolling on those charts can only end in tears.
Keep an eye out to ensure that your main cast always has someone who knows what to do next and someone who wants to do it. If Rainbow is not going to know how Canterlot works, then it may be wise to have Twilight along for the ride. Granted, this again extends beyond making sure the plot has a trail of breadcrumbs and characters to follow it. Twilight might know where to go, but Pinkie knows how to have a good time meeting people. It may be wiser to let Pinkie and Rainbow gallivant about Canterlot if getting into trouble along the way to the macguffin is an acceptable part of the story. The goal is not to keep the characters doing the plot. The goal is to ensure someone is always around who wants to do something. So long as someone wants to do something, you will always have a next scene that will write itself. All you need to figure out is how to bring to plot naturally into play.
The problem then becomes: if Rarity wants high-society politics, how can we ensure that two informal spazzes know that tea parties are serious business and will get them places if they behave? She may need to lead some breadcrumbs through a disastrous tea party with real consequences as soon as possible to make sure our characters get the picture and the author is getting what she wants in the process. Perhaps they get a lead from a high-class pony who mentions they might get a tip at a masquerade that evening, but throws them out without revealing the juiciest information after shenanigans occur.
Remember that rules are not "you cannot do this." Rules are "if you do this, you are going to have a bad time." If your setting has rules, it is far more fun to find them by collision than by narration. Just make the rules and relentlessly enforce the consequences of breaking them. No need to actually restrict anyone's actions.
Let your characters write the ending of as many scenes as possible
Giving your characters life is taking the responsibility upon yourself to give them the pieces and trusting them to write an honest ending with those pieces. Not the ending you want. The ending that they piece together from the circumstances they are given and the choices they make. It is true that the concept of "character" means that people are consistent enough that we can guess how they would act in a set of circumstances. However, no matter how well you plan, you will not know the exact nature of the circumstances until you write the scene. We can go in expecting our noblepony to act pompous, but sweet Sun, that fop is simply too insufferable -- it is our divine right and duty to apply a cyan hoof upside his head with great prejudice. What was to be a silly scene of Pinkie and Rainbow messing with a noblepony has earned them a mortal enemy, but possibly allies as well. The philistines who buffeted my enemies and blew them a raspberry cannot be all bad, no?
While this practice will lead to many a Picard from the GM, you cannot truly call your story character driven until you have given your characters a say in the action and direction of the story. It is more work for you to readjust your plans to account for what happens and juggle all the uncertainty in the meantime, but you will find that giving your characters a say brings with it their investment. Rainbow made the decision to clock that fop. She saw the pompousness, she probably knew she was giving up the info, and she decided to trade her shot at a lead for sweet justice. This brings the writer closer to the characters because we must find the ending in the circumstances and the characters rather than establish a backdrop of circumstances for our intended ending.
Of course, we must still consider ourselves as we write. There are some options that we cannot allow in our scene. If a fight leading to our main characters' full involvement in some underground nobles' feud is too awesome for our story, then we need to make sure something is there to stop fights. Put a massive butler looming over the table. Let Pinkie restrain Dash when it gets too heated. Do not put a loaded shotgun on the mantlepiece. We cannot control what happens in the scene, but by altering our circumstances intelligently, we can exclude or allow certain outcomes, or at least make them easier to avoid. If you leave a hairpin on the table next to the locked dynamite box and matches, the resulting loss of life and property is entirely your fault.
Know when you are done
Characters need direction. It is far too easy to get caught up in back and forth banter and run out of content halfway through the scene. It is equally easy to forget where you are going and meander, leading to bloated scenes. The solution is simple: know what your characters intend to do in each scene before you write it. What is their essential action? Under what circumstances might one or all parties declare the scene over? Regardless of how the characters actually get there, if they satisfy the requirements of their scene, it is time to start wrapping up. Likewise, if the scene starts to stray away from getting what the characters intended to do in the first place, it might be time to reign them in or re-evaluate where the story is going.
Likewise, knowing when the overarching story is done is another thing that must be tracked. Keep a list of what plot elements have been established, what each character has committed to do, and how you will know when each major element of the situation is resolved. While your characters will have to find their own way to checking each box, if you do not know what all is in play, you will have nothing to help you guide your story.
Another thing to ask: how much of this stuff do your characters even care about seeing through? If they do not care, make it relevant. Authors also have the luxury of going back and editing things out, but it is better to keep an eye on your list of plot elements and grow it with extreme caution rather than taking all the quests and thinning out your to-do list in post-production. Again: details break scenes. Removing details means rewriting, and if the details involve starting a subplot, the rewriting may be heavy.
Of course, our characters are in charge, but we can corral them by invoking the relative importance of each plot element. If Rainbow and Pinkie are tempted to do a quest for Sir Sorbet that will take them to Gryphonia and back before the story can go on, it is time to ask how much they want that Wonderbolts backstage pass and remind them that they will probably miss the show if they are traveling in foreign lands. If your characters are getting distracted by sideplot after sideplot, you have not taken the time to establish the importance and immediacy of the main plot. That, or you have forgotten to give your characters plot hooks that they personally care about. Change what you can control. Add or subtract elements to the next scene to strengthen what you cannot change now. If neither of these is feasible, revise. If your revisions are less interesting than what was before, then roll with the original version: you have likely found a better story. Go you.
Everything you plan will break
These are the facts of life. Cry softly and accept them.
Island plotting
But just because things will break does not mean they cannot break gracefully. You have control over the circumstances of your characters, and the more you think about it, the more you will find that circumstances are in no particular order. If you had a nice garden party setting all planned out, but Pinkie and Rainbow simply have no intention of attending, do not throw it out. Perhaps the garden party happens nightly? The next noble they talk to could ask them to tea in the garden. There are a thousand ways to slip your meticulously prepared garden party into such a plot.
The more you dig down and ask what is interesting about each piece of a scene, the easier it is to handle them individually. A garden might offer lush visuals that you wanted to write, a calming atmosphere that the story needed to relieve tension, a secluded nook for a secret conversation, or any number of things. Why did you want to put Pinkie and Rainbow in the garden party? Can you find a way to include some of what you wanted in another setting that they want to go to? If they need a whispered conversation with lush visuals, but have no invites to gardens, perhaps send them to a bush in the middle of a park for a secret conference of war. Jot down what you cannot use in your handy idea notebook. Then, when you are stuck, you have a treasure trove of odds and ends that you can repurpose to do what you want.
Doing this with set-pieces and settings is called "island plotting". We sit down and fill out a skeleton of several plausible scenes that give us something that we want to include in the story: a garden party, tense shows of stiff-upper-lips, and the fatal salad fork selection. Then, as we allow our characters to act, we have a variety of scenes and scenarios that we can fill in to fit the plot as it stands right now. Today a garden party, tonight the casino, and vicious pie-to-pie combat at the sky-yacht flotilla after tea. If our circumstances change, we simply reshuffle our "plot islands." In this way, we can plan rapidly with confidence that whatever we come up with will not be made irrelevant by our characters' actions in the moment. It is so much easier to let our characters be free if their gallivanting cannot utterly destroy our plans.
Remember when doing this that details break. Ideas are forever. Each "island" need only have a few sentences detailing what it is, why we might want to go there, and a few interesting facts to give it a hint of personality. Plan just enough that you can pick up a plot island and write that moody scene setting paragraph off the cuff. The rest will be more obvious when you get there.
Ultimately, when you put characters at the center of your planning process, your goal is to give yourself the tools you need to write your characters in situations that they want to be in while keeping the number of things that "must" happen to the bare minimum. When we devote lots of time to linear plans, we find that letting our characters off the leash means hours of our life get broken. A more robust planning process has the goal of establishing our direction and then keeping our larder of plausible ideas sufficiently stocked that we always have the next situation to hand to our characters. We might know one or two scenes in advance, but so long as we know where we are going and when we are done, we do not have to bother with long, fragile plot chains and are free to allow our characters to find their way through our world with only the barest guidance from us. This means we can write our characters and story without fear of the "right" choice losing us work. In the best case, if our characters know what they want to do, you will find the plot will write itself.
Wow, I honestly stepped out onto a blog of glory. Thanks so much for making these 101 blogs. I should also post them onto my page.
Great blog. I have to say that I find the notion of not planning ahead more than one or two scenes in advance a bit dangerous, though. While I completely agree that you should keep the things a scene needs before you actually write it to a bare minimum, I'm of the opinion that you should know the ending of your story before you start the first paragraph. Otherwise, how would you know if a certain scene derails the story if you don't know where you're going?
If you know your characters well enough, I think it is possible to plan character centric. Likewise, I think it's perfectly okay to shape characters the way they need to be for the story (for OCs only, of course), if you keep them consistent and have an explanation for why they are the way they are except that you need them to be so. That's why I had someone with a psychology degree give me some feedback on my latest character designs. Not that you need that for every story, but I still think knowledge of human nature is the most important skill of any author.
I like tea parties.
It's... It's beautiful.
2498580 Eh, I think Island Plotting, which I already use to some extent, is less about not knowing the ending and more about not caring too much how you get there.
I mean, if you've got the end scene, and you've got the start scene, instead of trying to meticulously link them together using a long, fragile chain of intermediate scenes, grab a scene you like and add it. Then, when opportunity arrises, grab the next scene that looks like it would fit and link it in. As long as you keep moving towards your ultimate destination and manage to hit the important points on the way, you'll be good. You won't have to stress about 'doing it wrong', because when it comes right down to it, it's pointless to constrain yourself except where it's really important. Over-outlining makes writing less enjoyable, and fighting to fit an outline exactly is silly. Just outline less.
I learned a lot from being a GM, and I'm slightly suprised that railroading was never mentioned here. My players rarely managed to devolve into barfights and poker because if they strayed too far from the plot, the plot would come looking. Cries of "Run! Plot!" always made me smile. As authors, we have an even bigger advantage in that we get to directly pick the character's reactions, (within a spectrum) and choose what they pay attention to.
I think what really happens with me is that I think differently on different 'levels' of writing. I got a lot better at plotting when I realized I needed lo leave room at the paragraph level for my characters to act, and that arranging my chapter level plotting around a few specific events and general concepts works much better for me. If my outline has more than a few sentences for every few thousand words, I'll end up fighting it when I actually write.
2499276
I've never been too big on railroading myself. If the story is constructed correctly, the characters should be actively seeking the plot on their own initiative. What I am a fan of is leveraging the background. There are concrete events taking place whether the players get there or not. It is important to establish early on that if they are blowing up the sheriff's office, they are going to be missing quite a few leads and making life harder for themselves when the law comes after them.
And of course, every action has consequences. If they are not going to let me have the fun I planned for them, then I am going to have fun with the consequences of whatever they planned to do. For instance, one fateful game, the party walked into a standard city of thieves with the objective of selling a single bag of pesh to get it off our hands and on with the story. Our rogue got it in his head that we could get into the biz instead of investigating the king's murder. Long story short: a four man party cannot a drug war fight
Granted, no one is being forced to follow any plot, so it is not railroading so much as it is conducting a game so as to allow the intended plot the most weight. If the players still don't want to follow it, that's their problem.
2498604
Dat message. Dat avvie.
2498592
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Tea is love. Tea is life.
2498580
But you do know where you are going, per "know when you are done." The idea is to keep track of what the overall problem is and how many ides your story has to sort through already. You do not need to know the details of how your characters will ultimately solve the problem so long as they know what the problem is and keep finding short-term objectives that get them closer to some solution and a few mid-long term goals to keep focus. You know when your story is derailed when your characters are suddenly investing a lot of time into something that you cannot reasonably tie back into solving the problem your story was supposed to be focusing on.
2498524
And thank you for reading
2500170 Many welcomes to you my good sir. Brilliant blog, just brilliant.
2500170 I find it a fitting avie given that it's pretty much reaction to a lot of things I see on this site.
I don't think I've ever heard that expressed, or thought of it myself. I'm going to think about that a lot.
Perhaps one of the reasons so many people love Scrivener is that it covertly forces them to use island plotting. I do island plotting myself. The story grows in my head as a set of disconnected scenes, and I try to link them up.
2500571
Well, with all this talk of "my characters are alive", it seems only fair that they should have a stake in the story. The author and reader profit as well because in the end, asking what the characters want out of the story ultimately has us pondering how these characters can self-actualize, or reach their fullest potential. If we solve the plot without unleashing the fullest potential of our characters, then we have not used our characters properly. There are assuredly "crowning moments of x" still to be discovered in our circumstances that we can bring out through judicious editing.
2500709 I think "the characters want to be in your story" needs to be rephrased somehow, because in many cases the story is generated by how much the characters don't want to be in it. Think of Arthur Dent being tossed about the galaxy in his bathrobe, or Pratchett's Rhincewind, or Yossarian from Catch-22. Think of 1984, Brave New World, horror stories, etc.
The character's player must want to be in the story. Is that any different from saying the character must want something in the story? Lots of writers have said each character must want something.
2501427 Eh... maybe re-phrasing would be useful, but I think you might be conflating 'story' with 'setting'. Sure, the charachters you mentioned don't want to be in the places they're in, but they very much want to be doing what they're doing. Winston has excellent reasons to try escaping Big Brother; Rincewind and anyone in a horror story very much wants to survive and escape.
What it comes down to is motivation, and that the actions come from it. I've seen the same idea expressed as something like: drama is characters doing extraordinary things for extraordinary reasons, while melodrama is characters doing the same thing for poor reasons. I liked Cyrao De Bergerac much more than Romeo and Juliet, because Edmund Rostand drew his tradgedy from mature characters with mature reasons, instead of angsty teenagers who were 'in wuv'.
It's important that the author draws the plot from the characters... well, charachter, because otherwise things happen 'because I said so', and that usually produces weak stories.
2499276
That is why we should try to not make our plot fragile! ^^ I'm an avid fan of a 4 part story structure model, and I believe that if your plot points are strong enough, the intermediate scenes will follow naturally, which makes them projectable. That doesn't mean that you can't deviate from a previously planned scene, of course. (If you're interested in what story structure model I'm talking about, I wrote a blog post desconstrucing Equestria Girls with it.)
2500170
I think that makes foreshadowing quite hard. You can of course always add that in later, but that's a lot more work than just knowing where you're going during the first draft.
I'm sorry I might come off as so prejorative towards the let-your-characters-develop-the-plot thing. I think I developed quite a knee-jerk reaction to it by having read that this is the method Steven King recommends, and while it may work in some stories of his, The Stand was a great concept with believable characters, a dragging middle part and a plot that moved exclusively through deus ex machinas, literally: it was all god's work. A very unsatisfactory read, and a long one at that. Still, while this working style may work for some people, I see far more people for who it doesn't, me included.
I wholeheartedly agree with your core sentiment, though: Don't bend characters, bend circumstances.
2501427
I think "character must want something in a story" loses something of the thought, because anyone can want a macguffin. This thought is not referring to a character desiring to receive a concrete reward or end state. It is more along the lines that the character is actively engaged by the journey. Kind of like you are not necessarily at a theme park to check an explicit box so much as you believe that being immersed in a theme park's entertaining environment is a worthy way to spend an afternoon.
I think the problem with my presentation is that, as you pointed out, it was phrased in a way that was biased towards positive experiences when there are equally engaging negative experiences. Arthur Dent is a perfect example of a person who is heavily negatively engaged by his story: it actively seeks out his peeves, threatens his life, and overall goes out of its way to bother him, and it is hilarious.
If the post had stopped at "what does Dent want" it would have lost the thought to look for all the little ways a story could interact with a character along the way. Perhaps "the more your story engages your characters..." makes more sense? Or perhaps we could reconcile Dent to my original wording by suggesting he wants to be in the story for the schadenfreude.
2501933
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. I'm not keen on forshadowing myself because the way I have been exposed to the concept, it always felt like the point is "tell your reader indirectly what is going to happen next." Symbolic spoilers, if you will. It is not the only way to foreshadow, but that is how I have heard it most talked about, especially back in school.
I usually approach the problem from the opposite direction: right now, things are happening. There exist causes. We will find some of their effects this scene and others later. When we find the effects, the causes naturally become foreshadowing because a reader who is paying attention should be able to take a good guess at what is happening next given the implications of the contents of the current scene. As authors, we need not know exactly what is next. We just need to keep track of all the things that could be next given what we have and pick the one our characters like best. The rest takes care of itself
2502401 The way I see foreshadowing, it's like dropping hints that you'll only get in hindsight. They're what makes a reader cry "I should've known!" instead of "I've never seen that coming." It's rather for things that are not direct consequences of actions already shown, that would be pretty redundant.
If you've seen the first few episodes of Breaking Bad, Walther's coughing is foreshadowing that he's sick with lung cancer. It's kinda blunt really, since people usually never cough on TV unless it's deliberate. Nonetheless, it's responsible for the fact that noone cried "foul!" and this disease didn't feel like a random thing they pulled out of their behinds to move the plot forward.
Many, very good examples of foreshadowing are in Shutter Island. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, I'd really recommend you to, they're both excellent. The foreshadowing in this story makes no sense at all during the first watch/read, but once you get to the end, it all falls into place. If you're interested, here's the first of a series of blog posts that deconstructs Shutter Island.
2501933 Yeah; I've seen the story-structure you're referring to, I think, although it was called the three act structure in the guide I read: Randy Ingermanson's suprisingly not-awful Writing Fiction for Dummies. It's widely used in movies and books, and works really well for anything of average length; most movies or the average novel.
Really, it's basically a formula for Island Plotting. Pick two or three islands, and project outwards from there. It's the islands that set the structure, and the rest of it fills in around them.
The thing is, it's specifically set up to create something that's about three acts long, and that's not always what you need. Squeezing three pinch points into a 5k fic is is silly, and limiting yourself to three pinch-points in a 300k fic is pointless; use nine, and break it into books! They key is that there are turning points you need to hit, and what goes between can come after.
What this sort of thinking does, is allows the author to look further ahead in the plot by focusing on the important bits first. It gives a cohesiveness, a unity of composition, that's lacking when an author tries to write like a reader; by starting at the beginning, and proceeding without stop till the end. THAT'S the fragile chain I was talking about.
Anyways, I'm pretty certain we're talking about the same thing, in case that's not already clear. I will say, though, that one thing worth discovering for yourself is just how precise an outline is most useful Mr. Ingermanson preaches the 'snowflake method', where an author starts with one sentence and expands it into a three-act novel in nine progressively more detailed outlines. I personally, can't do that; my current thought processes aren't advanced enough to accurately encompass a whole novel. If I try, I get caught up in circular editing and never actually write anything. It's much more useful to me to outline vaguely, and then actually bang out a few chapters. It probably produces inferior work, but hey; I actually get something down.
Well, this is one of the best discussions of writing I've had on this site so far, so thank you for your thoughts.