Lesson 3: Characters, Plot, Setting

I want to ease us into the next segment of our lessons, which will be on characters, plot, and settings. Each one of these story elements affects our stories in its own complicated way, and there’s a lot more that can be said about them than what I will be covering. So for now, I wanted to help shorten the next few lessons by touching upon some common ways that writers should approach any of these. 

Where to start? (And why it should be characters)

If you can, you should be proficient at developing all three of these things. If you had to pick two, it would usually be characters and plot. But if you had to pick one, it would be characters. Why? Imagine a story that has a really vibrant and dynamic setting, one that captures the imagination with its creativity. That’s great. But then you go to read the story and you realize “Oh, the main character is really boring and I can’t relate to them. And wow, this plot has a really bad premise and drags on through the middle.”

Case in point: Star Wars the Last Jedi. By all accounts, the film had inherited an excellent setting that had a strong reputation, was beloved by fans, and had already been fleshed out by previous movies. But the plot and characters of the film are both highly criticized to this day, despite a setting that, judging by the continuation of the franchise, is still beloved by fans.

Conversely, if you have a story with solid characters and plot, but a less unique or stunning setting, you can still have a great story. Could it maybe be elevated with more worldbuilding elements? Sure. But it’s not bad. Just look at any realistic fiction set in our world. 

Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code is an excellent example. Granted, he adds some lore to his own version of our world, but it’s nowhere near as complex and reinventive as the world-building of Game of Thrones, the Shannara Chronicles, or the Mistborn series. And yet The DaVinci Code is a best-selling story and the writing’s pretty good actually. No comment on his portrayal of early Christianity. 

I won’t say too much more on characters vs plot, they’re actually closer in value in my opinion and you can interchange how you focus on them if you want. But my philosophy is that if you have a good character but an average plot, your reader will probably care more than if you have a great plot with an average character. 

We, as humans, generally fixate on other humans that we like. Even if that human is actually a pony, or a wolf, or a Beastar. 

What this means in writing

So, that’s a lot of words just to say you should be focusing on characters and plot. But what does that mean when we get down to the nuts and bolts of opening and progressing our stories? 

Especially for opening scenes, whether the start of a story or just the beginning of a chapter, it means you want to establish information about your character in a way that sends hints to your reader about what the plot and setting are going to be. 

Harry Potter’s core conflict does not begin with details about what the magic world is like or telling us that the evil Voldemort could come back and start trouble (okay, technically it does, but Chapter 1 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is functionally a prologue, which we will get to later). It begins with a zoo, disappearing glass, and a severely neglected Harry Potter.

JK Rowling establishes the reader’s connection to Harry through his ill-treatment, and within his ill-treatment, we get small hints that Harry has some magical ability and is going to have something to do with those wizards we saw in the prologue. This develops into the later plot and setting because Harry’s character has a very strong reason to get away from his awful life. 

Imagine if the book started the other way around, where we begin at Hogwarts where students are showing off spectacular spells as they prepare for “defence against the dark arts.” We introduce the setting, Hogwarts, and the implication that the plot will involve some defence against the aforementioned dark arts. 

And after all that, some random kid named Potter shows up and he starts describing how terrible his home life is. Given enough time we’d probably get back on track to sympathizing with Harry, but investing the reader in the plot and setting before giving a character to anchor to and act as a surrogate for the reader makes the overall story feel out of sync with itself. 

Tropes as clay, not moulds.

Tropes. Shorthand convention for story elements that are easily recognizable to the audience. And because they can be easily recognized, when handled poorly, tropes are typically seen as cliches, things that simply fill an expected slot in the story because all the other stories have them. As a result, a lot of readers and writers, especially novice ones, will think that tropes are generally bad. 

Now, if we’re going with the modern classics, we should hit the nail on the head with tropes. Luke Skywalker. Avatar Aang. Harry Potter. Disney’s Hercules. Frodo. These characters, all integral parts of their successful stories and applauded for their writing, are based on a trope: the farm boy with a magical destiny.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young male with a not-yet-known magical ability is stuck in a remote place, only to answer a call to action and discover that their special ability implicates them in a grand prophecy, destiny, or calling.  And this trope doesn’t just apply to characters, but plot elements as well because the farmboy adventure story will usually follow the plot structure of the Hero’s Journey (more on that in future lessons). 

To give some examples for settings, some tropes have, over time, become linked with genres to the point of being cliche. The Book of Eli, A Boy and His Dog, and the Fallout franchise, feature dry desert wastelands as the iconic setting. More urban sci-fi stories like Dredd, Bladerunner, or anything else in the cyberpunk genre, feature dense over-populated cities and a blending of extreme poverty and futuristic technology. 

But each of these examples manages to take the trope and mould it into something unique to the author and the story. And here we go back to the power of iterative ideation. If you want to ask exactly “how” you go from being cliche and overused, the easiest answer is to iterate your writing. Write and rewrite until you hone in on a mix of new and familiar elements. 

The reason why we like to do this as writers, rather than just start from nothing and see what sticks, is that we are inevitably going to reflect on other works when we begin writing. It’s in human nature to build off of existing references and templates. So if we remain unaware of these tropes and avoid confronting them with an analytical eye, we end up letting our references dictate our writing and not the other way around, which is exactly how weak stories tend to seem to repetitive of established genres. 

Need or Want?

The final topic that has immense application in all three story elements is the question of what you need for your story versus what you want. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkein definitely wanted to use his own con-lang for Elvish and give us twenty-odd pages of history on the ents and elves and goblins and whatnot. Did he need those to tell a story about finding the world’s strongest incinerator? No. 

And Tolkein is an exception in that he still did it well. His world was so well crafted that fans didn’t mind all the extra pages. We’d probably skip them while reading, but we still appreciate that they’re there. 

Most of the time, however, you don’t want to put unnecessary information into your story because readers are going to pick up on that, and they might expect more out of it. This is less so when you’re deep into the plot and it’s easier to tell what’s relevant to the story and what’s not, but you still don’t want to overload just because of it. 

Similarly, adding too much of your characters and plot can make the pace of your story feel incongruous. Stories are a ticking time bomb. The reader knows just by looking at the size of the book or the length of the webpage how much they have left to read. Readers know when they’re at the beginning, middle, or end. So if your main character is harping on a character flaw and not getting to the next step in their arc, the story feels slow. 

You might want to show how awful their character arc is to make the change more impactful, but people are not going to feel that as the reader because they know the story has to move on.

Homework and Remarks

I realize this is a really broad and vague lesson, and for our next three lessons, I will be honing further into each of these topics. Hopefully, everything here makes sense, but if it doesn’t, please feel free to ask questions now rather than wait for the next lesson. Feedback and real examples always make these better so the sooner you get your foot in the door, the better.

As for homework, I want you to go back to one of your stories, which could be a current project or an old one, and find what tropes you are employing. You should be able to identify what your tropes are because you are writing from your own mental references, but if not, I will provide a link to the TV Tropes page for fiction (which is by no means an accurate or definitive list, but it’s an okay place to start).

Find your tropes, and try to see where you’re adapting and iterating to make that trope unique and specific to your story. Then, try to identify anywhere in your intro (that could mean just the first paragraph or the first chapter, you decide) where you add details that you want your reader to know about your story, but they are not needed for your story.

Trope list: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Fiction

Comments

[JinxTJL]

I don't like admitting it, but I badly need to learn one or more of these lessons.

Well, that's not exactly true- I love admitting how flawed I am; but I'm not really thrilled about having validation that I should be fixing my problems.

I suppose it'd be nice to say thanks for this post that narcissistically feels as though it's purposefully targeted towards me. It might be time to stop luxuriating in my ability to crowd a page with words, and let the plot speak a bit more.

Oh, and very well written; by the by. You're definitely smarter than I am, which is why I'm choosing to take your words as relative gospel in my development.