CHARACTER DRIVEN = DRIVEN CHARACTER
by Donald Maass
Problem: you’ve got someone or something to write about, but you’ve got no plot. Perhaps you’re not that kind of writer. Perhaps you dislike plot templates. Perhaps the tricks and tropes of genre fiction turn you off. What will keep your readers reading, you might hope, is the magnetism of your prose and the inherent fascination of your subject…except…
…except, well, there is that sinking feeling that readers may not actually be lit up by the same things that light you up. They might not relate. They may lose interest. They might want things to happen in your novel, more than you know how to devise. Which brings you back to the basic problem: no plot.
So, what do you do when there is no overt problem for your protagonist to solve? What if there is no dead body, dragon or danger to avert? What if what interests you is a multi-faceted human being? What if it is relationships, the human heart…heck, the human condition that you want to write about? Isn’t plumbing the depths of people as important to write about as saving the world?
There are many approaches to non-plot driven storytelling, the kind of novels that center around not events but people, what in editorial parlance is generalized as “character driven” fiction. What human beings go through is interesting…or rather, unhelpfully, interesting to you but not necessarily interesting to readers.
If you think about it, readers have plenty of their own things going on. They have families, hurts to heal, secrets to keep, situations which are deeply felt. Readers undergo the full range of human misery and joy. Grief. Loneliness. Longing. Desire. On and on. Readers have their own dramas underway, so why do they need your story?
They don’t. That is, until they do. What is it that causes readers to value a story about someone who could be anyone? Someone regular but whose experience, in your mind, but not necessarily theirs, requires exploration and is special enough to merit in-depth treatment?
Drive
My daughter just started college. One weekend this past summer, I took her on a father-daughter bonding trip to the Six Flags amusement park in California. She’s a thrill seeker and so we rode roller coasters, or rather she did. I bailed on most of them. Luckily after a day of hot California sunshine, she was done. The next day I drove her down Rodeo Drive and through West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the canyons, Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
I pointed out the headquarters of Paradigm talent management on Wilshire, with whom we sometime co-agent, but she wasn’t interested in that. She wanted to see the big houses and enjoy the car I had rented, a luxury-loaded Mercedes. (There was an option for Alfa Romeo, but sadly she’d never heard of that brand.) She wanted me to put the car through its paces and so on an evening drive out to Ventura Beach to see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, we hit an empty stretch of Route 126 and I floored it.
Say this for Mercedes: It’s a helluva car. It flattened us back in our seats as it shot down the highway, flexing its muscles, sprinting for the gold or possibly for its life. It was, as they say, a rush. For half a mile we were flying, superheroes, free from speed limits and everything ordinary. It was a thrill better than any roller coaster not only because it was fast—and because it lacked inversions and rolls—but because for that brief stretch of highway I wasn’t just Dad, that eye-rolling relic of yester-yore, but a father making his daughter’s dream of speed come true.
We were driving fast. We were driven. My daughter by a feeling of freedom coming within her reach. Me by the aching need never to let her go. In that moment the Mercedes gave us momentum, literally a moving moment, racing—for me–too fast down the highway that’s inside.
Which brings me back to your character who has nothing to do…but everything to seek.
Yeah, But Seek What?
Okay, back to your plotless novel. It needs a framework, a reason for the story to be told—and read. How, then, in the first place do you set a problem for a protagonist who overtly has no problem? What can give the reader a sense that this human life or situation matters and must be explored? Let’s look at an example of a character about whom, overtly, we have no reason to read or any reason to care.
Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True (1998) is a novel that I resisted for years only for the shallow reason that I hated the title—I mean, I actively despised it. So pretentious. So self-proclaimed lit-TAH-rary. (Pronounced that way.) Nevertheless, the book was an Oprah pick and was adapted by HBO. There had to be something there, so eventually I caved in, read it, and I’m glad that I did.
It’s the story of Dominick Birdsey, whose twin brother Thomas Birdsey has paranoid schizophrenia. Dominick’s life sucks in other ways too: a failed marriage, ae dead child, a hated stepfather, an unknown birth father, a faithless girlfriend. Talk about stuck. After Dominck’s twin brother cuts off his hand in a public library (a protest, Thomas imagines, against the Gulf War), Dominick hasn’t much to do except navel gaze, get therapy and read the autobiography of his Sicilian grandfather. Not much plot there. Not much reason to read about Dominick either, except that Wally Lamb knew that he needed to make Dominick stuck situation something that matters to us.
Lamb works on that toward the beginning in this recounting of the death of the twins’ timid mother:
My mother slipped out of consciousness on May 1, 1987. Ray and I kept a vigil through the night, watching her labored, ragged breathing and thwarting, until the very end, her continual attempts to pull the oxygen mask from her mouth. “There’s a strong possibility that someone in a coma can hear and understand,” the hospice worker had told us the evening before. “If it feels right to you, you might want to give her permission to go.” It hadn’t felt right to Ray; he’d balked at such an idea. But ten minutes before she expired, while Ray was down the hall in the men’s room, I leaned close to my mother’s ear and whispered, “I love you, Ma. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.”
Him being his schizophrenic twin, Thomas. A few pages later, first-person Dominick offers this perspective to the reader:
When you’re the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands—the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you’re into both survival of the fittest and being your brother’s keeper—if you’ve promised your dying mother—then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman’s gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin—the guy who beat the biochemical rap.
The tricky thing about saving yourself…there we have it. Dominick is seeking something. He has a plot goal. In simple terms it is this: survive. The only way to do that is to do that. This Dominck does, learning a lot along the way. He learns about paranoid schizophrenia. He learns about twins. He learns about his Sicilian heritage. He learns the identity of his birth father. He learns how to cope with loss and his failures. His drive is to survive and everything he goes through carries him toward a realization that finally saves him: When there is nothing else to cling to, Dominick at least he can hang on to what he has learned is true.
(BTW, that title which I found so pretentious turns out, like the title of Colleen Hover’s It Ends with Us, to reflect not to the novel’s problematic situation but rather but its ultimate conclusion.)
There is Always a Plot When Your Character Wants or Needs
One of the workshops that I offer addresses the middle muddle, in particular the agonizing challenge of characters who are stuck, immobilized, trapped and lacking agency. Such characters are suffering, which by itself is not dynamic or particularly interesting. It only gets interesting when suffering is transformed into seeking.
Briefly, some of the tools that I recommend to help stuck characters get moving are these: 1) a crisis, meaning that which makes being stuck and suffering no longer bearable, 2) A task, scheme, gamble or plan, 3) complications, 4) an enemy.
There is also the powerful tool of right now, which is expressed in questions, a couple of which are:
What can the protagonist do right now to get what he or she wants or needs?
Who right now can help with that?
What must the protagonist do right now to gain that help?
Where right now must the protagonist go to get what’s needed?
There are many variations of the right now question, the underlying point is that there is always something that a stuck protagonist can do next. What kinds of things? Here’s a short list:
There is somewhere to go.
There is something to get.
There is someone to seek.
There is evidence to bury or destroy.
There is damage to repair.
Sin must be confessed, forgiveness found, atonement done, time is short.
An offender must be confronted, accused, shamed—and right now, or it will never happen.
An opportunity arises: seize this opportunity it’s the last one you’ll ever get.
An unlikely person arrives to help, challenge or in some way shake things up.
There is a temptation too good to resist.
A plan is hatched or a scheme is devised—with whom?
There is a way to put things back to the way they once were, all that’s required is–?
Conclusion
When a character has no plot to follow, there is still something to tackle. When there is nothing to be done, there is still something to be accomplished. When there is nowhere to go, there is still somewhere to get to. When there is no agency and no hope, there is still oneself to work on.
There is always something that matters. Call it motivation. Call it a problem, a goal or anything else that you like. When we feel a protagonist’s need, want, urgency and desire, then whatever moments you sense that you need to portray in a novel—even speeding down an empty stretch of highway—can achieve meaning.
A “plotless” novel can still have plenty going on. Narrative drive arises when something matters greatly to a character. It is the discovery of meaning that provides the sense of movement. It’s those ways in which a novel becomes truly character driven.
Your WIP may have plot, or not, but either way what is it that drives your protagonist? How are you making that matter to that character—and to your reader?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).