January 2, 2010
Recently rereading Stephen King’s On Writing, and I came upon his thoughts on plot-driven vs. character-driven stories. I’m always on the lookout for individual thoughts on the matter because I have strong ideas myself (read my essays discussing Narrative Art and Fiction). Here is what Stephen King said:
[likening writing a story to digging a fossil] Plot is a far bigger tool [than most], the writer’s jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It’s clumsy, mechanical, anticreative. Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.
[…] [M]y books tend to be based on situation rather than story. […] I want to put a group of characters […] in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.
Yet another [apparent] agreement to my conviction that character should at all times rule plot.
Filed under Writing.