Plots and Characters

            Hiya reader! I hope life’s treating you kindly today. I’m doing pretty well, myself. For one reason or another, I’ve been feeling a bit more optimistic lately… I’m starting to get into a nice little groove with this blog, although I must admit that most of my other writing’s fallen by the wayside, at least temporarily. But enough about me, enough, enough, enough… let’s talk about something else, let’s talk about creating characters in our writing. After all, a narrative is nothing at all if it’s not happening to anybody! And while characters may not exactly be people, they’re a lot like people in a lot of respects.

            Although of course you could get a few philosophers in the room, wind them up and get ‘em going on about what it means to be a person, and there’s bound to be a decent handful that says that a person is nothing more or less than the collection of all the possible things that can be said about them. Say what you will about the idea, there’s more than a few philosophers that have managed to convince themselves that that’s the way it be—philosophers really like to convince themselves of the strangest things, you know. Now in the case of a character in a book, say Achilles for example, whatever else he is I don’t think you can possibly deny that he’s the collection of all the things that are said about Achilles in all of the books that mention him. We can say that he was the son of Thetis and Peleus, we can say that he served under that idiot Agamemnon under the walls of Ilium, we can say that he was the friend of Patroclus, that he was the killer of Hector, and that in the end he was killed by Paris.

            But what’s going on here? We’ve got this character, and as we try to form an idea of who he is we find ourselves describing him in relation to other people. Oddly enough, it seems as though the only way we can understand any character in any work is by watching them in relation to others. Put it this way: if Achilles was taken at birth and locked in a room with no human contact, and Hermione Granger was also taken at birth and locked in a room with no human contact, why, what exactly would stop us from saying that the two of them are in some sense the same person? What becomes of Achilles’ status as the greatest warrior of all the Achaeans if he’s locked up in a room and never presented with the opportunity to show his valor? What becomes of Hermione’s vaunted cleverness if she never has to stop Harry and Ron from going and getting themselves killed? But the point here is that we can never know the characters as themselves without seeing them in relation to the other characters; we know them by who their enemies are, by who they love and what they do in the world of the story. Just as we know that Ahab is a madman because he drives the Pequod to her destruction, we know that Starbuck is a coward because he won’t dare to stop Ahab when he has the chance.

            What I’m trying to indicate—poorly—is that there’s no abstract essence over and above what we say about the characters in the books, there’s no Ahab-ness over and above Ahab that gives him all his qualities. We only have characters by virtue of what they do—that is, by virtue of the way they participate in the plot. But it’s equally true that we only have the plot in virtue of the actions the characters take in the story. Now, logically speaking there’s a circularity here, so most decent philosophers will tell you that it’s impossible to create a story in the first place… which is of course ridiculous. But this kind of consideration does lead an author to face a crucial choice in constructing a story: do you build a plot and let the characters follow from that, or do you create the characters and, so to speak, let them work out the story amongst themselves? Now, naturally, as a writer you’re bound to be doing more than a little of both (that’s just part of the nature of writing), but you do have to choose an overall approach, a predominating attitude towards the work being created. Now, I’m far from figuring out which approach comes most naturally to me, but I’m beginning to feel—particularly after what I wrote last night—that there’s a great significance in an author’s choice of method.

            I get the feeling I’ve walked myself into a bit of a muddle here, reader. I’ll let you know what I’ve come up with tomorrow, unless in the meantime I manage to come up with something else I’d rather talk about. All my best wishes to you, reader. Good night.