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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26595
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26595
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I've never been entirely sure what the distinction between plot driven and character driven is supposed to mean. Story is the intersection of character and event. Character without events is psychology. Events without character is history.

None of the definitions of the concept I have read are really definitive and they don't really seen to agree with each other. The nearest distinction I can find that might fit is between a story that primarily give the pleasure of vicarious experience (being a policeman or a cowboy or an astronaut) and the pleasure of meeting a person.

A story whose principle aim is to give the vicarious pleasure of imagining oneself a policeman needs characters, because policemen meet characters: the partner, the captain, the villain, the mentor, the pretty girl who is not all she seems. We have met these characters before, and we will meet them again. And again. And again. These characters are archetypes and you can follow a template to generate instance of the archetype.

But in a story whose principle aim is to introduce you to a person, that person is not an instance of an archetype, generated to fill a role in a plot. They are a person. You don't invent people. You observe them. The drive to create a "character driven" story, if this is what the concept means, comes from an encounter with, and observation of, that person. This is not to say that such a character is a literal portrait of a single individual. Sometimes they are an amalgam of several people. But the point remains that observation, not invention, not a formula, are what drives their creation.

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