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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > Literary Merit > Does there have to be a plot or are characters sufficient?
Does there have to be a plot or are characters sufficient?  [message #76727] Mon, 13 April 2020 13:57 Go to previous message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



This raised its head in another thread where I use my own Chris and Nigel as an example of a work that has no real plot save the scrapes the characters create for themselves, but has reasonably decent characterisation in that people find they identify with the characters. There is no real start and it meanders broadly towards the place it dries up like a river entering a dried up lake.

Two things happened to dry it up. My attempt to introduce a plot bored the characters rigid, and the bored characters became unwritable because they were being asked to do that which they had no desire to do.

Other stories are well plotted. Sometimes the characters fail to be three dimensional because they are subservient to the plot; at other times both characters and plot thrive.

I choose not to speak of other authors' work by name here, but they are welcome to mention their own and speak to its strengths or weaknesses. I have none of my own where both plot and characters take joint centre stage and do it well, though I do have some attempts.



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
 
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