My stories are majorly plot-driven, which often leads to my characters seeming flat or even making out-of-character decisions. I've asked a friend about it, and she told me real development and personality shows in interactions with other characters, but I'm not sure how to put that advice into practice. How do I have multiple 3-dimensional characters in a plot driven novel, and what are some strategies I can use to show their individual personalities scene-by-scene?
Well, I think this is a bit of a backwards approach to constructing a narrative, if you don’t mind me saying. All stories are plot-driven. Plots, in turn, are character driven. You can’t really have a plot that isn’t propelled by the characters personalities, choices, failings, etc. I feel like this is a fairly common misconception that is made by a lot of inexperienced writers.
A plot isn’t just a series of things that happen. Sometimes it’s easy to think of a cool storyline, or series of events that we’d like to see happen in our story, but getting that idea developed into a story that will work on a deeper level involves working back to incorporate the other vital elements of the narrative into it.
The plot is the outcome of the situation that the story begins with, combined with the choices that the characters make. I think something that is very important to understand with this is the concept of character agency which means that the characters must be taking an active role in shaping the events that they experience. This isn’t to say that the characters just decide what they’re going to do and are never wrong, but that there are actual things that happen due to the choices that they make.
A book that is a fairly easy one to showcase character agency is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Throughout the book, the protagonist Katniss has multiple opportunities to make choices about the way that she will act and react when presented with events in the world around her. Katniss is a fairly proactive character, so she often chooses to take action, and while this sometimes has positive effects, it often also has negative consequences.
Sometimes Katniss’s selfish or mean actions have positive outcomes, and sometimes her altruistic actions have negative outcomes, but we never feel like we’re just watching her go through the motions of ‘choosing to do this thing because it is the most convenient thing to do to get the next plot point to happen.’
I feel like this is where a lot of peoples attempts at meshing character agency and that big cool Plot Idea that they have falls down, because rather than tweaking the plot to fit the character they have developed, people will tend to try and just wheedle around it by taking the easy way out. This comes in a lot of different forms, and while I won’t recommend TVtropes as a bastion of literary analysis, this section from their page on the ‘Idiot Ball’ trope sums up this concept pretty well:
Frequently, the person carrying the idiot ball is acting out of character, misunderstanding something that could be cleared up by asking a single reasonable question or not performing a simple action that would solve everything. It's almost as if the character holding the ball is being willfully stupid or obtuse far beyond what has been established as "natural" for them. Frequently, it's only because the story (and by extension, the writers) need them to act this way, or else the chosen plot/conflict for the episode won't happen.
When you have a character just do something because it is convenient to making the plot progress in the way you want it to, and that action is not congruent with the way that that character has so far been established as feeling and behaving, it breaks the immersion in the story, as the characters, our link to the world of the story, begin to feel flimsy and undeveloped, more like cardboard puppets than developed people whose lives we are interested and invested in.
Now, as to the second part of your question, this is sort of ... extremely broad and basic, it’s really difficult to answer because it is kind of the basic building block of story. Character agency is the factor that determines whether a story is ‘just a series of things happening’ or a cohesive narrative. Developing robust characters that can act with agency within the narrative is foundational to creating an engaging story.
I’ll link you to my ‘characterisation’ tag [HERE] and you can have a look through some of the questions folks have been asking, and the answers I’ve given them. Essentially, character informs every other element of the story, and every page and line of the story is going to illuminate some part of the characters that appear there.
This post is getting long, and I’m not sure if I’ve explained things in a helpful way here, so do send in any clarifying questions you’ve got here.
