When Plot is Driving

Teresa Nielsen Hayden discusses inefficient writing when it comes to cool plot points and character motivations. Great advice, neat insight, and it really rung true for me as I recently read a book that was plot-driven rather than character-driven. This was a best-seller, a neat concept book that wasn't exactly bad, but every single plot "twist" could be anticipated because the scenes leading up to it only existed to make the twist happen. For example, you're reading a scene from a character's POV and you realize that this character has the Answers that everyone else needs to stop the crisis, save the day, live HEA. Then you look up at the page number and see that you're a third of the way through the book at best. You get the sneaking suspicion that this Character With All the Answers will soon die. Lo and behold, a spectacular accident (that is completely an accident, so there's not even the gripping idea that the Baddies offed this glorious character to prevent the answers from coming out) wipes Character With All the Answers off the face of the planet. Everybody loved the heroine not for any understandable reason (cute and competent will get you far, but not that far) but primarily because those characters later needed a motivation for their actions. The romantic subplot starts off with the characters supposedly no longer in love with each other (again, for no real reason that the reader can discern), and ends with them doing heroic things that risk life and limb because they actually love each other after all (and we've seen nothing to indicate why or how this happened, except that the plot needed it).

Again, it wasn't really a bad book, per se. It just wasn't nearly as good as it could have been. This is why, with every plot point that my muse reveals to me, my first question is always "Why does this happen?" followed quickly by "How does it happen? Why is this the only way it could happen?" and so on. A good book should not have you anticipating events because it's clear that Person A needs to get to Place Z in order for Plot Point 3 to occur. A good book should have you anticipating events because they're the inevitable outcome, and you know this, and yet you still find yourself cheering for the characters to figure it out and save their butts, even though you know they can't, and it's going to be awful, but the promise that they'll find their way out of it is there (you don't know how, but you know it will be good).

This seems somewhat off-topic from Teresa's post, but it's not really. Economy of plotting happens when the characters are the focus. If a writer only focuses on "what happens next", then we have that "I only remember the cool parts" effect. But if a writer constantly asks "why does this happen next" and "how do I believably make this inevitable", then the focus is on who's doing what in the story and why. The story's still there. The cool plot points are still there, but they aren't just little empty-calorie candybars floating in the ether of a poorly constructed universe. They're the high notes of a full-course meal where all the flavors are unique yet blend together perfectly to create a sublime gastronomical experience. Hmmm....candybars.