Recently, I was asked if I thought the book series, A Song of Fire And Ice was a plot driven or character driven story?
The question came up during a conversation with another writer. We'd been talking about writing styles and I replied that I failed to see the relevance of his question. If a book was well-written, what did it matter if it was plot or character driven.
“It's a critical decision,” he replied. “It determines the type of reader and that ultimately determines the book's sales.”
I was intrigued by his answer and asked him to explain.
“Plot driven books have a wider appeal,” he stated confidently. “Lord of The Rings is classic hero’s journey and so is the Harry Potter series. Look at the best-seller lists,” he continued. “The names that appear regularly, Dan Brown, Micheal Crichton, James Patterson, Stephen King and Matthew Reilly, what do they all have in common?”
“They’re all males?”
“How about Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith?”
“Genre writers?” I said dismissively.
“Seriously? Alice Walker?” His look was both knowing and condescending.
“African American literature,” I replied, but I could see where he was heading.
“And I might add one of your personal favourites The Handmaid’s Tale which raises another point.”
“Which is?”
“Plot driven novels are most likely to be made into movies or streamed as serials; The Hunger Games, Gone Girl, Pride and Prejudice, The Godfather. Jurassic Park, Sky Wars—”
“Sky Wars?" Now it was was my turn to look disdainful.
“I know," he conceded, "I threw that in because I like it. That and all the Indiana Jones movies and the Die Hard franchise, the Terminator-“
“Stop, we’re getting off track.”
His confidence, however, was beginning to irritate me. My friend was making a good case for the popular appeal of plot-driven books (and movies)
He was wrong about the highest grossing novels. Romance books cashing in on 42% of sales dominated the list of best-sellers neither of us wanted to bring that up. We’d both been astounded to learn that the highest grossing romance book of all time was Fifty Shades Of Grey. The next highest grossing genre - thrillers, crime and mysteries, came in at a respectable 32% of sales and that suggested my friend had tapped into something important. Readers read books for entertainment and a big part of entertainment was escapism.
Thrillers, with their fast paced, suspenseful, high stakes action, kept readers turning the page to see what was going to happen next. Interjecting the protagonist’s self-analysing ran the risk of slowing down the action and these books were all about speed. The appeal of mysteries was different. Cozy or gruesome, mysteries are about figuring out who did it. Half the fun for the reader is pitting their own sleuthing abilities against that of the innocuous Miss Marpole, the gritty Sam Spade or the analytical and deductive Sherlock Holmes.
Following fast on the heels of action novels is a genre that is becoming more and more popular- Fantasy. To qualify as fantasy, all a novel needs is an element of magic (although dragons helps). That and a plot structure Joseph Campbell named the hero's journey. He theorised that almost every story throughout history could be reduced to this one common archetypal narrative. From Homer’s Ulysses to every movie ever made by the Disney corporation, it is a structure that does seem to have a timeless, universal appeal.
And this made me wonder if character-driven novels were a more recent invention. If you ignore the Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji, the first novel is generally credited to DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. Stories go back millenia but the novel in western culture is only 300 years old. It’s reasonable to assume therefore, that we are still exploring what the novel can be.
The Penny Dreadfuls of the Victorian age, cheap, serialised novels that popularised crime fiction, horror and adventure tales, made literature available to the masses. And, like today’s video games, they were thought to negatively influence young readers. In America, pulp fiction popularised images of the Wild West, adding to that vast westerward migration. Earlier novels, however, had also influenced social change. Charles Dickens writing in the mid-eighteenth century, high-lighted the cruelty of child labour and that awareness eventually resulted in legislation to protect the young. Women of the Enlightenment were writing novels that are precursors of modern day feminism and encouraged women to fight for universal suffrage. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, highlighted the atrocity of slavery and became instrumental in the fight to abolish that practice. In other words, novels weren't simply entertainment, they were catalysts for change.
The first book I remember reading that focused on the inner thoughts of the character more than the plot, was The Red Badge of Courage. It was written in 1895 and unlike many stories of warriors or soldiers, it is less about heros and battles and more about what it felt like to be a young man caught up in the horrors of war.
Around that same time, Ambrose Bierce wrote his famous short story, An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge. It was a story that takes place in the mind of a confederate sympathiser as he is about to be hanged. It turns out to be total fiction.
Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by her sister Charlotte, all display a trend towards looking inward at the complexities of human nature. Then in 1929, something truly new and exciting was introduced. Stream of consciousness. The first book written in this style, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, laid the ground work for Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Plot gave way to what was going on in the protagonist's mind.
And so to counter my friend’s praise for plot driven narratives, I mentioned these books saying, “Don’t you think character driven novels are a more realistic interpretation of what it is to be human?”
He sighed.
“I suppose you could say that character driven stories offer greater insights into human nature but are they worth the struggle? They’re like eating liver. Sure it’s good for you but it’s hard to chew and even harder to swallow.”
“Maybe you haven’t had it properly prepared," I replied. "Liver should be eaten slightly –”
He wasn’t interested in discussing the culinary delights of liver. Instead he stayed on point.
“Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is considered a classic but after wading through its 200 some odd pages, what have you accomplished? Several perspectives on death, including the dead person’s? It’s hard work and pointless. And don’t even get me started on that monstrosity of James Joyce. These books may be classified as great literature but their too cerebral, too in your head, to be entertaining.”
“What about The Great Gatsby!”
I admit I was struggling to come up with character driven novels that weren’t considered too literary, too high brow or too artsy. In other words, books that had broad public appeal and I thought Gatsby stood a chance. I bolstered my position, adding, “Not only is it a great novel but it’s been made into two very successful movies.”
“Three,” my friend corrected. “Unfortunately, the 1926 silent film has been lost.”
“I didn’t know there was a silent version,” I said, even as my mind segued into considering whether The Great Gatsby would have worked in black and white? Would it have intensified the stark difference between the haves and have nots or would the lack of colour have dimmed the crassness of the monied classes?
My friend, undaunted, continued,
“If you want to be in the running for a literary prize, then by all means, focus on character driven plots. But if you want a shot at Netflix, then focus on plot.”
Having made his case, my friend wandered off to talk to someone else, leaving me to rehash our conversation on my own.
I thought his assessment, while having some merit, was too simplistic. More and more plot driven books involved complex characters; Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Count Alexander Rostov in A Gentleman in Moscow, George Smiley in John Le Carres' spy novels.
And so I returned to the original question. Was GRRM’s books that were later turned into the wildly successful Game of Thrones dramas, character or plot based? In the absence of my friend, I asked Google. It turns out that Martin himself considers his books to be character-driven but many critics argue that the characters often make decisions that favour plot over character so that qualifies them as plot driven. And so it seems to me that the novel and readers are evolving together. Readers, as they are introduced to novels with both interesting plots and complex characters will demand more of both from writers. And writers, for their part, will experiment with new forms and structures. We can see that already with the increasing interest in graphic novels, audio books and flash fiction. How will plot and character play out in these new formats?Feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comments.