Do you start with plot first or with characters?

The first thing I observed while trying to write a book was that it is deeply immersive. It is an all-consuming activity during which normal life comes to a halt. It is unlike writing a report, a column, a blog.

Every day of writing was exhilarating. The skeletons your memory exhumes and the tricks your mind plays with those memories make you feel uniquely alive.

You find yourself entering a world peopled with characters, who have been inside your head. You have been granted permission to tell their story.

Characters are everything

In fiction, infusing your characters with life imbues your story with vitality, with potency. They should seem like real people, with real problems, real conflicts, real hopes, dreams, frustrations, sorrows, joys. Only then is the reader able to relate with them.

However, you soon realize that your characters have a mind of their own. They are stubborn, ridiculous, adventurous, wayward. They lead you astray and you must curb their enthusiasm. They dictate the story to you. Suddenly you are not in charge. You are at their mercy. 

You realize that the story you thought of writing is no longer being written.

Instead what’s getting written is trash. Or maybe not. Maybe it is a masterpiece. Or maybe you are deluded. And leaving your job was a bad idea. This feeling of being exhausted, exhilarated, enthused, and experiencing long periods of involuntary calm makes writing so addictive. Your solitude is more intoxicating than any other external stimulus. Like long-distance running, writing is a state of joyful meditation.       

Still, there are times when reality is sobering. One can’t overstate the utility of this phase. This is the phase I struggle with most. I felt, while writing, that I was writing a jaded, dated story, or the same thing over and over. These doubts were and are crippling. You wonder whether you should be doing it at all. And whether it’s your mind’s clever ploy of indulging your unhinged daydreaming.    

Your characters, exciting and adventurous though their lives may be, don’t always shape the story in a way that the reader will find interesting or convincing. Chances are if you do not find the story interesting, the reader too, will not.       

What I want to say is your characters have a tendency to lead you up the garden path. And while, as a writer, it is okay to be in their thrall, try not to get too carried away. Some restraint is advisable.   

In times of crisis, it’s the plot that sustains you 

In times of doubt, it’s your plot twists that reassure you. Your plot twists give you the confidence that what you have to say could be interesting to others.

How do you get better at creating more interesting shifts in the plot? I don’t know. But I am sure, over time, by granting more respect to the plot, the canvas for your characters to live out their colourful lives, you get better at it.

The plot is to the story, what silence is to a song. Good composers use the silence equally well.