: Re: How is character development a major role in the plot of a story People mostly say that the characters of a story have to be developed first, but I don't really understand why characters play

If your characters are interchangeable, forgettable and one dimensional you will have trouble getting readers to read much of your book.

Readers meet a character and watch, waiting for something to happen. If we donâ€™t care enough about the character because they are just a placeholder, we put the book down.

Plots happen to someone and if that someone is an undeveloped element and not a character, we donâ€™t care.

I was reading a book set during the French Revolution - it had a strong plot and a few interesting characters, but others were rather flat. I read on because one character was a young nobleman with republican views who joined the revolution. The author killed off a lot of interesting characters, but I kept reading because this guy had a problem and I wanted to see how it was resolved. I cared about him. She killed him off too and I put the book down - no one left I cared to follow.

Memorable characters are either hard work to create or they come as inspiration. They fuel even the most plot driven story - they are the reason the reader turns the page.

My piece is a character driven thriller and before I started writing it, I spent weeks thinking about two characters (one is minor, yet pivotal). I had a clear plot and my characters and I started writing. My characters reached a point where they diverged from the plot, essentially telling me they had a better idea. They did and the book went in a direction I had not foreseen.

My point is, had I held to my original plot, forced it to play out as I had planned, I would have 80k words of a generic novel that I would probably not want to read - at least, not twice. Following my characters, I have a much longer work that I am proud of, enjoy reading, and is fun to write.

I have no idea how it will end, suspect I will slip the original plot in sometime in the future and trust my characters to tell the tale. It is their story, I am just writing it.

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: Re: How is character development a major role in the plot of a story People mostly say that the characters of a story have to be developed first, but I don't really understand why characters play

More posts by @Pierce369

: What weight should be given to writers groups critiques? I joined a writers group that meets every three weeks. I submitted the first eighteen pages of my work and also sent the same file

: How do I write a "take action" scene for a play? Here is what I mean. My character- Violet- started the play with a lofty attitude, but now her pride has been broken by her mother's death

: How to write a convincing religious myth? In my story the protagonist hears, in a temple ceremony, the reading of a religious/mythological text. Now in the actual story, I don't need the text

: Do modern fiction writers adapt their style to the 21st century reader? With shortening attention spans and the way we consume content nowadays, is there any shift in the way modern fiction

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