#plot and character

[thewrittenmagic]

Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 2: The Lie Your Character Believes - Helping Writers Become Authors

Out of resistance comes conflict; out of conflict comes plot. This is the first of many ways in which plot and character arcs are inextricable.

Part Three

[theravenpiper]

Role-Players and Writers

Role-players need to change their perspectives when they turn to writing. In role-playing, you create your own characters. The DM creates the story outline, and the group of players fill in the details.

When you write, though, the creation of all these elements is usually done by a single person, and changing one changes the other. For instance, Shakespeare's Othello center on jealousy. The story exists because the lead character is not only jealous, but acts without stopping to think. Replace Othello with Hamlet, who thinks before he acts, and there's no story. Similarly, replace Hamlet with Othello, and Claudius is killed in the first scene with a minimum of drama. Ignore the inter-connection, and you wind up with a flat story at best or a disjointed story at worst.

[ariadza-writes]

Two things in particular are important [in Tomashevsky's analysis] – that the plot will involve a sequence of different situations, and that each of these situations will be defined by the nature of the interrelationships between the characters

Andrew Cowan, The Art of Writing Fiction