Meshing

Which comes first, characters or plot?  It's a question writers are often asked, an old debate, but I think it's the wrong question.  A good story needs both, and you can't develop them in isolation.

Action without character doesn't make for satisfying stories.  Say we describe a fire burning down a house.  That's action, but it's meaningless on its own.  Sure, somebody lost their house, but we don't know who, or why we should care about the event.

This kind of emotionally detached reporting of the scene is the sort of thing we see on the news every day.  The event is a tragedy for somebody, but not for us, because we don't know the people affected and we're not involved with the event in any way.

For us to care what happens, we need to know the people affected by the event.  And this is where introducing characters comes in.  If we've already met the owner of the house that burns down and we know she's an artist, we're going to be involved with the scene emotionally when we learn that her life's work, over a hundred paintings, have been destroyed in the fire.

Character and action need to mesh together in this way, like an intertwined braid.  Perhaps we're seeing the scene through a mother's eyes, and she's looking at the ruins of her daughter's house.  What if she thinks her grandaughter might have been killed there?  Character and plot will be strongly intertwined as she sets out to find out if her family is safe.

Character and plot must develop together.  We can't know a character until he or she is forced to act.  And by the way that they act they will define themselves and we will come to know them. Think of stories more in terms of character behaviours than plot and character.  What they do is who they are, and what they do is also what happens.  A perfect meshing of plot and characters.