How I Wrote a Character-Driven Story

I’m a plot-driven storyteller. As a result, it took me a long time to really understand how to write a character-driven story–not just to deepen characterization after the plot is written, but to really write a story that tells about a character’s particular life experiences.

This is supposed to be the domain of realist literary fiction, I thought. Plenty of genre fiction is character-driven, of course. The best often is. But genre fiction tends in general to slant towards plot and storytelling for the joy of storytelling. As such, I felt more at home writing those kinds of stories. I’d never consciously tried to write what Orson Scott Card might call a Character story before, but I had written Event stories.

Until, that is, I took a fiction writing workshop at the Thomas More Institute with Pauline Beauchamp and Karen Nesbitt (which is being offered again in Winter 2020). The 12-week workshop gave my classmates and myself plenty of time to do exercises that allowed us to slowly discover our protagonists. And once I had this chance to really build a character from the ground up, it seemed the easiest thing in the world to write a story about him.

The result? My story “The Goddess in Him” will be appearing with NewMyths.com in September 2020 and I can’t wait to share it with you all.

Writing a character-driven story was simple in the end. Because of the way my mind works, it had just never clicked that this was one way you could write the kind of story editors always want: character-driven stories.

I had to begin not with a fully outlined plot, but with a fully-fleshed person.

I go more into depth about my experience with writing character-driven fiction in my latest article in The Writing Cooperative, “How I Learned to Write Character-Driven Stories.”

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