This past Sunday, November 9, was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember seeing East and West Germans climbing over and on top of the Wall and celebrating with each other without being shot, and the first pieces of that horrendous thing finally pushed down by the public on live TV in 1989. It was… Continue reading The Berlin Wall: One wall, two sides, multiple outlooks.
I am and always have been a character-driven writer, and I love it. It’s like a drug in my system. I have to keep a tight rein on it, though, because in not wanting their story to end I’ll go right past where it should stop. 🙂 I do hope to at least once try my hand with a plot-driven story.
There are many writers out there who craft their stories based on a “what if” situation. They will come up with a scenario, such as “what if a meteor hit the earth?” or “what if a guy goes to the store and finds all the cars in the parking lot stacked on top of each other?”
These two scenarios may sound very similar, but they’re not. Yes, both start with the same three words, but the difference is this: the first revolves around a plot. The plot has yet to be populated by humans (assuming there are humans left alive after the meteor hit). The second scenario already has a human in it. Here may be the difference between a plot-driven story and a character-driven one.
For me, populating a story that contains a story first (aforementioned meteor crashing down) is near impossible. I can’t wrap my head around a…
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Manuscript. Head. Drawer. 