My wife and I decided to consume some novelistic comfort food through the hot summer. We have enjoyed some mainstream/literary stories (James, Westward with Giraffes, Mink River) and are now settled into British mystery series—Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway mysteries, Sarah Yarwood-Lovett’s Dr. Nell Ward series. Which led me, at least, to pondering guns: not the philosophy, not the politics, but the impact of easily available firearms on storytelling.
Most of the mystery writers I admire agree that character is most important element of a story. PD James says, “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.” That requires strong, deeply human, believable characters — not just clever plots. Raymond Chandler said, “The character of the detective must be in some way the moral center of the story.”
But plot-centric thrillers like Lee Child’s Reacher books are enormously popular. Reacher has little backstory and needs none. There’s virtually no character arc—he arrives on the bus, rights wrongs, faces nuance-free antagonists and kills a lot of bad guys, has sex with a pretty woman, leaves on a bus to his next adventure. When it comes down to it, I suspect one’s writing comes down to internal wiring—what you’re good at is part of you. My thrillers lean toward character development and have become more so in the now nearly fifteen years since I started writing seriously. I love the techie parts, but I’m always more interested in what makes the people in the stories tick.
I can see space for both approaches. I think of the character-driven stories as thick and the plot-driven hotrods as thin. The character driven model draws the reader into the depth of the story through the characters. You can’t get to the core of the story without knowing the characters, and building that knowledge takes words and permission from the reader to move a little more slowly. The plot driven stories tend to move fast, and part of the excitement of reading them is the breakneck pace.
They always say to write, you must read, and that is certainly true, but I’m finding that reading other writers firms up what I am. There are plenty of authors that I would love to be as good as, but the last few years have taught me that I don’t want to emulate them, I just want to understand why they’re good.
It’s good to be a work in progress..