Building Character Through Plot

How the pressure of plot can reveal and change our characters

Recently, novelist Marti Leimbach, author of the NYTimes Bestselling Dying Young, offered CWC her brilliant advice on building character through plot. CWC Prose Members can revisit her talk here.

You may have noticed a pattern in these speaker takeaways so far: there is always some sort of persistent, exhausting myth that needs to be questioned, and a CWC speaker comes along to do just that.

Ken Babstock did examined the idea of “depth” in poetry. Devin Kelly debunked limiting beliefs about genre. We’re going to continue that tradition today.

Marti Leimbach’s talk on character spoke began with a quote from John Gardner’s excellent Art of Fiction: “Trustworthy aesthetic universals do exist, but they exist at such a high level of abstraction as to offer almost no guidance to the writer.”

There is a distinction between the philosophy of writing and the practice of writing, and Leimbach gave us some insight on how to tell the difference: Writers must stop looking for rigid formulas and instead trust that Art is water; it will find itself in you if you let it.

If art is fluid, character is substance, and it’s best revealed under duress. She shared pithy philosophical wisdom from Wayne Dyer: “If you squeeze an orange, what do you get? Orange juice.” In fiction, your plot is the squeeze, and the character’s reaction is the juice. Whatever is truly inside them must be revealed under pressure.

This principle creates the key distinction between a flat story and a dynamic one: the difference between plot-based decisions and character-based decisions. Leimbach’s point was that character-based decisions deepen your characters. They breathe life into the collection of words on the page.

Leimbach illustrated this with the memorable image of a refined, 80-year-old woman walking into a strip club. We have the gut instinct to write a plot-based decision: She had a flat tire nearby. A good writer, however, makes it a character-based decision: perhaps she is looking for her granddaughter, or maybe the club is an old haunt from her past as a young stripper. The tire is a coincidence that gets A to B so that C can happen. But if she is a retired stripper confronting her own mortality, it deepens the character and the plot simultaneously to have her chase nostalgia in a place where she felt young and alive. The deeper the character, the more organically the story flows.

To build this depth, a writer must master the art of revelation rather than mere statement. We should aim to show what a character wants versus what they actually do, their powerful self-control or frustrating self-sabotage. She tells us that, because you can only add so many details before it becomes long and dull, details about our characters are best selected if they serve multiple functions at once. They should reveal more and more about our characters the more we squeeze the orange.

Leimbach offered three powerful case studies to show how a character’s inner life can be exposed through different techniques:

1. Immediate Power (Mary H.K. Choi’s Yoke): This character is immediately relatable, not because she’s kind, but because she embodies universal feelings of envy, despair, and bravado when confronted by an ex and his new lover. Her mean-spirited internal dialogue is what makes her real. The specificity of the attack (targeting particular clothing brands the new woman is wearing) also reveals details of her passions and her profession in the world of high fashion.

2. Gathering Power (Claire Keegan’s Foster): The young protagonist is passive in her physical life, offering brief pastoral observations, but active in her internal life. These imaginative reveries reveal her deepest hopes and fears, gathering power slowly. The reader goes along for that ride and witnesses this accumulation of confidence through her thoughts, which are all the more important because of the friction between life happening to her in reality and life happening because of her in her mind.

3. External Action (Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone): Even in high-stakes fantasy and powerful world-building, the character’s core desires determine the spectacular external actions. They may be extraordinary people, but they are still people—even if they’re orcs, or dragons, or anthropomorphized piles of shoes. Whatever the external spectacle is, it only matters because it is driven by desperate internal motivations and a sense of obligation.

Great characterization obviously isn’t just dialogue or internal monologue. Marti highlights the importance of using the surrounding world so that the character feels like a living being in that world. To put this into practice, Leimbach led an exercise focused on using a physical object to reveal character. You can try it out now.

The Prompt: The Prop Test

Take an object (a smartphone, a worn piece of jewelry, a half-finished cup of coffee, whatever you want) and write a short scene showing who your character is, based entirely on how they interact with that object. Let their actions, their frustrations, their tiny moments of control or lack thereof, reveal the deep current of their personality. Remember to lean on character-based decisions by letting their history inform their interaction.

Non-members, you can join CWC and watch Marti Leimbach’s talk (and 100+ hours of other recordings) here.

Happy Writing,

Mike

November in CWC

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