I'm working on a revision of a story. It's mostly garbage and I'm taking a lot out and adding a lot, but the biggest problem I can find so far is that the characters don't really do anything. It's in third person point of view and it's at the point where I could remove any one of the characters and replace with someone else and the story would still make sense. I see this all the time with bad movies, particularly new ones, where the characters are just victims of some convoluted action-plot and the camera is jumping all over the screen with constant special effects, flashing lights, etc. Compare this to the old gray scale films which might not have the most earth-shattering effects but in which the choices of characters mattered in determining the outcome of the plot. I've got a pretty simple plot in this story but none of the characters actually do anything to further it. The main character is the only one who really does anything that has any effect on the plot. And with the third person perspective deliberately not focusing on that main character I think it appears a weak story. I'm trying to keep it very subtle. There's plenty of conflict to keep it interesting. It's just too simple a plot, almost silly, really, to present enough choices for characters to make. Any suggestions if I should change anything or leave it as it?
I mean, characters do what you make them do, they aren't independent entities. If they're not taking an active role in the story, that's not exactly their fault. If the story is just going on around them and they're not doing anything, what good are they? Get rid of them and find characters that are integral to the story.
A simple plot is not a problem. (I actually believe in a 'simple plot, complicated character' approach.) It sounds like you haven't married your plot to your characters. Generally speaking, either you come up with the characters first then develop a plot from them or you come up with the plot first then find the characters for it. Find out which one you're more attached to. The characters or the plot? That answer is gonna clarify your drive for this story and you change the other part accordingly. What is your intention in doing this? Keep what subtle?
I think you'll need to change both plot and character motivations. They need to be intertwined. Your main character needs to have a problem, a weakness or character flaw or a deep seated fear, that he needs to overcome in order to make it through. And you need to believably bring him through a change so that he's able to grow enough to commit the act, whatever it may be. Methods I've seen for accomplishing this include giving him The Thing He Wants, which he's going after for around three quarters of the story, and also The Thing He Needs, that he fears doing, but ultimately he realizes he needs to just do it regardless of the danger (and give up on the thing he wants). Another method is that the character starts the story believing a lie. This causes him all kinds of trouble, but he refuses to give it up because he needs the lie for some reason, or it's very comforting and he's afraid of the truth. But by the end he needs to gradually see through his lie and accept the truth he's been resisting all along. In some ways this is just a different way of stating what I said in the previous paragraph. The outer story needs to spark an inner change, and these are ways of accomplishing that. I'm sure there are more, but really these are very flexible approaches. I highly recommend K M Weiland's Structuring Your Novel and Creating Character Arcs (Wow! Is Structuring Your Novel really only .99 right now?)
I'm a newbie, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. When storyboarding my story, I always first decide on an underlying theme - this might sound a bit ambitious, but I think even the simplest story needs one. This determines what my characters represent symbolically in my story, and what kind of problem the plot is supposed to tackle - it doesn't need to be something deep and meaningful, this problem can be as simple as "slavery exists" or "people are greedy". Now that I have a theme that will fuel the plot it's time to create a conflict - let's go with the simple "slavery exists" concept. If I want a conflict, I need characters with opposing worldviews - so, my protagonist can be a liberated slave, and the villain, let's say, a businessman who derives pleasure from buying slaves and killing them for sport. An extremely straightforward conflict, right? It's time for the most important part - what do I want to say with my story? Slavery good? Bad? Neutral? Small cog in a bigger machine? This question is important because depending on the answer, it'll influence what kind of growth will my protagonist go through - for example, we can have a story where the MC, a liberated slave, finds out there is no other way to survive for him than to become a slave master himself, showing that in order to go on, he became the exact same man he once despised. Metaphorically, we have an entrance point and an end goal for the characters, so we need to build a path - aka the plot. Every event that is going to happen in our story will need to influence the outcome - in this case, our focal point is the protagonist, but the end goal can also be a specific state of the world, place, other characters, etc. What's important is the question "how does this story tackle this theme?" In my opinion, not every scene in a story needs to influence the plot, but it needs to matter from a symbolic point of view. If you have a story already, think about the coding present in it - what did you want to show the world using this fictional series of events? Then, revise the characters in a way so that they symbolize something that you want to be a part of your statement, even if it does not move the plot forward. And again, when I say that something needs to have a symbolic meaning, I don't mean that it's supposed to be super deep or meaningful. Hope that helps!
In our minds, we are all Stars in our own movies. This is/should be true for every one of your main characters, and probably, for many secondary and tertiary characters as well. Recently, I have encountered a YouTube video regarding the 6 Essential Questions to ask about your characters. It's about screenwriting, but it makes sense for any story teller. I have realized that, for my novel, I have danced around many of these questions for my most important characters, I haven't answered them nearly well enough. I suspect it you can't answer these questions regarding the characters in your story, then maybe they don't need to even be in the story This has been a BIG revelation to me. I thought I was having trouble plotting, but it is clear, I don't know the characters well enough, and why they are even IN the story. Damn! This stuff is real thinky!
Usually, when I build characters for a story I pin-point their history and how it relates to the circumstances we find them in. How does (x) end up in the plot and why? Figure out their external motivations, i.e. which sounds more intriguing? A man who wants to rob a bank for fun or a man who, despite enjoying his life of crime, desperately needs funds to pay back debt or so he can afford life saving treatment for himself or a loved one? Add stakes to their actions, allow readers to want them to accomplish their goal or be fearful when they might fail. Discover their main traits; I generally assign each of mine 5 traits, one being a major flaw. You can play around and cast them in the wrong roles purposely, or the right roles to reveal their true being. Since you're dealing with several individuals, you have more opportunity to show how different they might be but also how their differences allow them to become a solid team. Every character would respond differently to the same situation and have unique relationships with the others. People are often drawn together in mutual interest but for their own motivations.
Spare characters is a common problem for first drafts: I do this too. The story involves a taxi ride, so for the sake of comfort a driver minor character is created with a name and a voice and a backstory, and a vague intention to use him again later. But on revising it, everything that driver says and does in the rest of the story could be given to another character instead. The 'receiving' character might change quite a bit in the process, and might no longer resemble the original ideas I had for them - but it's usually that they become more complex and plausible. Folding characters into each other could help with the other problem the OP mentions, of the characters not furthering the plot. When the spare characters vanishing from a scene leaves it empty of characters - that's a scene that can come out, or otherwise be reworked - leaving the remaining scenes tighter and better tied-together. I wouldn't get too hung up on whether the focus is on the MC, and whether the MC makes enough choices. Character development can become artificial - if it's how readers are taught to analyse stories in school, talking to how writers are taught to write. Just tell the story, and let them bend the character development paradigm around it afterwards.
Thanks everybody! Necessary bystanders, or witnesses, will be useful later in this story. Definitely this one. I'm trying to keep the story subtle so that it could be read as an allegory. I'm struggling to describe that so far. Much of the conflict is of the form man v. nature. As it is the main character probably doesn't have any major flaw, which is unbelievable and uninteresting. I could try to add some flaws, maybe. I took out a bunch of stuff already and I know what else to cut. It's helped me doing critiques here to go back over my own writing and see it how someone else would. I realize some parts are just irrelevant and other parts could be expanded. Definitely need to work on this! What do you mean by artificial?
Which doesn't help if your readers put the book down because nothing seems to be going on. Granted, we know none of the details of what you're doing but if your characters don't seem to be doing anything useful, that's a good sign that the book isn't going well, at least IMO.
To be honest, the guy who needs the money for medical treatment sounds kinda cliche. I wanna see a story where the protagonist does just rob banks for fun. Anyhoo, on OP's question I would simply ask why you choose the characters you did. What made you think of these characters in relation to the story? What are their connections to things? You may not need to change much about the plot or the characters if you can interrogate how they fit together. Then it may be a simple matter of connecting A to B. For my own example, one character I realised didn't have an independent character arc of any sort despite being in the lead protagonist team. So I simply interrogated who they were for what I could do to both showcase who that character is or what they might go through. More specifically, the character in question acts as another character's bodyguard and there was a present risk of them being too much like a prop or voiceless tool for their charge. So I focused on why they were there, and I realised it was important to emphasise that this character is in fact not there out of any obligation, so it should be easy to avoid them feeling like a slave. I just have to make sure their reasons are portrayed strongly enough while giving them clear character. And for an arc, there are many obvious issues the character has to confront in their particular situation, given they belong to a special class of people, so as long as I make that relevant and do its work it should be something to chew on. Really, I suspect the answer you need is more obvious than you think, and you probably already have most of it. You just need to do it right.
"John wanted a glass of water. If not for the brick wall standing in the way. He picked up the sledge hammer."
The plot is the motion of the characters. If they can't affect some grand event happening in the background, then that's not their plot. You need to invent a smaller plot around them that they control. You can still tell about the fall of Mordor or the attack of the photino birds or whatever, and maybe your characters can get tangled up in that for a moment, but come back to their plot and tell that. Take "All the Light We Cannot See" as an example. The characters don't shape the war, but can see it around them and are affected by it. They have a smaller, more personal story to tell. I hope that makes sense and seems sane. You can keep the big action plot, but build a smaller plot under it. Let the characters focus on that and only touch the bigger plot when the time is right, knowing it's not really the crux of their story.
Well, make sure it isn't just some random character flaw. It needs to tie in directly to the main thrust of the story—overcoming it needs to be the thing he needs. In that way the external plot and the internal character change are unified, they're the same thing. In order to solve the external plot, he needs to overcome his major character flaw—that's switching from the thing he wants (to comfortably remain the way he's always been) to the thing he needs (overcoming the character flaw that he always thought of as unchangeable).
"What John didn't know, was that the howitzer shells had been 'tampered' with. We're gonna miss John"
I guess in the long run whether it's first or third person, it depends how it's all put together, but either view point can be good. I found myself writing a few stories in third person, but if I ever wanted to add onto it, I know of how I'd change the perspective to more of a first person stance because it seems a whole lot easier than thinking about third person. Although, once again - depends on what all you're writing and how it's written. Don't be so quick to call it garbage. All good works start somewhere and with some time can be awesome Every story will have it's week points, especially if it's not the final draft. Some things you might want to think about is, "What is my plot? What characters are involved? Which character is most affected? How does this affect all my characters in the long-run? Which characters could/should I involve?" If the plot is too simple, how will you make it more complex? What other conflicts or problems could you include that lead up to your plot? Without knowing the plot it's kind of hard to give too much in-depth advice (but that's okay, no need to share anything that you don't feel you need to here). If you're not satisfied with the plot, do modify it to suit your preferences and you never know, you might be glad that you did
This is no fault of the characters as they do what you write them to do. Perhaps, it's how you approach them that needs to change. I have a friend who is a writing mentor, Emma Darwin, she has a blog called "This Itch of Writing" you might be interested to read. I had the same problem as you when I was a newbie at writing and she said that one way to change a reactive character to an active one was to give them choices. Giving them choices makes them active or at least makes them feel active. Suddenly they aren't a leaf in the breeze just following the plot, they are actively driving it. So just add choices. Say you're novel is about a girl in a village who is selected to go and kill the local werewolf killing the sheep. Selected means no choice. The plot dictated she be chosen so she goes. Add a choice. Someone she cares about it actually selected and she volunteers instead of them/prevents them and goes in their place. She had a choice. She could have stayed home and hoped for the best. Or she could go in their place. Nothing has changed, she's still the one heading into the forest to go on the journey you want but now she's dictating the story, not the other way around. I hope this helps.
