What's More Vital to a Good Story: Plot or Characters

[Legacy]

Obviously, a good book or story will likely have both an enthralling, suspenseful plot and effective characters and character development.

But if you had to pick one over the other as being more important, what would you say?

 

[Dorothy]

Good characters can redeem a bad story, but a good story can't redeem bad characters. Your characters are the reader's eyes and ears in the narrative, so if they aren't good, the whole work falls apart. Obviously both story and characters are important, but making sure your characters are good should take precedence.

 

[Glitchipedia]

The way I see it, the characters should drive the plot, not the other way around. Characters are everything—without them, nothing would ever happen. So making sure they're well-written is the key to the whole thing.

Admittedly, I'm still grappling with this issue. Actions and motivations that sound perfectly reasonable in my head suddenly sound outrageous, embarrassing and occasionally contradictory after I've written them down. Probably my writing reflecting my personality: impulsive.

 

[GastlyGibus]

Characters, 100%. It's one thing to have a good plot, and a good plot can really help a story, but if the characters aren't interesting, or even believable, then the story is ultimately going to suffer because of it.

Take Avatar: The Last Airbender for example (the cartoon series not the terrible movie adaptation). That series had a very standard plot: some big bad guy is trying to take over the world and only the chosen one can stop him. It was the characters that made that story so great in my opinion. The "chosen one" (the Avatar) wasn't some wise mystic, he was a little kid, and he didn't even want anything to do with being the avatar at first. Even Sokka, who was at most times the comic relief, had some very serious moments that helped contribute a lot to character development. And even when he was being serious, he always found the time to crack a joke or two ("Goodbye, space-sword!").

My point is, good characters can help a standard plot become interesting. It doesn't really matter if the plot is new and interesting or if it's been done before, it's the characters that are ultimately driving the story forward, and how they interact with the world around them will directly affect the reader's enjoyment of the story. It doesn't matter if you've come up with a totally original plot that's never been done before; if your characters are boring, the story will reflect that as well.

 

[Flaze]

Though I even have to say it with everyone giving out the same answer xD

That being said I do think it needs a little bit of both. Well certainly it needs a lot of character but I think it also needs to at least have an interesting plot that'll get you to try it out in the first place. Not to say plot is everything because it's not and like everyone above me has said character is what defines a story, but I do think having a good plot in which to drop those characters in also helps, because depending on how the plot develops it'll also affect how the characters develop and the situations they go through. So essentially you need a great cast and a good story to drop that cast into so they can grow.

 

[Drakon]

They're equally important as they both interact with each other in myriad ways to make a great story.

Great characters won't save a poorly written or implausable plot. And a great plot is useless if the characters driving the story are badly written.

 

[Lysandre]

I know I personally find characters to be more important. Clearly a balance is ideal, but I could theoretically enjoy characters interacting in a mundane setting if the characters are interesting, while even the most fascinating of story concepts won't hold my attention if I can't bring myself to care about the characters involved.

 

[PiccoloX]

Good character design overshadows the plot. The plot will come together in the end, but we generally get to know the characters much sooner. A poor character design, regardless of how epic the plot may be, would turn off readers from wanting to see the end if the story. Ultimately, well designed characters will shape the plot themselves.

 

[Dorothy]

I know I personally find characters to be more important. Clearly a balance is ideal, but I could theoretically enjoy characters interacting in a mundane setting if the characters are interesting, while even the most fascinating of story concepts won't hold my attention if I can't bring myself to care about the characters involved.

I assume this why things like coffee shop or high school AUs are so popular.

 

[Persephone]

Characters are generally preferable, with a handful of limited exceptions. Waiting for Godot comes to mind as a work that has, well, neither but less of real character development than plot. It's also surrealist/existentialist commentary which kind of allows for its own rules. But for most fiction, characters trump plot.

Take The Catcher in the Rye. Plot: A guy gets kicked out of school and aimlessly wanders a city. See much of a point? Well, not really. What makes it classic is the sheer skill Salinger had in crafting a character that readers could understand and maybe identify with, however disturbed he was. Plot comes when people do things, if we take it to its simplest definition. Well-developed people either do things or their lack of doing things is an integral aspect of their character that you're probably commenting on if you really take this direction. When a character can identify with and understand and maybe even hate or love a character as if they were real, then the things they do gain real significance to readers if they are important to the character even if what they are doing is objectively not exciting. By contrast, it is much harder to get readers to care about a person because of what they happen to be doing. Sure, it works for action stories. But you might note that not many of those are remembered as true classics or are remembered for particularly long.

 

[Almonds]

Characters are more importatnt, because good characters can make a boring/cheesy/overused plot engaging, but a bland/boring character fails to bring out the best of an interesting plot no matter how unique/original/new the plot is.

 

[PiccoloX]

Characters are more importatnt, because good characters can make a boring/cheesy/overused plot engaging, but a bland/boring character fails to bring out the best of an interesting plot no matter how unique/original/new the plot is.

I dunno why, but what you said reminded me of the DBZ Abridged running gag in specials where Piccolo points out the "misfit villain" cliches. Pretty one, strong one, strange one with weird powers and "the fourth" sometimes. lol

 

[Treemo]

At the end of the day, the characters are the ones driving the plot forward and are the ones through which it is experienced by the reader, so it goes without saying that character quality is usually the factor that either makes or breaks a work. In my experience, it's usually better to work heavily on the characters and start with a very basic premise/plot, and then build from there. It all tends to fall together. Aside from pre-planning certain major plot points, I mostly write by the seat of my pants when it comes to plot development. Character-wise, though, I always invest a lot of time in them. I even have backstories and crap for background characters, just so i can keep them acting properly even if it never comes up.

 

[Lugion]

I dunno why, but what you said reminded me of the DBZ Abridged running gag in specials where Piccolo points out the "misfit villain" cliches. Pretty one, strong one, strange one with weird powers and "the fourth" sometimes. lol

Spectacular.

But anyway, I'd definitely say characters. IDW's current Transformers comics are a brilliant example of this: there are two ongoings, Robots in Disguise and More Than Meets the Eye. Both take place after the end of the Autobot-Decepticon war, which is totally new ground for the series (not counting Beast Wars). RID centers on Bumblebee and a few other major characters such as Starscream, Ironhide, Wheeljack, and so on, trying to get the Autobots and Decepticons and all the thousands of non-aligned Cybertronians to live together peacefully. MTMTE is about the hot-headed Rodimus leading a band of primarily second-string characters in a quest to find the mythical Knights of Cybertron. RID sounds more interesting, yes, but the guy who writes it isn't nearly as good a character writer as James Roberts, who writes MTMTE. The result gives the middling-to-good RID and the consistently fantastic (and hilarious and heart-wrenching) MTMTE.

 

[Oblivion]

See, the reason why characters tend to be more important than the plot is because the point of characters is to drive the plot. The very concept of a main protagonist or main antagonist or main character in general is to have a specific character or group of characters that the plot of the work revolves around. If you have crappy characters and ESPECIALLY if you have a crappy protagonist or antagonist, what could have been an awesome plot is going to get sidewinded into a ditch.