The character based approach to story is basically the idea that the character is your story so all you have to do is basically really really inhabit your main character and you are done (if you are writing third person limited or first person. Arguably, it’s useful in omniscient too but there you have to inhabit the however many POVs that you switch between and a switch in POV is not a switch in camera angle [quote from one of my UBC instructors] but an entire lens to process the events in the story). A simple and powerful idea.
So what’s my take on this? Well, when I first came across this idea in full, it was through Robert McKee’s Story, specifically chapter 7 which he titled the Substance of Story and I bought the idea right off the bat. But in practice, it works quite differently for me. Firstly, I always conceptualise a story through events and each scene for me pivots around what happens rather than how a particular character experiences the events. Secondly, because I outline in omniscient (or at least a kind of birds’ eye view because it is really hard to say that I outline in a particular voice given that my outline is basically a jumble of notes to self and whatever I know about a particular scene) that means that I have to get into character for a third person limited narration that is my norm for writing. And I have to admit I am not quite adept at this and I can’t say that I am really in character for most of the scenes I have drafted. I am not sure that I can claim a particular scene that I am really ‘in character’ all the way through, snippets certainly but never a full scene. Instead, what I was able to import from McKee was his conceptualisation of beats as a coupled action/reaction between characters (I might have mentioned it before but I never really got what a beat was when I first learnt it through the UBC novel writing course until I read McKee) and his framework of how a story can be conceptualised as a continuous cycle of where the protagonist is trying to bridge the gap between his/her expectations from their actions and results as experienced by them. In fact, both frameworks are occasionally used by me to try to break into a particular scene (I wrote about that topic before).
So in light of all this, despite my initial enthusiasm for the idea, I have come to embrace the idea instead that there are different approaches into story and it is not necessary to always enter it through character in the first draft. The idea is that the story will eventually come to embrace character, plot and theme in its final form and of course I’m now still far from that point.
That’s it for today. Feel free to let me know your own take on this.
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