Aristotle Says Your Character-Driven Story Is Still Plot-Driven

By David Griffin Brown

About 2360 years ago, in a little book called Poetics, Aristotle gave the world a hot take: "Without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character."

And just to drive the nail in: "The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character holds the second place."

Okay, so Aristotle was talking about Greek tragedy—but his observations have informed story theory for millennia, and his point lands just as well when applied to the modern novel. Because here's the thing: most readers and writers operate with a vague sense that fiction divides neatly into two camps. Plot-driven stories are about plot first, characters second. Character-driven stories are about characters first, plot second. One is Raymond Chandler; the other is Virginia Woolf.

Aristotle disagrees.

The point it misses is this: with very few exceptions, character-driven fiction is still built around a plot. There's an inciting incident. There's a narrative goal that gets tested throughout rising action. There's a climax that resolves that goal, one way or another. What distinguishes the so-called character-driven story isn't the absence of plot machinery. It's what the story is asking us to pay attention to while that machinery is grinding along.

What "Character-Driven" Actually Means

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Character is plot, plot is character."

Aristotle agrees.

What Fitzgerald is getting at is the same thing Aristotle was circling when he wrote that fear and pity "may be aroused by spectacular means; but they may also result from the inner structure of the piece." The emotional draw of a story comes less from explosions and arguments, and more from the interplay between plot and character—from the way a character's inner life is woven into the events they move through.

In a plot-driven story, we still need to care about the characters, but the action is the main attraction. In a character-driven story, the characters are the main attraction—but they still need action to demonstrate who they are. The action, even if subdued, is still essential, because it creates the pressure that reveals who these people actually are.

A character sitting in a room thinking big thoughts is not a story. A character with big thoughts moving through a world that demands something of them? That's a page-turner.

The Narrative Goal Still Defines the Character

A character's narrative goal structures the plot while also defining the character. Their goal tells us what they want, which tells us what they value. The choices they make in pursuit of that goal—what they're willing to do, what they're not willing to do, where they draw lines and where they cross them—that's how we know who they really are.

We talk about this a lot in craft terms as the difference between want and need. The want is the external goal, the thing the character is consciously chasing. The need is the internal truth they have to reckon with in order to get there—or the thing they lose when they fail to reckon with it. These two forces are what create the tension at the heart of any story worth reading.

Take The Great Gatsby. Gatsby wants Daisy. That's his narrative goal, crystallized at the inciting incident (she married Tom while he was overseas) and pursued relentlessly through every bootleg deal he makes, every party he throws. But what he needs is to recognize that Daisy was never the dream she represented; that no one person can embody an abstraction; that the past can't be remade.

He never gets there. And the tragedy is inseparable from the plot. Without the goal, there's no tragedy. Without the tragedy, there's no character. Yes indeed, character is plot.

Another example: Lessons in Chemistry. Elizabeth Zott's narrative goal is highly focused. She wants to do research in abiogenesis, and she refuses to accept that being a woman in the 1960s means she can't. Every obstacle and reversal in that novel—the assault at UCLA, the firing from Hastings, the unexpected pregnancy, the cooking show—is a door that slams in her face. And with each slammed door, we learn exactly who she is. Not from her inner monologue, not from a grocery list of quirks and hobbies, but from what she does next. The plot, structured around those obstacles and reversals, is the wellspring of her characterization.

Even (most) "Plotless" Novels Have Plots

Sometimes writers point to the most experimental end of the literary spectrum as proof that character-driven fiction can dispense with plot entirely. To the Lighthouse gets invoked a lot in this context—it's been called "a novel light on plot." And it's true that Virginia Woolf isn't trafficking in fight scenes or car chases.

But if we take a magnifying glass to this book, we find that Mr. Ramsay has a narrative goal: he is determined to pit his rationalism against his wife's idealism. That conflict, launched in the novel's opening pages when James wants to visit the lighthouse and Mrs. Ramsay says yes and Mr. Ramsay says no, is the spine of the whole thing. The midpoint comes when Mrs. Ramsay dies and Mr. Ramsay is suddenly without the person whose reassurances kept his pessimism sustainable. The climax comes when he finally sails to the lighthouse—an act of embracing exactly the kind of idealism he spent the novel resisting. His children, watching him soften as they sail along, are changed by it.

That is a plot. It's just that Woolf has buried it in the interiority of a dozen characters and made the inner life (the texture of consciousness, the weight of perception) the thing she wants you to pay attention to. The plot machinery is grinding. She's just tricking us into looking elsewhere.

The same is true of As I Lay Dying. The Bundren family's journey to bury Addie in Jefferson is structurally clean: inciting incident, rising action, obstacles, climax, resolution. But Faulkner gives each member of the family a separate narrative goal—Jewel's honour, Cash's duty, Dewey Dell's secret, Anse's dentures and replacement wife—and those individual trajectories are where the characterization lives. Each character is defined not by their inner monologue alone (though Darl's is extraordinary) but by what they want and what they're willing to sacrifice for it. Darl's goal (to hold the family together emotionally) is the most poignant precisely because the plot makes clear it was always impossible.

Strip the plot from As I Lay Dying and what you have is not a deeper character study. You have nothing.

The Draw Is the Character. The Architecture Is the Plot.

So where does that leave the character-driven versus plot-driven distinction?

First of all, we might consider a reframing. The term plot-driven is the issue here. What we’re actually talking about is the difference between a character-driven plot and an action-driven plot.

The distinction is about emphasis, not about structure. In an action-driven story, the events and spectacle are the draw; we read to find out what happens. In a character-driven story, the characters are the draw; we read to find out who these people are (and are becoming). But in both cases, the events and the characters are doing their work together. The characters wouldn't be who they are without the events. The events wouldn't matter without the characters moving through them.

Aristotle said character holds second place. He wasn't wrong. Character is largely opaque without plot. But Fitzgerald's refinement is worth adding to the pile. When character and plot are working together the way they should, there's no hierarchy. They're the same thing, running in the same direction, illuminating each other.

The best "character-driven" stories still have a spine. They still have an inciting incident, a narrative goal, rising action, and a climax. The difference is that you're asking your reader to care as much about what happens at the end as who this person is becoming along the way.

Which means if you’re getting feedback that your "character-driven" story feels a bit thin, the answer probably isn't more interiority. It's a sharper narrative goal. Give your protagonist something to want badly enough to act on. Give them more plot. The characterization will follow.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.