Plot driven or character driven?

Which is the proper way to write a story? Have it plot driven or character driven?

My answer to this is..the question is wrong.

Write a story properly and whether it is plot driven or character driven, falls on the wayside. But in my opinion, the genre of story would determine if you should be plot driven or character driven.

A good writer can write in any genre they so choose but they can only be masters in one genre at the time. Thus, they become focus to a particular approach to writing a story.

I am generally, character driven. And from my own experience, character driven stories take longer to formulate and draft. Partly because, as your character intereacts in your mind; he/she may choose to do things that shoot off from your initial ideas for your story. They may introduce unique problems that you may not have thought of and thus add more color to your story not to mention an endless supply of sub-plots.

Plot driven stories can be formulated even before you start writing the first chapter. You can draft out scenes and by joining these scenes together, your draft takes shape. Plot driven stories are slightly easier to draft out. The best tool for this is actually Microsoft Excel. And the method that works for me when I think of writing a plot driven story is Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method.

There is no right or wrong approach to writing a story. Whether plot driven or character driven, ultimately the most important thing is to have a good story told.

Happy writing!

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Creative writing doesn't have to be creative.

I once sat with an aspiring writer and listened as he talked about writing. I kept quiet and allowed him to put forward his view on how one should write a book. And from what I gather from him, I was of the opinion he had it all wrong.

A story has to be out of this world, he said. I rolled my eyes.

A story does not have to outlandish or spectacular. This is a common mistake, newbies make when they approach creative writing. They think that the plot has to be totally wild and ideas centered upon things no-one has thought of. So they spend their time trying to find ideas to out-do the one before.

Unfortunately, creative writing is about the art of writing, where one is able to tell a story in the most creative of ways. It's the style.

Imagine a campfire where you sit around with fellow writers, and each one is to tell a ghost story. The plot is the same. There is a ghost and the ghost wants to scare people, foolish enough to stumble around in a cemetary in the dead of night.

As you listen to the each writer spin their tale, you will notice that there are difference not in the story but rather in the way the story is told. Each writer has a voice, unique to their view point of the subject matter. This is the capstone to creative writing.

Creative writing doesn't have to be creative. It could be an old story, but the retelling of the story is creative.

The tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet is well known to everyone, and through out the years; there have been countless retelling of this same tale. The characters may have changed, the places change, the period change yet it is the same story. What makes the retelling good? The creative way it was told.

That's what creative writing is all about. It is the way you tell a tale. It is the clever use of chapters, sentences, dialog, flashbacks, language, etc. The old saying, Master the rules then break them, holds true to creative writing.

As for the aspiring writer above, I read through his draft and honestly, he could not write. For all his ideas about creative writing, he could not write a proper sentence.

How then can you truly embark on creative writing when the basic foundation of it all (a sentence) has not been mastered?

There is a story waiting to be told, all around you. You just need to use your voice and tell it. Remember the campfire scene, when you put words to paper.

Happy writing!

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