By M. Beth Zimmer •

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” 

Henry James, The Art of Fiction

During the first month of my first semester as an MFA student, I was asked a question: “Do you see your work as character-driven or plot-driven? What type of story are you trying to tell?” But I struggled with this question. My writing instructors were teaching me to create strong characters and plot, so why would I focus on only one? And just when I thought I had a grasp of the meaning of the question, the two terms (plot! character!) twisted and slipped past one another and again, I was left bewildered and confused. 

Google these terms and you’ll find numerous definitions. Plot-driven novels tend to center on where the characters go and what they do. In this narrow definition, plot-driven novels tend to be formulaic in nature, follow specific tropes, and are often labeled “genre” fiction; think thriller, adventure, romance, and mystery. 

Alternatively, character-driven novels are all about the human experience and favor attention to interiority, inner conflict, and character growth. These stories use plot to reveal who the character is and to inspire character growth and change. These novels might feel more experimental or philosophical in nature, and in this manner, character-driven novels are often labeled “literary” fiction and tend toward a closer psychic distance. 

In his oft-cited work, “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James argued a character can’t be separated from incident, and that “these separations…have been made by critics and readers for their own convenience.” While many novels conform to these plot-driven or character-driven definitions, and fill the niche of “genre” or “literary” fiction, many others, however, fall somewhere on a continuum between the extreme nature of these definitions. 

Can a writer break out of these binaries to write novels that blur the lines, to create plot-driven stories that are also character-driven, or “genre” fiction that is also “literary” fiction? I believe the answer is yes. 

 

Olga Tokarczuk Defies the Plot-Driven Mystery Genre

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is, at heart, a mystery, a whodunit. And while bodies pile up, this is not a typical mystery. The novel centers on Janina Duszejko, a year-round caretaker for a small community of summer homes in a remote Polish town. One day, a neighbor dies, and soon after, people begin dying under strange and bizarre circumstances. Is it the revenge of the animals as Janina believes? The mystery of the deaths is well-established, a seemingly plot-driven novel. But Olga Tokarczuk defies the mystery genre and creates an intriguing character-driven literary mystery. How does she do it?

Use of Obsession to Create Strange and Interesting Characters

There are many ways to create curious characters that fascinate readers, but in The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, Charles Baxter says, “There’s nothing like a good usable obsession to provide an interesting story.” Tokarczuk exploits this strategy, hands down.

The discovery of the first death occurs in the opening scene. While Janina and her neighbor discuss the name of the dead man’s dog, Tokarczuk uses interiority to delve into her character’s mind, to show Janina’s motivation: “I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t like it. Those names didn’t suit this Dog, considering her personal history. Something else would have to be thought up for her instead.” The character rationalizes why names are predictable and ordinary, and thus, unnecessary: “That’s why I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person.” Tokarczuk exaggerates this quirk and intriguing names appear for all characters in the novel (Oddball, Big Foot, and Dizzy). 

Tokarczuk capitalizes (literally and figuratively) on her character’s attitudes and emotions through the first-person point of view. In the opening scene, Tokarczuk uses multiple senses to explain how Janina once reported Big Foot to the police. Janina uses visual cues to show how the Commandant looked at her: “[He] was an obese man of about my age, but he addressed me as if I were his mother or even his grandmother.” Janina surmises what the Commandant is thinking: “I could almost hear his thoughts—to his mind I was definitely a ‘little old lady,’ and once my accusatory speech was gathering strength, a ‘silly old bag,’ ‘crazy old crone,’ or ‘madwoman.’” And finally, Janina listens: “In the doorway I heard them snorting with laughter, and the very words I had predicted: Crazy madwoman.” Because the police perceive the main character as crazy and Janina doesn’t protest, the reader jumps in, wholeheartedly.  Everyone believes Janina is crazy, therefore, she can say and do crazy things, giving Tokarczuk carte blanche to go beyond the norm. Everyone inside the story (the characters) and out (the reader) finds Janina’s unusual behaviors perfectly acceptable. Charles Baxter writes, “Such [obsessive] characters serve as focusing agents for the entire story. You can’t take your eyes off them.” 

The obsessive nature of Janina remains front and center throughout the novel. With each death, the psychological and physiological stressors ratchet up. Janina’s health deteriorates, she has visions of her late mother, and her pleas to her friends and the police about how animals committed the crimes become more desperate. 

In the end, the plot-driven mystery of the killings has been solved, the character-driven mystery of who Janina is hasn’t. This creates a resonant close, but also an element of an unsettled or incomplete character, one still developing. The character knows her time is coming. She can see death on the horizon, it is written in her horoscope, and the reader believes it. 

 

Ruth Ozeki Turns a Character-Driven Novel into a Mystery

A Tale for the Time Being is not a classical mystery, but Ruth Ozeki uses the construct of a diary to turn the life of Nao into a mystery. Ruth, a middle-aged woman, finds a diary washed up on the shores of British Columbia. The diary connects Ruth to Nao, a young girl from Japan, not physically, but metaphysically. Ruth reads about the numerous suicide attempts by Nao’s father, the excruciating bullying Nao endures in school, and Nao’s foray into prostitution. These horrors are softened by the mystical lightness of a young girl and deepened with a calm spirituality she learns from her elderly great-grandmother, a Zen Buddhist nun. The character, Nao, is at the forefront (the character-driven story), but in introducing another character, Ruth, who worries about the fate of the young girl, Ozeki creates a mystery (the plot-driven story). 

Mixing Contradiction and Complexity to Enhance Character Development

From the opening lines of the novel, Ozeki seizes the reader with an interesting character. “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.” The language depicts ‘young and quirky,’ creating a sense of playfulness and welcomes the reader into Nao’s world. Typically written in secret, diaries are not meant for prying eyes, but Ozeki flips the form, creating a protagonist who speaks directly to Ruth (and the reader). 

In, The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, Douglas Bauer writes that “one of the major problems in the fictional creations of beginning writers is an absence of complexity.” Ozeki creates a character who epitomizes complexity. In one scene, Nao, in her high school uniform, sits in a French maid café thinking typical young-girl thoughts like painting toenails and cats sitting on laps, but she sees a man leering at her. Continuing in a sweet, young girl fantasy, Nao wonders whether this man is kind and might fall madly in love with her, and without warning, wonders whether he will instead take her to “a love hotel…[where] his inner nature will emerge, and he’ll tie me up and put the plastic shopping bag…over my head and rape me, and hours later the police will find my lifeless naked body bent at odd angles on the floor.” The reader is left gaping; who is this young girl? Ozeki turns her protagonist from an innocent girl to a deeply contradicted character in just a few lines. The reader can’t help wanting to know what happens to Nao.  

In one sense, the story of Nao is a linear set of incidents that carry the story forward. Nao moves from California to Japan; she is bullied; her father tries to commit suicide, so she is sent to spend the summer with her great grandmother. In another sense, the story is about a person’s relationship with time. Ruth finds a diary and begins reading Nao’s story, and in doing so, she begins to think she can help Nao (in the past). The stories of Nao and Ruth intertwine in such a way that the reader begins to believe Ruth can reach across time and space to help Nao. Thus, Ozeki creates a new sense of time, where worlds and time collapse upon one another. The mystery of who Nao is keeps the reader emotionally and intellectually engaged: the character-driven novel. The mystery of what will happen to Nao keeps the reader in suspense, and keeps us reading to know more: the plot-driven novel.

At the end of the story, Ozeki inverts the structure, telling Ruth’s story from the first-person rather than the third perspective. The novel concludes with a sense of optimism, but like Tokarczuk, Ozeki leaves the reader with a sense the story is not yet finalized. “Even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.”

 

To Defy Literary Binaries, Writers Must Break Out of the Norm 

In Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, Benjamin Percy says to “Toss out the worst elements of genre and literary fiction—and merge the best. We might then create a new taxonomy…”. Tokarczuk and Ozeki epitomize this new taxonomy. Readers want to be curious, to marvel at the story, the characters, relationships, events, and incidents. A character is not a story. Nor is plot a story. But these two writers have created character-driven literary works in the plot-driven mystery genre.  

Bauer writes, “One of a writer’s highest challenges is to create sentences that do the heavy lifting, but with elegance and beauty.” For example, in the following excerpt, Tokarczuk appears to do this with ease. Tokarczuk uses beautiful language to describe the simple notion that the world is not what it used to be:

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism—it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek, this word means “the dropping of petals.” The world has dropped its petals.

Tokarczuk creates an unstable and obsessive character, but also, a highly intelligent one. One who sees life in an exquisite way—demonstrating the epitome of the definition of character-driven literary novels. But the plot itself is straightforward; a woman goes on a killing spree to avenge the life of her beloved dog—fulfilling the definition of a plot-driven mystery. 

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that “although characters may be complex, the details of their complexity are often blurred, as if by time.” Ozeki appears to take Gardner’s statement literally. A Tale for the Time Being could have been narrated by Nao in real time, but then, this character-driven story would not have been the same. By placing Nao’s story in the past, in the borrowed form of a diary, time becomes blurred. The reader knows Nao’s fate is sealed; it is in the past. The reader feels the plot-driven mystery and remains intrigued. The reader questions what possible role Ruth can accomplish. This distorts our belief of what can be accomplished across time and space. In a key scene, Nao and Jiko are on the beach watching the surfers, and Nao laughs aloud because first, a man is up on the wave and then just as quickly, he falls down. But “old Jiko,” the Zen-Buddhist nun, sees life differently: 

“Up, down, same thing”

It’s a typical Jiko comment, all about pointing to what she calls the non-two nature of existence… “No, it’s not the same thing. Not for a surfer.”

“Yes,” she said, “You are right. Not same…not different either.”

See what I mean? 

“It is different Granny. The whole point of surfing is to stand on top of the wave, not underneath it.”

“Surfer, wave, same thing.” […]

Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. “A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls around like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”  

[…] This is pretty typical of the kind of conversation you have with my old Jiko. I never quite understand what she’s saying, but I like that she tries to explain it to me anyway.

Old Jiko is right: Character, Plot, same thing. 

 

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BETH ZIMMER lives and writes in central Michigan. When she is not writing, she can be found working as a biology professor at Ferris State University. Whenever possible, she explores ways to meld her passion for biology into her creative writing. She recently received her MFA from the Solstice Creative Writing Program at Lasell University. Find her on Instagram @m.bethzimmer.

Featured image by Patrick Tomasso, courtesy of Unsplash.