Characters First

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”-Ray BradburyImagine a story in which characters acted against their nature: a serial killer helps a young girl find her way home, the President of the U.S. appears on TV in his pajamas, or a health nut smokes a cigarette. As a reader, I will find moments like that dramatic, but only if it is believable that such a twist could happen for the character. That health nut better be having the worst day of his year.A book that I read recently was full of moments where the characters made decisions that seemed to come from nowhere. They took a helicopter to a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm, on a "hunch." A workaholic cop had her badge taken away for almost no reason. The characters somewhat clumsily moved from plot point to plot point, their own motivations often forgotten.A trap that writers can fall into is to create a plot and then try to force characters to follow the predetermined path. A person with OCD wouldn't casually skip washing his hands. A narcissist wouldn't avoid looking in the mirror because it would be inconvenient to the author if he discovered the person following him. The characters must have wills of their own. The story is theirs as soon as they are set down on the page; the author is along for the ride.Today, the exercise is to create two stories. One should force characters to follow a predetermined path. The second should allow the characters to make their own decisions. A comparison should highlight the advantages of willful characters.***Plot first:1) A young man decides to run away from home instead of going to college.2) He hitchhikes with a couple who invite him to join them as they follow Keller Williams across the country.3) When he offers to pay for a motel, they rob him but leave him the car keys.4) He uses the car to drive home.Adalberto stood in the dust on the side of the highway with his thumb in the air. The day was hotter than he had expected, and his jeans and flannel long-sleeve clung to his body. Few cars passed, and none slowed down. He took a drink from the sweating water bottle in his backpack. To protect himself from the sun, he rested the pack on his head, stood straight, and stuck his thumb back out toward the road.There was nothing in west Texas. That had always been his complaint, and he felt it viscerally now, alone on the side of the road with little chance at a ride. He walked, and gave up on protecting his head from the sun. In the ditch beside him brambles grew thick, and he was careful not to lose his footing and fall towards the thorns.He heard a soft squeal of tires, and looked up to find a ti-dyed mini-van on the shoulder of the highway. A beard poked out of the window."Heading to El Paso?" the beard asked."Suppose.""Well are ya, or aren't ya?""Yeah."He slouched over to the rolling back door and pulled it open. The back seat was packed with a cooler, a grill, a hammock, and bags and bags of clothes. He put his bag on a square inch of empty space and pulled down the armrest on his chair. He shot a furtive glance at the driver, a woman with greying hair that had once been blonde. She watched him as well."Name's Marlene," she said."Hi.""This is Robert, but you can call him Dougie.""Howdy," Robert-Dougie said.He extended a callused, grimy hand. His handshake was firm and warming. Marlene pulled back onto the highway. She eyed Adalberto in the rearview."So what do you call yourself?""Al.""How old are you, Al?""Twenty-two," he lied."Well ain't that something. You're two years older than me."He eyed the wrinkles that her smile caused."All right," Al said. "I'm eighteen.""Oh to be eighteen," Robert-Dougie said.The van hiccuped and Marlene gave the dashboard a smack. They rolled through the flat, open ground. Robert-Dougie rolled a cigarette and blew smoke toward the window, but the highway air pushed most of the smoke into Adalberto's face. He coughed."Why are you leaving home?" Robert-Dougie asked."How did you know-""You don't have the street in your DNA yet, son. A few weeks on your own and you'll be a much different person. Any street kid would have sized us up before getting in this car."He turned around, eyes earnest."Not that you have anything to worry about. I'm the one worried, is all."Al watched a lone tree on the horizon."I'm going to LA to learn the movie business," he said."Know many people over there?" Marlene asked.Al stayed quiet."That's OK. You've got to get started somehow."The car rumbled to a stop. They were approaching a highway town, with two gas stations and a grocery store. The highway opened up and the speed limit increased and the van hiccuped and Marlene smacked the dashboard. They went through two more towns this way, until the sun began to set, and Adalberto heard snoring from Robert-Dougie's seat."Will we stop to sleep?" he asked."Of course. We'll find a rest stop and sleep in the van."Adalberto wanted a shower, soaked with sweat as he was."I could get us a motel room," he said.Marlene eyed him in the rearview."Don't go spending your money on us now," she said."This would be for me, really, and you all can sleep there too.""Well. If you insist."She pulled into a Motel 8 in the next town. Adalberto helped carry the cooler into the motel. He could not wait to hop in the shower and rinse the layers of salt and sweat from his body. His flannel shirt felt suffocating. Robert-Dougie had jerked awake when Marlene tickled his nose, and now smoked a cigarette in front of the lobby. Adalberto could see him through the glass doors. He counted out four tens, stuffed the rest of his money back in his pocket, and handed the night manager his forty dollars. He got two room keys. He handed one to Marlene."We'll be out here, sweetie," she said. "Come get us when you're cleaned up."Relief swept through Adalberto as he stripped his jeans from his legs. He left them on the bed with his flannel shirt, and went to test the water of the shower. Hot enough. He rinsed his hair and face and neck and back. He scrubbed dust and salt from his body. He began to wonder why he had invited the hippies to join him, when he could have asked them to drop him off. By the time he was getting out, he was worried.When he saw his pants on the floor, he knew something was wrong. They had not moved from the bed on their own. He snatched them up and could tell by the weight that his pockets were empty: no cash, no wallet, no keys, no phone. In the middle of the white bedspread, at the end of a hemp lanyard, he saw the keys to the van, and a note.Be more careful, son. We aren't bad people. You're lucky we left you the van.The van had been stripped of clothes and grill and hammock and tent. The emptiness made Adalberto feel all the more alone as he shoved his bag into the passenger seat and twisted the key in the ignition. The hours passed. Outside of his house, the weight of his situation pinned him to the driver's seat. He had a tie-dyed car in exchange for a missed plane ticket to the life his parents wanted for him. He smacked the dashboard, like Marlene would have, and laughed.***Characters first: Adalberto is a young man who is nervous to leave home for the first time. He is a Chilean immigrant who has strong family values. His father wants him to leave home and go to college, because the college has given him a scholarship to become an engineer. His mother wants him to be happy. He considers returning to Chile instead of making a decision; he is avoidant, like many eighteen-year-olds. He deals with stress with a twisted sense of humor. He says, "Geez" too much, and likes to play football as long as he wins. He likes brand name clothing, and has worked as a manager at the McDonald's in the town where he grew up. His skin is slightly lighter than his brother's, and his brother is considered more handsome. His deepest desire is ______, something that will play into the story.When he had been twelve and his family first moved to the States, Adalberto had taken up American football for no reason at all. His father scoffed and muttered that, already, not three days gone from Vina del Mar, his family spat on its heritage. In his small room shared with his younger brother in the smaller apartment, Adalberto hung his football helmet in a place of pride in the closet. Though everyone had made the team, it was a token of his new self, a character who could join a tribe though he barely knew the language.His pride would be humbled. In the coming days the other boys called him "Venti" on account of his coffee brown skin and tall, broad frame. He failed his English test, having no idea what a gerund was even in Spanish, and brought his report card to his father, head held low.Adi, as his mother called him, had grit, but it could only be observed from afar. When his teachers had given up on him, they found that his grades improved, and his play on the football field elevated, so much that by his senior year he was starting running back and defensive end, and the stadium would cheer: "Venti! Venti! Venti!" as he crossed into the endzone. A few colleges wanted him for football, and a few wanted him for his grades, but only one wanted him for both, and his father gave a rare hug to see that his son could go to school for free. Mama made enchiladas more often that summer, as if an overture to remind her son that home was beautiful too, and cried often, knowing that Adi would be more than ten hours away by car. His abuela pressed a wad of bills into his hand, and said, "For your plane ticket. To a new life!" His brother congratulated him with an affecting mix of pride and jealousy, and for a long time it seemed the person who felt the least emotion about the situation was Adalberto.That was the description Adalberto himself would use, to his close friends at least. I don't know what to make of it; I'm still trying to figure out how to feel about it; my dad is more excited than me lol. He texted his friends these, but he was not laughing. He did not work on his fitness for football that June, as his letter instructed him that he ought to. His friends from high school would invite him to parties, but he did not see the point. He called in sick to his job at McDonald's, for no reason at all. Most nights he sat on a bench in the park and watched the fountain pour water into the pond.The pond reminded him of the sea back in Chile. The aquamarine water at the beach would ebb and flow with infinite patience. He had loved to watch storms blow in, dark furor in the sky that produced panicked, choppy waves on the beach, as if the waters sensed the torrents to come. They said that Chile meant "the land where the world ends." He and his friends would use such phrases to describe the storms, out beyond where the world ends, but in English, the words lost some of their power. He knew more now, but Elena would never have used the word statistic, and Antonio would never care for economics, and his best friend Marco could not have spoken with the same passion and certainty in English as he did in Spanish. No one in the States had become a member of the family as Marco had, and he did not think they ever could. More importantly, no one in the states made him a member of their family, and he was certain they never would.When the time came, and his mother cried on the porch as his father drove him, giddily, to the airport, Adalberto decided; he would look at flights to Vina del Mar. He would go home. He would live with Marco. He needed to be some place he could belong."Goodbye, hijo," his father said, eyes twinkling. "We want to hear about your adventure when you've landed."His brother gripped him around the shoulders, eyes shimmering. His words were lost on Adalberto, who had entered a realm of such heightened sensitivity that he could hear nothing beside the pounding of his own heart."Goodbye," Adalberto said, and he turned toward the ticket counter.The woman behind the desk spoke to him about fees and baggage tags. He thought about a place that felt like home, and asked how much it would be for a ticket on flight 1106. He already knew the answer."Eleven hundred fifty five dollars."He placed his savings, in cash, on the counter."I'd like to change my flight, please."She eyed him over the rim of her spectacles, as if seeing him for the first time."Headed to school?" she asked.He flushed."Headed home."She counted the money and when she had counted all nine hundred she glanced at him again."There's only nine hundred dollars here.""I've paid three hundred dollars for my current flight.""But there's a change fee of two hundred dollars. You're short one-hundred and fifty five dollars."Adalberto felt pin pricks on the back of his neck. He blinked as if his eyes hoped she might not be real. But there she remained, and seeing his surprise, she handed him back his nine-hundred dollars and took his bag and printed a ticket for a flight two hours north.Later that year, Adalberto looked back on the situation fondly. He saw it as proof that everything in the world had its place, even airline fees.***A short note: The first story is not bad. Adalberto is a developed character, and the story begins quickly. The plot is developed much more clearly than that of the second story. But creative flow did not come to me when writing plot-first, because it puts too much of a strain on the writer. The writer is working against the character, trying to coerce him or her into following a preset path. In character-first, the writer embraces the character's flaws and freedom and the plot develops when characters want something.Getting Started: 3Character: 3Point of View and Tone: 2Plot and Narrative: 2Dialogue and Voice: 2Descriptive Language and Setting: 2Revision: 2Overall: 2*Level 2*