If you're familiar with literary lingo, you probably have heard the two terms in the subject line: character driven and plot driven. Often, they're thrown about as synonymous with "literary fiction" and "commercial fiction."
"Literary fiction," you might have heard a teacher preach, "focuses on human beings, on people, on their shortcomings and their faults and their world perceptions. Not on the events they go through."
And in fact, I can distinctly remember my AP (Advanced Placement) Literature and Composition teacher, who was incredibly open-minded in his idea of "literature," who taught high school seniors postmodern and existential literary theory, telling us that we couldn't choose anything "plot driven" for our end-of-the-year book projects.
I love Chekhov. I really do. His short stories are fantastic and his plays are even better. But I blame him for instilling in the literary realm the notion that plot is Evil and the Sum of All Things Unliterary And Unartistic. Ever since he revolutionized the idea of what literature should be (and mind, it did need some revolutionizing), it's always "character this" and "character that" and open-minded left-wing-literary-theorists equating everything you might consider "plot driven" with the books spun out several times a year by authors such as James Patterson.
What I'm really trying to get at here is that:
1) I don't think "character driven" and "plot driven" properly characterized the sorts of novels they're supposed to characterize. (Stephen King denounces plot, and instead builds fantastic characters. His characters often influence what happens next, but no one's putting King up on a throne next to Hemingway or Mark Twain or, dare I say it, the Russian Literary Greats.)
2) I disagree with the notion that "character driven" and "plot driven" are "literary" and "commercial." respectively. (Take Cat's Cradle. You've got a classic "plot driven" plot, apocalypse and all, but no one's calling it commercial fiction.)
3) While I love fabulously drawn, complex, original characters with something to reveal about humanity quite a lot, I find just as much value in a devilishly well-constructed plot. (In fact, the deus ex machina endings typical of literary novels, where everything just suddenly works out, is always a low point for me, no matter how deep a character is.
I'm by no means settled on this issue, which is why I'm posting here. I want to know... what do folks here think about this issue?
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