I was at a writers’ conference yesterday (actually, just sitting at a table from the local sf club), and spoke to several writers there, talking (among other things) of character vs. plot.
One young woman told me she was working on an MFA, and was being taught the character-driven side… and she said that she was learning some, but that was not what she was going to write.
Another, older woman, told me she was writing lit-fic, and mostly not nice people, with lots of ulterior motives and private agendas, and it usually didn’t turn out well for them.
I can see why she was writing about people like that, because if you write about good, nice people, what do you have for a story?
The issue I have with that is the same one I had when I read The Great Gatsby – these are people I don’t like, and would prefer not to know personally… so why would I want to read about them?
But let me go deeper, and look at a bigger picture than just what I want to read. When some of my kids were turning 13 and 14, I wrote them a long letter about life, the universe, and everything. One of the points I made was this: you hear about meeting someone, and they’re almost perfect, but this one little thing, but you can fix that.
No, you can’t. By the time someone hits 18, this is who they are, and unless they slam into a massively life-changing event, they will only be more like that as they get older.
Now, when I got into fandom, back when mammoths walked the earth, one of the major criticisms of sf, “genre fiction”, was that there was no character development or growth.
So, with a character-driven story, unless you have a strong enough plot to offer a life-changing event… the character will not change. And if you don’t have that kind of plot… then what you have is a character study. Esp. in short fiction, and in flash fiction in spades, that’s what you have.
Feel free to post arguments (argument, def, Monty Python, “a series of statements intended to prove a proposition, not merely nay-saying or cursing”) against this view… but I say that you need a balance of plot and character, and failing that, you don’t have a good story.