100 Things Challenge (#2):: The Origins of Fiction: Character vs. Plot

A few years ago, I made a statement that got people quite unexpectedly riled up. I said that not much exciting tends to happen in my stories, plot-wise. Ho boy, did people jump to defend me against myself, arguing that stories like Another Man's Cage were actually quite involved in terms of plot and very exciting in that regard. At the time, it surprised me, as the relative lack of plot in my stories has always been, to me, self-evident. In retrospect, I don't think I was as precise as I needed to be in commenting on the plot of most of my stories and therefore brought the ensuing brouhaha upon myself. My point was more about where my stories arise from: They arise from character, not plot. The plot that develops is incidental to the characterization rather than the other way around.

( People and the Things That Happen to Them )