Writing Fiction: Driven by Character or Plot?

Honoré Daumier's Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Two Characters in Quest of a Plot

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, as I was preparing my lesson for today's literature class, I came upon an interesting passage on the role of "character" in stories:

Although the average reader may consider plot the basic element of fiction, writers often remark that stories begin with characters. They imagine a certain person and then wait to see what that character will do. "By the time I write a story," remarked Katherine Anne Porter, "my people are up and alive and walking around and taking things into their own hands." The action of a story usually grows out of the personality of its protagonist and the situation he or she faces. As critic Phyllis Bottome observed, "If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot." (X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (New York: Pearson, 2006), 82)

This contrasts with a point about character versus plot made by a contemporary writer, Olen Steinhauer, whom I have gotten to know online and have occasionally blogged about. In a blog entry of mine titled "Plotting Character" (May 11, 2006), I noted that Olen, who blogs at Contemporary Nomad with three other published writers, tells of learning a fact about fiction from his own experience -- but also from the novelist Tim O'Brien, who insists that:

"Stories are about plot. Only about plot. Nothing else. They're not about character. Characters exist only to serve the plot. They have no other reason to exist!"

Upon hearing O'Brien's views, Olen confessed:

I was immensely relieved. He was voicing something I never felt comfortable saying aloud in my grad school classes, where everyone went on about their characters as if they were real people....

I find myself continually making notes to alter the characters who have come before. As the story unfolds -- that is, as I learn more about the story I'm telling -- I find out that the character who existed earlier just won't satisfy the needs for this later part of the story. I sometimes alter my expectations of the story, but within severe limits. Because the plot -- even when I'm still figuring it out -- is the master, and the characters must bow to it....

[O]thers deal with character differently, and they come up with fantastic results. But having spent so much time in school being taught the maxim that "plot springs from character", I think it's worth mentioning that I've found this to be wrong. For me, characters spring from a story, and almost (because nothing in the craft of writing is absolute) never the other way around.

So, who's right? Kennedy and Gioia? Or O'Brien and Steinhauer?

We don't have to choose, of course. For some writers, character offers the key to writing. For others writers, plot shows the way to write.

Back when I was writing short stories for Morse Hamilton's creative writing class, I composed them as riffs on character, writing quickly and letting my story be led wherever the characters wanted to go. My approach was the literary equivalent of playing jazz, I guess.

My poems have generally developed the same way, though usually not led by character -- unless the character is the poetic voice that takes over a poem as I write it, which is perhaps what happens in lyrical poetry.

But I wonder what happens in epic poetry. Did Milton follow his characters or his plot? Satan's rough character, or God's omniscient plan?