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How decisions reveal character in any story you tell.
I just read Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel.
It’s stunning.
Mandel’s characters advance the plot through their actions. In other words, Mandel forces her characters to make choice after choice in the novel, and those choices have repercussions and those repercussions escalate as the story progresses. I gobbled up the book because Mandel’s characters reveal their persona through their actions. And those actions advance the overall story.
The best TV shows do this blend really well, too. In Breaking Bad, every decision Walter White makes leads to ever-more dire new realities in the story, and these new realities influence how he behaves with his wife and children and associates, and how they in turn behave around him. I’d argue this duality of character and story development is why Breaking Bad still trends on Netflix, more than a decade after the show debuted.
I think a character’s decisions and actions can drive stories in longform nonfiction, too. We tend to think when we’re young writers — or at least I thought as a young writer — that something big and terrible has to happen to a story’s protagonist for that story to work. Because only through some big and terrible thing can we show how the protagonist overcame it. I…
