Lets imagine a bubble filled with TV static. When this bubble bounces off of a wall, it doesn’t pop: instead, some of it’s static escapes. A single bubble is interesting, but a room full of those bubbles would hectic.

We jump to a different scene. A person is walking down the street in a big city. They are a bundle of experiences, dreams, and trauma. They are listening to a carefully curated playlist of their favourite songs from their favourite niche bands within specific favourite genres which plays as background noise to a monologue thought train in their brain and a subconscious that is navigating them to a subway station. When, while lost in thought, they bump into someone and their earbuds fall out, their phone begins to play a song out loud. The person recognizes their song and compliments them on their music taste before moving on.

A character is a bubble of distortion. Incoming information will pass a series of filters and understandings that they’ve created through their unique lived experiences, a simple sentence running over an entire string of memories like a row of speedbumps. That incoming information is distorted and manipulated, wrapped around and passed through a variety of emotions. Then, based on their personal judgement and values, a communication will pass through a separate but equally long set of outgoing filters (such as the phrases and vocabulary that they have available to them, articulation based on the audience (not swearing in front of children, using fancier words in a classroom, etc) in order to communicate information to another person. If things weren’t so quietly in everyone’s head, the world would be insanely loud, all the time. Just like our room full of bubbles.

The distortion bubble will also interfere with other bubbles when they interact. Our character’s goals, motivations, fears, and pain will be misinterpreted or corrected based on their own perception. Plot is not a ping pong ball being bounced back and forth, or a guidewire stringing everyone along. Plot is the event horizon of all the distortion bubbles clashing.

In a game of telephone, you should find predictable outcomes for your characters based on a sentence or paragraph of information. How do they retell stories? What key moments would they find important to relay? What do the average interactions with them look like? Do they follow a script or panic? The answers to those will help you anticipate their reactions.

Now, factor in things like ego. How do they preserve or improve their reputation? How would they push themselves towards a goal? Do they do the action even if it harms others? Or would they only do it if it uplifts others?

Remember, your character doesn’t have a single voice in their head that guides their every move. It’s an operating system of complex filters. If you interrupt it at any point in that process, they could spill out one thing or another. Great for internal exposition.

Think about how their values will bring different memories into the forefront of their mind. Returning to our city walker, they’re about to board the subway. The compliment from earlier has brought on a different monologue: one covering their personal history of music, and an ex lover who took them to their first concert - back when they were still happy. This introduction gives our reader a secret to hold that is important to our character, which bonds them together. The reader is now entrusted with this deep emotion that exposes a complicated spiderweb of issues, questions, and memories. We also find out more about these people that deeply impact the story and our protagonist’s internal world through the perspective lens of our main character.

Now, we can interrupt this process to form an inciting incident for personal growth. Maybe they see a poster that says “guitar for sale”, take a picture of it, and then walk home. Later on in the story, they get their first guitar, join a band, play a show, and fall in love all over again. Is the story about them getting over their ex by making music their own thing instead of a shared thing, is it about finding happiness again, finding new love, or is it about self actualization? What subtext is there?

Was the inciting incident the person complimenting our character? Or seeing the poster? Was it getting the guitar? Or deciding to pursue music?

When the distortion bubbles interact, the plot can change direction. Plot is driven by the characters. Goals and motivations shift with interactions and events. Someone that was passive might become proactive at just the right moment. When we follow our plotline, we also see our character’s growth alongside it. Pay attention to their respective changes. The beginning of those changes is the first movement in a chain reaction, and is often a very small moment that leads to greater ones. An inciting incident should be an opportunity to break out of the process. want them to take to get there. The type of story you want to tell.

At this point, we should also make note that our operating systems in our brain wants to become the best version of itself it can be. It will do the most to become as efficient at a lifestyle as possible. It’s self-correcting and gets rid of any extra baggage. It also wants to solve as many of your problems as it can, doing so in the background of your day to day life, and analyzing your experiences for solutions to those old problems while you sleep. Meeting new people, experiencing new things, and getting new information is very helpful to changing up those filters and problems. It’s also the reason why therapy is so effective: you’re cutting straight to the chase and giving direct solutions for those problems. You don’t need to solve the problem for your character. You just need to point them down the path towards the solution for them to find themselves. If your character needs to grow in a certain way in order to achieve the thing, you need to place those events and moments along the way for them to do so. This is also why using side character deaths as a catalyst for growth feels like hit or miss: if they die simply for growth, the plot feels shallow and it feels self-serving to the main character. Instead, it should be the result of some sort of event related to their own goals or lifestyle, and the interpretation of that should be the catalyst for your main character. But that’s just a side note.

There’s also an inferred position. Your reader loves gossip and drama, and will read into any situation you give them. When our lead guitarist gets a visit from their ex back stage before a gig, and the guitarist blows up on them, we can infer that this emotion has been bubbling over in them for a long time. We can tell this because the natural filter process was interrupted by too heavy of a question or an emotion, and this rant blurted out of them. Depending on the content and context of the rant, this is a huge turning point in the character and the reader’s relationship due to confrontation. The event horizon of two distortion bubbles inside the story is plot. The event horizon of our reader and the main character is emotional attachment.

When our gossip-loving reader hears the ex say “wow. You haven’t changed at all.”, they’re immediately looking to see how this information is processed in our main character’s mind. Similarly, due to the reader/character bond, they want to know if they should like this character or not - depending on the guitarist’s reaction. At this point, the exposition of information about the character is a deciding factor. If we want our reader to doubt their feelings toward our main character and just how right they are for rooting for them, we’ve successfully pulled that off by introducing the question of our main character being the problematic one all along. Even though the reader is now distanced from the main character, they’re also equally invested to see if theres any growth or revelations after this explosion.

Let’s step back for a minute. Our reader has a backseat to this entire affair, and will never know anything past what we tell them. However, our reader is a distortion bubble themselves as well. They have had a complex life of different events and emotions, and they have formed their own filters when it comes to communication. When we’re thinking about dialogue and characterization, we also need to think about how people in real life are going to react to these events we’re laying out on page. We can assume the majority of events and their interpretations - most people can relate to having a bad breakup and a weird relationship towards their ex. The reader has also been a friend to people who have gone through that sort of thing, and will relate to the process regardless. However, what happens for those niche moments, those things that are very specific to the situation? Well, in the same way a baby will look to it’s parent to see if it should cry or not after hitting it’s head, the reader will be anticipating a tell as to how they’re supposed to feel. A physical reaction or an internal monologue works extremely well. You can adjust the depth and cadence of the reader’s emotional response according to the temperance of your character’s reactions to the situation. Big words.

Now, back into the story. If we pair our newfound distortion bubbles and their reactive/proactive life to a respective character archetypes, we begin to see a three-dimensional vision come to life. These are now people that you might encounter in your day to day life. You see this exact kind of person with their histories and desires standing in line to grab coffee. Starting with an archetype or letting your characters choose their own adventure along the design process is up to you, but it completes a summary of who we can expect this person to be. For example, we have a calm and collected character that doesn’t have too many hobbies, and has a very ‘what you see is what you get’ personality. If we pair this character with a professor archetype, then we have an older, wisened character that prefers to take life slower and dig deep into their studies. If we pair this character with a stoner archetype, then their calm demeanor becomes a mellow, foggy one. You see where I’m going with this? The experiences and reactions can be molded to a specific framework to complete a full caricature.

When it comes to dialogue, the experiences and emotions will guide the flow of conversation, but the topics and subtext themselves draw deeply from these archetypes.

In our story, we now have established a troubled history around love and music, stale anger towards someone who hasn’t been in their life for a long time, and goals to express these emotions through performance and also to ‘win back’ music for themselves. We have chosen archetypes that suit our characters and bring them to life, and we’ve also both established and strained our reader’s connection to our main character. Our dialogue and inner monologues have also placed a specific subtext so that our readers interpret exactly the type of story we mean to tell.

Now, we need to think about the ending of the story. Understanding the merging point of plot threads at the end of a story as a climax gives the impression that there is rising action or a boiling over point. Depending on the story, this may be true, but there should also be a sense of resolution that comes from this. The pain of removing a splinter is also the relief afterwards, all built into the same action.

Our guitarist and their band are performing on stage at a large local music festival. There is an emotional whirlpool of zombified feelings for their ex, writing new music, preparing for the show, and exploring a new lover. Our reader desperately wants them to come out on top and shed their old life to finally begin the new one, and they know as well as we do that this is make-or-break.

Our guitarist takes the stage, the lights go dark, and the crowd cheers. They spot both their ex and their new lover in the crowd. They take a breathe, and realize that they might never have gotten this far if their ex hadn’t introduced them to this world in the first place. They also realize all the work they did to get here, and reflect on their journey: record label problems, practicing with the band on too many late nights, and quite a lot of self doubt. They look back at their band for support, and they see smiling faces that make them realize that they’ve been smiling through tears as well. They give the nod, and the song begins. The lights flare up, the crowd starts jumping, and our main character feels euphoric. Tonight is theirs and no one elses.

The relief from the strains of heavy emotions and the rewards for their effort make our reader feel equally elated as well. On this journey, all of our characters and our reader have experienced the same things and have a similar outlook by the end of the book, making them feel rewarded in the payoff as well.

Plot is not a guidewire for stumbling characters, and it isn’t the ping-pong ball for your protagonist and antagonist to slap at eachother. It’s the point of contact when worlds collide and both share something that changes both, even if it’s small. It’s the thousands of these interactions that add up to a larger story that you want to tell.