The Great Divide: When Character Meets Plot

I read an article recently in Script magazine that got me thinking. Jeff Howard (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House) said that choosing between character-first or plot-first storytelling is like songwriting. Some writers lay down the melody first, others start with lyrics.

The timing couldn't be better as I'm in the middle of developing a story idea for a MOW pitch that calls for an innocent, family-friendly mystery. It's the kind of project where you need characters compelling enough to carry a feature but wholesome enough for Sunday night television.

It got me thinking about my graduate research, when I spent 250 hours watching fourteen acclaimed shows including, but not limited to Scandal, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black. I was hunting for structural patterns. What I found wasn't format or pacing. It was moral dilemmas baked into the characters' DNA. These weren't people having things happen to them. They were people whose nature made drama inevitable.

That's when I rediscovered Lajos Egri.

Character as Premise

Egri, a Hungarian immigrant who taught playwriting in New York during the first half of the 20th century, wrote The Art of Dramatic Writing in 1946. Woody Allen called it "the most stimulating and best book on the subject every written." It's still in print today.

Egri's insight was radical: character doesn't just drive plot. Character is plot. Everything worth dramatizing springs from what he called "dialectical contradictions" within human nature. Not surface quirks, but fundamental tensions that create genuine internal conflict.

Think about Walter White. Breaking Bad isn't about a chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth. It's about a man whose carefully maintained self-image was always at war with his actual nature. The mild-mannered persona was masking someone capable of extraordinary ruthlessness. The cancer didn't change Walter; it gave him permission to stop pretending.

This is what Egri called premise—the moral proposition the story proves through character action. Not "desperate times call for desperate measures," but "pride in the service of self-deception leads to destruction." Every plot point flows from that fundamental contradiction.

Same with Tony Soprano's anxiety-ridden mob boss, or Don Draper building his identity on lies while selling the American Dream. Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses is a brilliant spymaster whose slovenly exterior masks razor-sharp intelligence, whose crude behavior conceals genuine care. These characters don't just have flaws; their contradictions are the engine.

The Suturing Effect

Here's what I found fascinating in my research: successful stories create what I call "moral suturing." This is the process where audiences identify so strongly with characters that we share their physical and emotional essence. Not just empathy, but a kind of psychological merging.

This happens when audiences recognize the story's moral framework as true. We don't just watch Walter White make choices; we understand the internal logic that makes those choices inevitable for someone like him. The premise becomes clear not through exposition but through accumulated character action.

This is why television's antiheroes work so powerfully. Tony Soprano going to therapy while running a criminal organization. Walter White cooking meth to provide for his family while destroying it. We're morally sutured to them not despite their contradictions, but because of them. They mirror our own internal conflicts—the gap between who we want to be and who we actually are. Once you understand this principle, you start seeing these contradictions everywhere in real life.

Watching People, Building Characters

This is why we build experiential exercises into EatWriteRoam's Screenwriting Intensive Workshops. You see these contradictions everywhere once you start looking. The waiter setting up before he puts on his professional smile. The vendor muttering under his breath as he counts his change. Each person carries their own premise, their own contradiction.

The skill isn't just observation—it's recognizing which contradictions have dramatic legs. Which internal conflicts will generate the kind of external drama that audiences can't look away from.

Whether you write for television or film, whether you start with character or plot, the principle holds: the most compelling stories don't resolve contradictions—they explore them. They ask what happens when someone who believes one thing about themselves is forced to confront evidence to the contrary.

In television, this exploration can sustain multiple seasons because TV characters don't change—they reveal depth. Each episode peels back another layer of the contradiction, deepening our understanding without resolving the fundamental tension. In film, that same contradiction drives a complete arc within the constraint of two hours.

For my family-friendly mystery, the challenge becomes: How do you create characters whose contradictions are compelling but not destructive? How do you generate drama from internal conflict without crossing into territory that alienates a Sunday night audience?

The answer, I think, lies in Egri's understanding that the most universal premises deal with fundamental human struggles: truth versus comfort, duty versus desire, individual needs versus community good. These contradictions exist at every level of human experience, from the most innocent to the most corrupt.

Whether you're a melody-first or lyrics-first writer, the goal remains the same: creating people so compelling in their contradictions that audiences become morally sutured to their journey.

The rest is just deciding whether to build from the inside out or the outside in.

Charro Dresses, Durango © Lorraine Flett