Which comes first, the character or the plot?

Quick quiz–Name a few of your favorite movies (ones that you’ll watch over and over). Mine are: Gladiator, Braveheart, Last of the Mohicans, the Karate Kid, and the Star Wars movies.

Now list what they have in common.

For mine–several have a tormented hero. Two of my favorite heroes have lost their wives and this motivates them toward revenge. In LotM, the hero offers to sacrifice his own life for the heroine. In the Karate Kid, Daniel is the victim of bullying. In the Star Wars movies, the hero has to grow and learn before he can vanguish the enemy.

From the movies you listed, do you keep watching them for the characters or for the plot?

I watch for the characters, and I think that makes me a character-driven author. The books on my shelves, my keepers, all center on particular characters. The movies I watch again and again, I watch in order to experience the hero’s torment and their own personal struggle to become a stronger force against evil.

But accomplishing this in my own work is another matter. (Sometimes I think it involves fairy dust.) One of my favorite minor characters in His Chosen Bride is a gawky teenage boy who isn’t a warrior. He can’t fight, and he’s embarrassed by it. Watching him grow and change throughout the book was just magical. I was like a proud mom, seeing her boy grow up.

Tormented, sexy heroes are my favorites. Give them a load of emotional baggage, a woman they loved and lost, and you have me at Once Upon a Time. I don’t particularly care about the plot if you emotionally invest me in his story. Funny, but the heroine is always secondary to me. I’m trying to make her more of a central focus in my new book, but I find that it’s harder to do.

So which comes first for you, the character or the plot?