More writerly-processy pondering

[gnomi]

I had coffee with a friend last night, and we got to talking about writer-type stuff. And that prompted this question: when you start a new story, does the plot come to you first or do the characters tend to show up first and then let you know, eventually, what the plot is? Does it vary depending on the type of story?

I'd love to hear from people who write all sorts of stories - genre, mainstream, whatever. If it's got plot and characters, I'd love to hear which order they come to you.

Comments

[dpolicar]

So, I always feel a little sheepish answering questions like this, because to a first approximation I don't write and I don't want to claim a status I don't have. But, that caveat aside: neither, or perhaps both.
What comes to me is scenes... a character or group of characters doing something.
Plot, when I get that far, derives from repeated asking and answering of questions like "why are they doing that? what were they doing a minute ago? what will they do next? what are they trying to accomplish, and do they succeed? if not, why not?" and so forth, and listening to the answer.
Character comes for free... as with nonfictional people, it is an emergent and sometimes imagined property of a set of actions and reactions with a common agent.

A housemate of mine used to complain that I would write scenes in which characters who clearly have shared history would wander in in pursuit of a fragment of some obviously complicated goal, to which they would periodically refer, achieve whatever it was they set out to achieve (or fail to), and exit stage left, and she really wanted to know what they were talking about. It frustrated her that I had absolutely no idea, and she was as free to write the background as I was...