I love plots. There, I’ve said it—I’m out of the closet. I love reading books with beginnings, middles and ends. I love writing books with plots, and outlining and strategizing and analyzing other people’s plots. For me, figuring out the plot is the best part of writing a novel.

In the three years I spent earning my MFA, my love of plot felt like a dirty secret. I was surrounded by messages, overt and covert, that said focusing on plot was Bad. Everyone knew that quality fiction was character-driven; popular, genre, read-it-at-the-beach-and-try-not-to-show-your-shame fiction was plot-driven. Forget plot.  Character is destiny.

And yet, my bookshelves were full of mysteries, fantasy, sci-fi and romance. For my thesis project, I was writing a fantasy novel (called magic realism whenever we all started to feel uncomfortable). A large portion of the contemporary literary fiction I was assigned to read for class left me absolutely cold.

Insecurity gnawed at me. Was I destined to be a hack writer, a sentimental and uncritical reader, a literary control freak who turned my characters into mere puppets serving an arbitrary series of events? Why didn’t I “get” so much of the literary fiction that my professors and classmates admired?

It was my thesis research into the mythic origins of fantasy, coupled with a class discussion on the way a reader’s worldview affects her perception of fiction, that made me realize the answer was a lot simpler than I’d supposed.

I couldn’t embrace the idea that character is destiny, because I don’t believe it.

I believe that there is a pattern to events in the universe, and that there are unseen forces affecting our lives. I believe that this pattern somehow encompasses and accounts for our free will, yet contains a divine intelligence that provides us with specific external challenges, offering us opportunities to grow, transform, and push ourselves beyond our limits. Because of this conviction, I value the experience of reading and writing fiction in which characters are intentionally given such challenges. Fiction in which there is a plot, a plan, the collision of inner and outer forces that ultimately results in a meaningful outcome.

I believe that character—not just literary character, but human character—is developed at the intersection of what happens to us and what we do about it. And that what happens to us is not random, nor is it necessarily under our control.

In his book The Power of Myth, acclaimed scholar Joseph Campbell says:

Greek and Latin and biblical literature used to be part of everyone’s education. Now, when these were dropped, a whole tradition of Occidental mythological information was lost. It used to be that these stories were in the minds of people. When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you perspective on what’s happening to you. With the loss of that, we’ve really lost something because we don’t have a comparable literature to take its place. These bits of information from ancient times, which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and informed religions over millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage, and if you don’t know what the guidesigns are along the way, you have to work it out for yourself.

I don’t advocate a return to fatalism, or blind obedience to “God’s will” as imposed on us by religious leaders. I’m a big fan of the Age of Reason.  It gave us freedom from the tyranny of superstition and religious oppression, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. But that freedom came with a price. With the loosening of those bonds came a widespread loss of belief not only in divine guidance, but also in humankind’s participation in a larger story. Such a sense of participation in the unfolding of the universe made us both smaller and larger—it acknowledged the limits of our power, and yet it simultaneously gave us dignity and a place in the cosmos. We were important enough to warrant the attention of divine beings, and to play a significant part in the destiny of Creation. Like Campbell, I believe that the effects of that loss are incalculable, and contribute to the pervasive feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness in modern Western culture.

Besides illuminating my personal approach to fiction, this idea offered a possible insight into the literary world’s reverence for the “character-driven” approach to fiction. If our society has lost its myths, then humans have lost our place in the cosmos; we are alone in a sea of chaos. Our only hope lies within ourselves. If we, as a culture, have lost our certainty that there are divine forces shaping our destiny, then we are all characters wandering around in search of a plot. Our literature—and our approach to that literature—can’t help but reflect that.