Plot driven or character driven? What makes a better story?

Kudos!

I used to feel completely different about all this, too. It's fine to write however you want when you're just putting yourself out there on a smaller platform. However, the minute you start opening yourself up to Amazon and marketing and reviews, it all changes. Sign on with a publisher, and it definitely changes. The definition of a better story becomes "it will sell more books." They might ask for character-driven stories, but they'll have their editors fine-tune until you've churned out one of those commercial plot-driven recipes that "works."

So there are those of us who write for a hobby, and those who hope to write for a living. If you want to write for a living, you need Amazon reviews (sadly). You need to please acquisition editors and agents. A lot of famous writers follow a recipe. They say David Baldacci throws in a car chase in all of his stories to add 10,000 words and set up pacing for a good thriller-climax. Can you imagine that? Writing a car chase to just fill space?

I did this little experiment in 2017 with a goofy, lighthearted character-driven romance just to stretch myself. And I self-published it, because at this point, why not? It's Christian fiction, and a targeted audience.The ladies at my speaking engagements love it. I sell tons of copies at tables across America. Ha ha well, okay, not tons, but it does reasonably well. Bought me a new couch LOL.

However... online reviewers NAILED me for being too character-driven. I had mostly 4 and 5-stars, but the critical comments were things like "the story was too long" and even though they loved the zany characters and funny stories, they felt like pacing was off throughout. They said I rushed the ending and had a slow start. Some of the chapters dragged and could have been left out entirely.

Lesson learned. I couldn't sell that story to an agent or a publishing company unless I completely restructured it. 

I don't think it's possible to write one without the other. There needs to be a balance. If you lean too far toward the plot-driven story, you end up with flat, boring characters who can only be sustained by the thrill of your action and mystery. If you lean too far toward the character-driven story, you have pieces that feel stretched or compressed and your pacing is off because you didn't write them into an engaging, antagonistic environment. 

So I love how you put this. Writing is a fluid process, but it's more like swimming in intervals, not drifting along in the water hoping you find a good place. It's key that you had other drafts to work from because you could play around with arcs and reconnect your story at the important places. What's wrong with freewriting some along the way and let the characters visit a few different places? That can be the fun of the story. What you settle on at the end might be completely different, but you and the characters can have many adventures that are just between the two of you.

We punish ourselves because we want to get to "The End" so badly. And we want to write start to finish and it should just be good. No one really does that! Professional writers punish themselves even more because they have deadlines hanging over their heads. What fun is it to develop a completely amazing fictional entity and not really know them inside and out? 

Glad you had a breakthrough!

Right now, I'll go for character-driven.

For the simple reason that I've just had a meeting with my publisher about my second novel, where the whole gist of the conversation was LESS PLOT, MORE CHARACTER!

I think it's easy to over-plot - to make a story needlessly complex, but you'd be hard-pressed to do that with characters. They are better the more complex they are. I also believe that great characters can carry a weak-ish plot, but even the best plot makes for boring reading if the characters are not up to scratch.