I've seen this argument come up many times, however, the answer that are give are wrong. Usually people seperate the two and that is a mistake.

        Characters and plot should not be seperated. Your characters are the plot. Your protagonist can't not act unless he/she has an antagonist to opose his/her goals. Your antagonist won't opose your protagonist unless your protagonist is hindering him/her from reaching or his/her goal. This conflict between protag and Antag is your plot. How does the protagonist overcome the antagonist or vise versa; and also, how does the antagonist try to stop the protagonist? Now you may say the Antagonist could be society, natural event or the main character himself. If that is the case then you need to have a physical characters that represents these oposing goals. Good Will Hunting you could say the antagonist was himself. Ture, but how was that represented? Throught the characters in Good Wills life. His girlfriend oposed him, the law oposed him, the doctor oposed him. His friends oposed him. Main reason to stop him from going down a destructive path. The main point I'm trying to make is that you should never try to seperate character and plot. Your plot is the interaction between protagonist and the antagonist.  

The argument is usually which of the two is more important.  It's pretty obvious that you need both.

Between the two, I still argu that characterizatioin is more important than plot.  If you don't care about the characters, you're not going to care what happens to them.


Phil

I would definately agree that character comes first in every instance. There should never be a decision between your characters and something else (e.g. action scenes or plot revelations). Plot is important, but in my book the writer should be willing to sacrifice plot in order to have stronger and more defined characters.

That's just my two cents. I'm throwing it in.


Cheers, Chism.