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How does character advance the plot in short fiction?
Quick answer:
In short fiction, characters advance the plot through their relationships, conflicts, goals, and personal journeys. Characters like protagonists and antagonists drive the narrative by pursuing goals or creating obstacles. Their actions and growth often intertwine with the plot, leading to a resolution. For example, in "Cinderella," the protagonist and others like the Prince and fairy godmother propel the story forward, while antagonists like the stepmother hinder progress, demonstrating how characters shape the storyline.
For an assignment like this one, you would need to tailor it to a specific story and analyze it accordingly. However, in general, characters tend to have a profound impact in shaping the plots of the stories they inhabit. You can expect fictional characters to have relationships with other characters, conflicts, goals, and personalities—and you can expect these qualities to have a profound impact in shaping the plots they inhabit. In fact, very often the plot of a story will be closely intertwined with a more personal journey on the part of its protagonists, who will often come away changed by the experiences that have befallen them.
In some ways, it's best to tackle this kind of question with concrete examples. So, with that in mind, let's take the original Star Wars trilogy as an example. We have within it certain key characters, with complex personalities, motivations and relationships with...
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one another: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Darth Vader, and so on. With that in mind, what are the personal journeys these characters go on? In the first movie, we find Luke Skywalker longing to overcome his life as a desert farmer, wishing to see the larger galaxy. He will eventually get caught up in the rebellion and destroy the Death Star. His own story will grow far more complicated once he learns that Darth Vader is in fact his father, Anakin Skywalker. This will prove central to the trilogy's third movie, which resolves around Luke's attempt at redeeming his father. Meanwhile, we find with Darth Vader a profound internalized conflict in which his own love of his son is pitted against his obedience to the Emperor and his years spent in the service of evil. Furthermore, if we trace the first six movies as a complete narrative, we find the story of Anakin Skywalker's rise to prominence in the Jedi Order, his corruption into evil, and eventually, through the efforts of his son, his reclamation of some thread of redemption, with him, at the very of his life, overcoming the evil that had enslaved him.
I'd suggest that this is what is meant by "characters advance plot"—stories are ultimately made up of people (fictional people perhaps, but people all the same). With that in mind, you can assume that the personal journeys which they undertake will often have a profound impact in shaping the stories they inhabit.
The two main elements of fiction are normally plot and character. The plot is the main action of the story, and usually moves from a conflict to a resolution. This conflict is often between a protagonist (the main or leading character) and one or more antagonists (the "bad guy" in genre fiction or movies) who hinders the protagonist from reaching a goal.
Characters in the story can serve to advance the plot, in the sense of doing things crucial to the main action of the story, or they can be peripheral to the plot. Imagine, for example, the story of Cinderella. Cinderella is the protagonist, and her goal is to live a better life. The Prince helps her by offering marriage. The fairy godmother helps her by enabling her to attend the ball. The wicked stepmother and the evil stepsisters are obstacles preventing Cinderella from living a happy life. Thus all of these characters have a role in advancing the plot by what they do or say. There are also characters such as the people attending the ball, who are minor characters, added for realism (you couldn't have a ball without a crowd of people attending), but who have no real role in the plot.
Thus for your essay, you need to look at what each character does to help or hinder the protagonist achieve a goal.