Character Agency

Who’s driving your plot? Does your plot move forward when things happen to your protagonist, or when they do something?

The difference might seem minimal, but it’s the difference between engaged readers and someone putting down the book. Consider active and passive voice, which is more engaging: ‘I wrote the book’ or ‘the book was written by me.’ (There’s a time for passive voice, but it’s beyond the scope of today’s post.) So it is with your characters. What I’m talking about here is agency. Agency is your character’s ability to impact her life and her world. If a character lacks agency, they seem dehumanized, an object. And it makes for a dull read when a character never actually “does” anything.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to figure out if your manuscript has this problem. The two questions at the top are all you need to diagnose a lack of agency. I find that the easiest way to fix it isn’t just to start making your character do things but to dig deep into yourself as a writer and determine why you’ve been sheltering your character! Are you afraid to make them make bad decisions or be wrong? The thing about actions is they have consequences, but reactions feel justified based on what they’re responding to somehow. What seems like such a little thing, who does what, is actually a major craft issue because from it flows not only the plot but often theme (what are you saying with your characters’ decisions) and motivation (why they’re doing it). A character who makes decisions and acts on them will have an arc based on their motivations and what the consequences of those decisions are. A character who just reacts to things that happen will not grow.

Once you figure out why you haven’t been letting your characters act, you can address it: it might be your own fears as a writer, it might be that you just need a stronger plot, or it might be that you’re too close to your character/material and need to separate yourself from them or cool off somehow. Whatever the reason, there’s a solution. When you’ve done that, THEN you can sit down and start reworking your plot for agency.

I’ll note that most often it’s female characters who lack agency so if your book has any, consider what they’re doing–even if they aren’t the main character.