What is character agency? It’s something I see missing in a lot of writers’ manuscripts.
Imagine Titanic if Jack rescued Rose, protected her, made all the important decisions, and eventually deposited her safely into the lifeboat while going stoically to his death. We might call this version Distressed Luggage at Sea.
Or imagine Home Alone if Kevin discovered that burglars were coming and did the sensible thing and hid under the bed until his neighbor dealt with them. That movie might be called Child Waits Responsibly for Supervision.
Or how about Mulan? She takes her father’s place in the army, which seems promising. But after that, she follows orders, survives the battles, and waits for other soldiers to save China. We hope you enjoy Young Woman Attends War While Others Save China.
There’s still plenty happening in all these stories. There’s danger, conflict, loss, life-or-death stakes, and the main characters are right in the middle of it all.
So, what’s the problem?
Something important is missing. And you may be thinking, “Well, I don’t do that.” But I’m going to ask you to double-check.
An editor pointed out this same hidden problem in my first novel, and I was so grateful because before that, I just couldn’t see it.
How Character Agency Goes Missing
We might call this missing element agency. That simply means your character’s choices create what happens next in your story. Not what other people or beings do to your character, but what your character chooses to do.
There are actually two parts to this agency issue that I see in writers’ manuscripts all the time. Agency isn’t just one thing. It’s two things. So, let me explain what these two parts are and how they can mess your story up.
Character Agency: Is Your Protagonist Driving the Story?
The first thing we’re talking about with agency is how much your main character is directing the events in your story. In other words, how often are they the one taking charge of their own destiny?
A lack of agency in my main character was the problem in my first novel attempt. My protagonist was going through all kinds of difficulties. She was struggling with people who didn’t understand her. Others were threatening her and making her life difficult. Even her family seemed distant.
Meanwhile, she had a secret power that scared her, and she was being chased by monsters for reasons she didn’t understand. There was plenty of conflict and plenty going on.
Most of the time, the other characters were making the decisions for her. They formed the plans for her. They directed her life, told her what she had to do, and pushed her this way and that.
My protagonist was standing in the center of the story, but structurally, she was more like a very distressed package that everyone else kept handing around. In essence, she had become what I call the perpetual victim.
I see the same problem in a lot of writers’ manuscripts. It makes sense because the problem can be hard to spot. A main character can be suffering terribly, and we as writers think that’s enough to gain the reader’s sympathy.
As writers, we feel everything our main character is going through. To us, it feels like a lot is happening. But a reader isn’t experiencing the story from the same point of view.
If all there is is emotional turmoil, eventually they’re going to leave and go watch a cat video. At some point, they want the main character to do something that changes the direction of the story.
Why Character Agency Matters to Readers
Why does the reader care who’s making the decisions? If the main character is being chased by monsters, rejected by her family, and generally having the worst month of her life, why isn’t that enough?
Because when a reader enters a story, their brain begins building a kind of mental map. They’re keeping track of what the main character wants, what she tries to do, what happens because of that attempt, and how the result affects what she does next.
Researchers have found that readers are very sensitive to the match between a character’s goals and her actions. They process an action more easily when its extremeness fits what the character wants and how urgently she wants it.
That’s why it’s so important that you know what your main character’s goal is. That goal needs to be clear, and your main character has to have enough agency to go after it.
Character Agency and the Reader’s Mental Map
Your reader doesn’t know they’re doing this. They’re probably not sitting there with a clipboard saying, “I’m sorry, author, but this action does not adequately reflect the urgency of Susan’s stated goal.”
All this is happening in their brains beneath the surface as they’re reading.
The reader is following a chain of cause and effect. Something puts pressure on the character. The character makes a choice, we hope, and that choice creates a consequence that leads into the next part of the story.
If the main character has no agency, that chain keeps leaving her behind.
Something happens to her. Then something else happens to her. Someone tells her where to go, another person makes the plan, somebody else shows up to rescue her, and she feels bad.
We read about her emotions. We read about her turmoil and how overwhelmed she is. The reader might feel sorry for her, but they’re no longer following a story created by her pursuit of something. They’re just watching the plot run over her repeatedly.
After a while, that gets a little boring.
Character Agency Keeps the Reader Asking
What a reader wants is to keep asking, “What is she going to do now?”
That’s what they really want to know. What is she going to do now? Not what is she going to suffer now. What is she going to do?
That question pulls your reader forward. It lets them hope your character is going to make another choice. It may make them worry she’ll make the wrong choice or yell at the page because she’s just made a spectacularly terrible choice.
That’s all good because it means your reader is involved.
But if the main character rarely chooses anything or continues to be a victim of everything else, the reader is left asking a much less interesting question: “What awful thing is going to happen to her next?”
Feel how passive that is. How unexciting. How boring.
It may create some curiosity for a while. Eventually, though, this kind of story starts to feel repetitive.
The disasters may change, which is what I did in my first novel attempt. I thought that as long as something was happening to my character, things were exciting enough.
No, it’s not enough.
These things may happen, and your character may suffer, but it’s not enough to make the story move. Your story has to move forward.
Character Agency: “The Martian”
Let’s take The Martian by Andy Weir. Mark Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars, and his crew believes he’s dead. His supplies are limited, and nobody even knows he’s alive.
That’s a lot happening to the character right up front. Weir could have spent the rest of the story going on about how horrible it all was and how much Mark suffered because of it.
Imagine if Mark spent the rest of the story sitting inside his habitat, staring mournfully through the window while NASA discovered the problem, figured out how to feed him, repaired his equipment remotely, and eventually came back to pick him up.
There would still be plenty happening, right? Equipment would fail, storms would hit, NASA would hold tense meetings, people on Earth would look very concerned, and poor Mark would continue to suffer.
But his only real goal would be, “Please, somebody come and get me.”
Weir might have titled that version of the story Man Waits Patiently for NASA.
Obviously, that’s not what happens. The real story keeps us interested because Mark immediately jumps into survival mode. He wants to live, and almost every part of the plot grows out of what he does to reach that goal.
He figures out how to grow food. He repairs equipment. He tries to communicate with Earth. Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes he doesn’t. Some of his choices work, and some fail spectacularly.
Every result forces him to make another choice. That gives the reader the chain their brain needs to follow.
How Character Agency Shows What Matters
There’s another reason readers really want your main character to have agency and make choices that affect the outcome: Agency helps the reader understand which events matter.
Research into narrative comprehension has found that events in a causal chain, and events with more causal connections to other events, are more likely to be remembered, summarized, and judged important.
In plain English, when your character makes a choice that causes something else to happen, the reader’s brain recognizes that choice as part of the spine of the story.
For example, Rose jumping out of the lifeboat matters because that choice changes everything that follows.
We might be saying, “Rose, what the heck are you doing? You’re getting back onto a sinking ship.”
But now she’s placed herself back on the Titanic, which is going down, and the reader or viewer immediately begins anticipating the consequence of that choice.
We worry. Is she going to die now? Is she going to drown? What’s going to happen to her and Jack?
She made the choice. The consequences follow after it.
Character Agency Does Not Mean Control
Or imagine Kevin from Home Alone. His family leaving him behind begins the trouble. But Kevin doesn’t sit around crying about his predicament. He decides to defend his house, to take agency, and to be in charge of his own destiny.
That decision is what makes the movie such a classic.
The reader doesn’t need the main character to control everything. They just need to see the main character try to affect what happens next.
The outside trouble puts pressure on your hero. What your hero chooses to do under that pressure is what turns a series of events into her story or his story.
Let’s look at a few examples of stories that got this right.
Character Agency in Titanic
In Titanic, Rose is trapped by her mother, by Cal, by money, by class, and eventually by a rapidly sinking ship. She is absolutely a victim of her circumstances, but she also takes agency.
She chooses Jack. She defies Cal. She defies her mother when she’s placed in a lifeboat. She jumps back onto the sinking ship.
She makes choices. She affects her destiny.
Later, she goes searching for Jack, and frees him. These choices show Rose’s agency in the story. They keep changing what happens next, which keeps the viewer hooked.
As a writer, when you do this, you will be hooked, too. This is one of the coolest things about writing.
Allow your main character to have agency and watch what they choose. Whenever your antagonist applies pressure, watch what your character chooses to do.
Suddenly, the story becomes really interesting.
It’s one of the things I love about writing because it opens the story up. What is she going to do next?
If you stay true to your character and have her live from her lie, which I talked about in a previous post, then have her take agency in the story, it makes the story so much more fun to write.
Other Examples of Character Agency Done Right
Kevin doesn’t choose to be left home alone, and he doesn’t invite burglars to rob his house. But once that threat arrives, he makes a plan. He takes charge of his destiny.
It’s kind of an alarming plan involving household appliances and paint cans, but he acts, and his actions create the best part of the story.
Mulan lives in a world that has already decided who she’s allowed to be. She could just be a victim here. Her father is called to war, the Huns invade, and she’s repeatedly placed in circumstances she can’t control.
But she makes choices. She takes agency.
She takes her father’s armor, joins the army, and causes the avalanche. When everyone else believes the danger is over, she goes back to warn them and helps create the plan that saves the emperor.
In your story, pile on the trouble. Absolutely. The trouble that falls on the hero creates the pressure. But the choices your hero makes under that pressure create the story.
The Second Part of Character Agency
I said there were two parts to this agency issue. Your main character doesn’t just need to act. Most of their important choices should come from the inner wound they’re carrying and the lie that wound taught them to believe.
Basically, the inner wound is usually something painful that happened in the character’s past. Maybe they were abandoned, betrayed, humiliated, rejected, controlled, or made to feel powerless.
But the wound itself is only part of the equation. The character also drew a conclusion from what happened, just like people do.
Maybe someone they trusted betrayed them, so now they believe they can’t trust anybody. Or maybe a parent abandoned them, so now they believe everyone they care about will eventually leave.
That conclusion is what I call the lie.
The character has taken one very painful experience and turned it into a rule for surviving the world.
How Character Agency Grows From the Lie
Here’s the thing a lot of writers miss: That rule, that lie, should affect what the main character does.
Writers I’ve worked with can sometimes tell me exactly what wound their protagonist suffers from. Often, they know the lie the character now believes because of that wound.
But then the story starts, and the main character behaves like a perfectly well-adjusted person.
For instance, imagine a character who was abandoned by everyone she depended on. Because of that wound, she now believes, “Everyone leaves eventually, so I should never need anybody too much.”
Realistically, that character might keep people at a distance. She may refuse help when she desperately needs it, pretend she doesn’t care, or leave a relationship at the first sign of trouble so the other person can’t leave her first.
What probably does not make sense is for her to meet someone in Chapter Two, share her deepest secrets over lunch, and immediately add him as her emergency contact.
She’s acting. She’s got agency. That’s good.
But she’s not acting from the lie she believes. She’s acting from years of therapy that we never saw her go through.
This is the second part of agency.
Be sure your character is acting. They have agency. They’re taking charge of their own destiny.
But at least in the first half of your book, the character needs to be acting from the lie.
Test Character Agency at Your Turning Points
To test this in your story, write down the five or six biggest turning points.
These might include the event that launches the story, the inciting incident, the first major decision, the midpoint, the darkest moment or all-is-lost moment, and the final confrontation.
Then look at each one and ask:
- Did my main character make a choice here that caused this turning point, or at least helped cause it?
- Or did the event just happen to them because somebody else did something?
You’re looking for a pattern. Your main character’s choices should keep changing the direction of the story.
If that isn’t happening, your main character probably needs more agency.
One More Check
Then you can do one more check. Beside each choice your protagonist makes, write down the lie that choice comes from.
Maybe she refuses help because she believes needing people makes her weak. Maybe he keeps a secret because he believes trust leads to betrayal.
By the time you finish, you should be able to see a chain running through your story structure.
The story puts pressure on your character. Your character acts from the lie, at least for the first half or two-thirds of the story. That choice creates a consequence, and the consequence pushes the story toward the next major turn.
If most of your turning points are being created by everyone except your protagonist, you may have a perpetual victim hiding in the middle of your story.
The good news is that now you can see it. Once you can see it, you can start handing your main character the story back.
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If you went through those turning points and realized your main character is mostly being dragged from one event to the next, that’s exactly the kind of problem I look for in my Story Structure Diagnostic. I’ll look at your structure as a whole to help you see where the story may be missing key elements and what is keeping the plot from moving through your protagonist’s choices.
And if you’d like ongoing help as you work through your book, come join us inside Writer’s Brain Studio. We’re spending the rest of this year helping writers finish their books with live monthly master classes that are always available for replay, practical tools, and support from other writers.
Featured image by stockking on Magnific.