AGENCY IN CHARACTERS

This is my first post here. A few days ago I sent my dad an e-mail regarding the contents of this post and he thought it was good enough to put here. So, here it is!

I read a lot of writers’ blogs. One writer, Diana Peterfreund (whose fiction I’ve never come across, but I read her blog anyway), recently made a post about the importance of character agency. A certain fiction professor I had in college constantly harped about how important this is, but for reasons he did not make clear. At the time I could not understand why it was so important to have proactive characters… why is it so important for people in stories, when in real life sometimes stuff just happens to you? Well, thanks to this post, I finally understand. Here is a very small excerpt:

I think I’ve finally hit upon it. This book, like mine, has a core theme of “normal person caught up in an extraordinary situation.” I love these books. I love the superhero-type books too, but let’s leave that out of this for a moment. In these types of books, the normal person has two options: they can either let shit happen to them, or they can go out and do shit.

This book that I don’t care for is of the “let shit happen to them” variety. It’s a glorified tour through the extraordinary situation as seen through the eyes of the protagonist.

Once I started thinking of it in this manner I was able to understand what I didn’t like about a lot of classic stories. For instance, I was never all into Alice in Wonderland. Sure, I love all the crazy creatures, but I wasn’t a huge fan of Alice herself. Compare that to, say, Dorothy, who also found herself in a strange and wonderful world, but instead of being led about by the nose, actually went on a little quest.

As an aside, Dad and I have never liked Alice in Wonderland. I never knew why, but maybe this helps explain it. However, this theory doesn’t hold true for other examples she gives later in the post, such as for the second Harry Potter book, which Dad and I both liked a lot.

I highly recommend reading the rest, but this is the key part of the analysis:

Agency is a very important concept in fiction. it comes from the Latin word “ago” which means “to do.” Story is what happens when your characters do things. Not when they watch things happen. When they do things. Plot happens because of a choice a character makes in a given situation.

When you have a very normal character in a very extraordinary situation, there is a strong temptation to just let things happen to her. Let her be swept along in the tide of all the extraordinary things. Let the extraordinary people around her start making her decisions for her. I guess it works, but for my money, the really unforgettable stories are when the ordinary person overcomes these forces and makes decisions for herself. Maybe they’re the wrong decision, but at least they’re decisions.

If only my professor had been so articulate. It turns out that his terrible teaching did one very valuable thing, which was help motivate me to learn about fiction from other sources. In the two and a half years following his class, I’ve learned a ton about fiction writing from books, blogs, and personal experience. I’ll be sure to revisit Peterfreund’s blog to learn more.