In a new blog post, Kristen Lamb says that character agency is the critical element to every great story. “Agency means a condition of being in action, instrumental, or possessing some kind of power,” she explains. “It can incorporate not only making decisions, but the belief that we (or our characters) have choice.”
When your characters – particularly your protagonist – lack agency, your story ceases to have a plot and instead becomes a series of bad events that happen to your MC. “If we parse novel structure, what we will see (especially with good stories) is that there is a steady progression of agency that flows in tandem with rising pushback, higher stakes, and a steadily compressed ticking clock,” Lamb writes.
Agency begins to appear at the inciting incident. At the very beginning of your novel – the status quo or normal world – your character doesn’t necessarily need agency. Everything is going swimmingly, as far as they know. But the inciting incident kicks them out of their complacency and decisions must be made. The MC must actively choose to abandon the status quo.
“Events cannot simply fling them ahead,” Lamb writes. “Granted, they will be signing up for far more than they can handle, but (at the time) they don’t know that. They also need to have some vague idea of what the adventure entails. To toss characters out into the world and push them from point to point is NOT dramatic tension.”
After the inciting incident, the protagonist is reactive, but still must exercise agency. They may not drive events, but they should actively choose to follow a specific path. “Authors must always provide opportunities where, if the character(s) makes a decision, one decision pushes the narrative forward and the other ends the story,” Lamb says.
Limited Act One agency also helps you develop your character arc. “There has to be something emotionally undeveloped that must change by the end of the story,” Lamb explains. But, when circumstances begin challenging – or beating – your protagonist, their agency should ramp up accordingly. They should start to fight, even if they don’t know exactly what they are fighting and how their flaws hold them back. As new information arises, agency increases and the protagonist becomes more proactive.
During Act Two, complications continue, forcing your protagonist to make difficult choices, again ramping up the agency. “This marks how our character is not only progressing along via plot, but how they are emotionally maturing,” Lamb notes. “Since they are not yet fully evolved, they’ll try to rely on their old ways of thinking.” At the climax, the protagonist makes the ultimate choice: fight or give up and go home. The odds should be impossible and time should be running out, but now your hero is fighting on his own terms.
“The key thing to remember about agency is that our character must always be actively involved in the decision making process,” Lamb writes. “They can and WILL make a lot of bad decisions. Yet, over time, as they mature, these decisions will vastly improve.”
