Character Agency & Creating Active Characters

When we talk about characters, the idea of a story being “character-driven” is often raised. Character-driven stories are intended to be the antithesis of plot-driven stories. The story is about the characters, their lives, and their relationships, rather than the characters being tossed around willy-nilly by a series of pre-determined events.

I’ve never been one for the character-driven vs plot-driven argument. Character and plot are equally important and are essentially two sides of the same coin. Just as plot creates scenarios and situations for the characters to react to, those characters’ choices are what fuel the events of the plot. These two storytelling elements are so closely linked that they are fundamentally intertwined.

Rather than focusing on the question of “character-driven” and “plot-driven”, I think it’s more useful to ask yourself who your main characters are, what they are striving for, and how they go about achieving their goals.

Organic characterization can only happen when your characters have agency. For characters to develop over the course of a story—to grow and learn as people do in real life—they need to be an active participant. While there will be occasions when character growth comes from a character’s reaction to an outside event they have no control over, consider first how the character affects their environment, not the other way around.

When a character lacks agency in their own narrative, they run the risk of falling flat. A narrative is made up of a series of cause and effect; if a character never participates in the cause and only in the effect, then the plot is happening to them. There is much less room for dynamic growth when all a character does is react to the events of a story. While this works for secondary and tertiary characters (because the story isn’t about them), this can lead to an unsatisfying protagonist.

A protagonist who does not have agency in their own story can make audiences wonder why they are the main character. If all your protagonist does is react to the world around them, rather than actively participate, why is their point of view important? Why are they the right character to tell this story?

When crafting a protagonist and main characters, there are three things I like to consider:

• Character desire
• Action vs reaction
• Breaking the status quo

Character Desire

The first element I consider when developing an active character is the character’s desire.

• What do they want most in the world?
• What are they willing to do to get what they want?
• How does this desire push them forward?
• What kind of decisions (good and bad) will they make in pursuit of this desire?
• What are they willing to sacrifice in the name of getting their desire? Or are do they have a boundary they will not pass and will they force themselves to give up on it?

Character desire can be anything. It can be simple (“I want cookies from the cookie jar”) or complex (“I want to be free from the societal pressures enforced on me because of my identity”). Regardless, you want to make your character’s desire as high stakes as possible for the scope of your story.

This doesn’t mean you need to escalate it to make a desire high stakes. When I was TA in graduate school, some of my playwriting students assumed that to make a desire high stakes, they had to escalate it to the point where it became a life and death situation. This does not automatically make a desire high stakes.

When it comes to desire, high stakes only refers to the importance and value the character places on it. High stakes means something completely different depending on the genre and scope of your story. “I want cookies from the cookie jar” could be just as high stakes in a slice-of-life family drama as “I want to redeem my father and defeat the Empire” is in Star Wars.

Character desire is important for an active character because it gives them a goal to work towards throughout the course of the story. It becomes a central point in their characterization, one in which everything else is relative. How they interact with other characters will depend on whether those characters are helping or hindering them in achieving their goal. A character’s development over the course of the story will depend on how successful they are at getting what they want and what they had to risk along the way. And sometimes, some characters don’t achieve their goal at all. How and why they failed (and whether they are willing to try again) can be used to instigate growth.

Building Blocks & Shifting Desires

In long-form fiction, sometimes it’s not feasible for your main characters to maintain the same desire or goal throughout the course of the entire story. The scope of a seven book series is going to be very different from the scale of a single novel, just as the scope of a TV show is different from the scope of a two hour movie.

Sometimes, you need to reconfigure your character’s singular goal into a series of goals. It becomes less about what they desire most at all times and what they desire most in the moment. Breaking it down into smaller blocks can allow you to shift your character’s goals over the long term as they complete or fail them.

This is much more flexible in the long-term. For example, in Avatar: the Last Airbender, Zuko goes through an immense amount of character development. You can break his journey down into major story beats that revolve around what he desires most at each moment—and how successful he is at getting it.

• In Book 1, he wants to regain his family’s respect by capturing the Avatar.
• In Book 2, he wants to find a purpose outside his family, which is in direct conflict with his Book 1 desire (which leads to a crisis point in the Book 2 conclusion).
• In Book 3, he finally has achieved his original goal, but it’s an empty victory. The turning point happens when he abandons his original Book 1 desire completely and focuses on stopping/defeating his father and sister.

Regardless of the scale of your story, an active character is one who always has something they are striving for.

Action vs. Reaction

The second element I consider when writing active characters is action vs reaction. This concerns the character’s involvement in the story. If plot is a sequence of cause and effect, then how do the character’s choices and actions affect that cause and effect? Are they responsible for some element of the plot, or are they simply a vehicle by which the audience can experience the plot?

Making your characters responsible for their own actions is a good way to ensure they are active participants in their own story because it means they are affecting the plot just as much as the plot is affecting them. Allow your characters to fail. Allow them to make poor decisions that come back to bite them. Failure is a part of being human, and through failure, we learn and we grow.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that failure is not the same thing as suffering. Failure is a direct consequence of a character’s previous actions. Suffering can be involved, of course, but it’s a symptom of their failure. There’s a difference between a character who makes a mistake, fails, and then grows from that experience and a character who suffers only due to outside forces. One is active, which gives your character agency; the other is passive, which strips the character of control and places them in a position where things happen to them.

However, there are times when you will want your characters to react rather than act. Sometimes you need an outside element to kickstart a story beat, or to impact the plot in an unforeseen way. But if all your characters do is react to story events, it can strip them of character growth. If they aren’t involved, if they aren’t actively doing something, how can they grow? Why would they change?

Breaking the Status Quo

The last element I consider when making active characters is the status quo and (specifically) breaking it. This is less about the character’s overarching character arc and more about individual, specific scene structure. Since this tutorial isn’t about scene structure itself, I won’t be going into this extremely in-depth, but here is a brief introduction.

The status quo refers to the existing emotional, mental, and/or physical state of the characters when the scene begins. The status quo can be a belief the main character has that will proceed to be challenged throughout the scene; it can be how they are feeling in relation to the other characters. It is essentially a way of referring to the state of the world from the POV character’s perspective.

No matter what happens in the scene, the status quo should be broken by the end of the scene. There should be some fundamental shift that makes it impossible for the characters to go back to the way they were before. This can be a small, low stakes shift or a large, high stakes shift. Sometimes the characters can learn a new piece of information; sometimes a character can have a change in perspective or feelings.

Regardless, there should always be some kind of change. If things aren’t changing, then it’s usually a sign that you don’t actually need the scene and it can be cut and re-purposed elsewhere. Agency and action needs change, and breaking the status quo is an organic way to invoke that change.

Interactive Fiction and Giving the Player Character Agency

Interactive fiction holds a unique place for character growth for a handful of reasons. Because interactive novels are prose text, there are many commonalities between them and traditional novels. But interactive novels are also games, which means the reader/player is an active participant in the unfolding of the story. They choose where the story goes; their choices affect the content they see and how their character progresses.

When you’re designing a player character for an IF game, I think it’s easy to fall into the trap that interactivity equals agency and action. In traditional video games, the player character almost always feels like they’re growing and developing because you, the player, are actively learning the game mechanics, improving your skills, and generally getting better at playing the game as you progress.

The protagonist’s character growth in traditional RPGs can be a tricky thing that changes depending on whether it has a pre-established character (i.e. Witcher 3’s Geralt or Horizon: Zero Dawn’s Aloy) or a custom one the player creates (Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, etc). It’s easy for pre-established characters to have a character arc over the course of the game’s story. However, when you’re working with a custom character the player creates, it’s much more challenging to write an in-depth character arc because so many elements of the player character are unknown. I find that most of the time in custom character games, the player character’s development is left to the imaginations of the player. They can fine-tune things in their heads as they play, and fill in the gaps themselves to suit the character they made.

But interactive fiction is a middle ground between traditional games and traditional novels. Because interactive fiction is based in text and prose, authors have more control over the narrative than in a traditional video game. And because interactive fiction is read rather than physically played, the player character’s development sits in a different place than it does in a traditional video game.

This brings us back to interactivity, agency and action. In interactive fiction, just because a player can select different options and choices does not necessarily mean that the player character is an active character.

If the choices do not directly impact the direction of the narrative and there are no consequences for the player character’s actions, the player character does not have agency. When this happens, other characters in the game are the ones whose actions push the plot; the player character just happens to be there to witness it. This creates an experience where the player is more of a passive bystander, absorbing events as they happen around them, rather than actively engaging in the direction of the game.

I think it’s important for player characters in IF to maintain some level of agency. IF is a medium built on player choice—that is where the gameplay lies. Without agency and the ability for the player to directly impact the plot, choice can end up feeling hollow. While it’s nice to be able to select the colour of your hair or your favourite caffeinated drink, interactive fiction thrives when the player can see how their choices affect the story, the characters, and the world around them.