486 – Common Agency Problems
The Mythcreant Podcast
Understanding Character Agency
This chapter explores the importance of character agency in narratives and the issues authors commonly encounter in their manuscripts. It emphasizes that protagonists must feel their actions have real consequences, while also distinguishing between agency and proactivity in storytelling.
It used to be that lacking a throughline was the most common problem in client manuscripts, but no longer! That particular issue has been dethroned by a lack of agency for the protagonist. Yay? That’s why today’s episode is all about identifying problems with agency and repairing them, so your main character remains the most important person in the story. Don’t worry though, we also find some time to complain about magic schools.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: Now, this wasn’t my idea or Oren’s. We just ended up here because Bunny told us to do it. In fact, I have a sheet that I’m just gonna read off of for this podcast.
Oren: Curses to that Bunny, always puppet mastering us!
Chris: But it’s good ’cause now I don’t have to figure out what to say. Bunny can just tell me what to say.
Oren: Hmm. You know, that is actually really relaxing. No decisions. Just go with the flow. Whatever.
Chris: Doesn’t it feel wonderful to just have Bunny to write the podcast for us?
Oren: I do love it. All right. This is how we’re gonna do the rest of the podcast from now on.
Chris: I’m sure Bunny will love that. Okay, so this time we’re talking about character agency and the problems that we often encounter with it and why people often don’t have it in their manuscripts and how to fix those problems. So first of all, what is it? What is agency?
Oren: My experience is that agency is a thing that disappears when authors write a story. In my experience, authors are machines that take story and put out agency problems. Which is to say this happens a lot in client manuscripts that I work with.
Chris: Do you have a, if you were to guess, what percentage of client manuscripts have agency problems?
Oren: 50%, easy.
Chris: Yeah, that’s… I would’ve said that too.
Oren: That might be a conservative guess, to be honest.
Chris: That might be conservative, and it might be more like 75%.
Oren: Possibly the most common problem is an agency issue.
Chris: That’s probably partly because we have hammered home the throughline issue so much that now we have more clients who have throughlines than we did before.
Oren: Yeah, they’re all like, we’ve heard you yell at us about throughlines. Please don’t yell at us about throughlines anymore. Here’s the throughline. We’re like, all right, moving on to agency next.
Chris: Progress! But it’s like a story, where you solve one problem and then another problem instantly peers up to raise the tension.
Oren: I don’t want my life to operate according to narrative principles anymore.
Chris: Are you looking forward to the climax?
Oren: It’s all fun and games until someone raises the tension.
Chris: Okay. Agency is basically the feeling that your protagonist is making a difference for good or ill. It’s usually for good, but it can be for ill. And those differences have to be attributable to them. They have to be the one to credit or blame, basically. So if they’re just doing what somebody else tells them, you could replace them with any old follower and that person could do the same thing and so it does not feel like it’s attributable to them. Their contribution has to feel like it happens because they uniquely are there.
Oren: Right, and just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be ever following someone’s directions or commands or whatever. I don’t wanna sound like we’re, you know, Snyder over here saying that your protagonist always has to be at the top of their local org chart. It just means that if they are following a command, they still have to be making important choices and accomplishing things, even if it’s things that they were generally commanded to do.
Chris: So they have to make choices and solve problems that affect the plot, but that doesn’t mean that other characters aren’t also doing that. You can shift around in your story, what things you want to be your turning points, right? Where your character makes a difference. And in any sort of five-step process, let’s say, to solve some conflict, you can decide, okay, what is the hard part? That is what things really rest on, and that’s where my protagonist comes in. Whereas other things can be supplied for them, right? They don’t have to do everything, but the plot is just gonna rest on that one pivotal moment where they make a difference. And that’s what you’re gonna focus on when you’re narrating. Whereas if you have a friend that’s off fighting somebody else, that’s gonna be happening more in the background.
Oren: Correct.
Chris: And the other thing is, we’ve covered previously that this is not the same as proactivity. And the reason we have to say that is ’cause when I talk about agency, usually a common response is, “oh, but like I don’t want my character to be proactive.” And you don’t have to make them proactive. You don’t have to make them outgoing, right? They can be reluctant. They can feel disempowered.
Oren: They don’t have to be extroverts.
Chris: They don’t have to be extroverts. If we find a character that lacks agency, making them more proactive is often a really nice way of fixing it. Because it forces them to have agency more. But you can absolutely have agency without a character that’s super empowered or proactive, right? It’s just in that case, the problems come to them and they decide how to react, and maybe by choosing how to react, the result they get is that they can just cope for longer.
Oren: Yeah, and you just have to scale your story to your protagonist or scale your protagonist to your story, whichever one. It can go in either direction, but the disconnect is when you have a protagonist who you’re like, well, my protagonist is too small scale. They can’t possibly affect these big events. And it’s like, all right, why are you telling a story about these big events then? That’s the wrong plot. You need to find a plot that works with your protagonist. Your plot can’t be an alien invasion if your protagonist is some rando gunslinger. Like they can’t stop an alien invasion with their revolver. They just can’t do it. There has to be something else going on.
Chris: Problem one that I’ve written down: the protagonist doesn’t have enough power for the plot that you’ve created. And that one unfortunately is one of the hardest to fix because a lot of times it involves the premise that you chose for your story in sometimes bigger rewriting, right? So that’s probably the toughest situation, where, again, it’s hard for a child to stop a war or a villager to influence politics in the capital city. If your protagonist just doesn’t have the ability to handle the kind of plot of a specific scope, it needs people that have more power, that have some kind of authority or are just in proximity to the problem, right? Or positioned to work on it. So if you don’t do that, that can be real tough.
Oren: If you wanna have a protagonist who starts off unable to do those things and gains the ability to over the course of the story, that can work, right? Your character can have a growth arc of some kind, that’s also fine. But are you prepared for that? Is there room in your story for that growth arc? Because often there’s not, and that’s how you end up with a protagonist who doesn’t do anything.
Chris: You can have a protagonist who starts off with no ability and is just, they’re incredibly clever, so they start to climb ladders. But I feel like people who create these story situations, that’s not usually what they want. They want a protagonist that is very humble and relatable, and if the protagonist is super clever and managed to find, you know, as a child who managed to find a way to get themselves in with the general, become the general’s confidant because they’re just that clever, usually they would not make those choices in the first place. Now, granted, that one could happen in the middle of a great story, but when we see this kind of situation, usually it happens because the writer is invested in the protagonist’s humble standing, as it were. Sometimes we often mention a magic power. The right magic power can do a lot here to make your protagonist special, or they can have unusual social influence because, for instance, an incident happened that was really iconic and they’re the last survivor of some tragedy or something like that, and they became a figurehead for a specific social cause. For instance, it might be a reason why they have influence beyond what you would expect for someone like them.
Oren: Although in that case, you still have to make sure that they can’t just turn to their nearest advisor and be like, advisor, what should I do? And then just follow the advisor’s advice for the entire story, right? There needs to be some reason for them to be making independent choices.
Chris: Yeah, I think we have to cover powerful allies too. Before we do, I wanna talk about ways to reduce the scope a little bit. ‘Cause that’s the other factor here, besides what the protagonist can do, there’s also how hard the plot is to solve. So for one way, one thing that you can do to shrink the scope of your plot is to just bring it closer to its conclusion. So for instance, instead of a raging war, there’s already peace negotiations happening, but they’re very tenuous. Nobody expects it to go well, and that again gives your protagonist the ability to maybe just start talking to the people in the peace negotiations. It’s just a step easier than handling the entire war. And maybe the people in the peace negotiations want it to work, but they don’t understand each other and they need somebody who, for instance, lives in a village bordering both nations to help them understand each other, or something. That would be a way of shrinking the scope by just making things closer to the resolution. So you just have to take it over the edge or you just need some kind of catalyst, that kind of thing. Or you could, of course, just make it smaller, like instead of a whole war, we have one skirmish or two neighboring towns that end up on opposite sides of the war, and we’re trying to reconcile those two towns. Or something like that.
Oren: You can zoom in and look for smaller conflicts within a bigger one. So you’ve got your war, your protagonist is a normal villager. They’re not gonna have a big impact on this war. Within the war, there could be a conflict over keeping this villager’s family fed ’cause that’s hard to do during wartime and this villager just can’t do anything about the war, that is outside of their control. They can try to keep their family fed.
Chris: Same thing, shrink down your entire political movement to the passage of one law or trying to survive the passage of a bad law and make your scope smaller until it’s something that your protagonist can handle. Leads us to problem two, which is probably the most common problem. Like I say, problem one is probably the hardest to deal with, but I would say this one is probably our most common, which is that we have a more powerful ally overshadowing the protagonist.
Oren: Hey. Hey, now, that’s not fair. Sometimes it’s a bunch of allies.
Chris: Sometimes it’s an entire herd of allies just surrounding the protagonist in a protective cocoon to ensure that they never have to solve their own problems.
Oren: It’s like, hello, random farm kid. My name is Badass McWarriorFriend, and here’s your next best buddy, the wisest mage and the most caring healer. And we’re all going to stand around you in a circle and whenever you move, we’ll move. And that’s the story.
Chris: Also, you’re a secret princess, so here’s your bodyguards. A special team of bodyguards that we’ve naturally assigned to you, and we’re gonna send you to Magic School where there’s also teachers.
Oren: And maybe you’ll have a really cool friend who hangs out with you and is way better at everything than you. There we go.
Chris: Let’s not forget that at Magic School, of course, you have to meet the love interest, who is the best magic student and is a prodigy and can really just level entire armies by himself.
Oren: Get outta here, love interest!
Chris: And he lives to protect you. He lives to protect you!
Oren: Yeah, but he doesn’t even like you. Shut up.
Chris: So, yeah, we’ve seen this a lot and it happens for various reasons. In some cases where the storyteller, again, is just struggling to figure out how the protagonist can solve problems, it may feel like a shortcut to just add a mentor that can just tell them what to do. ‘Cause then you don’t have to figure out how to make your protagonist do various things like clue finding and being clever and all those things can be hard. But in those cases, again, toning down the ally. If you can bear to tone down the ally a little bit, that’s the first thing to do. If you don’t need that mentor and that mentor is just there to spare the protagonist from having to figure things out, then you can cut the mentor. And do they have to be powerful? Can you make them so they’re like, they’re frail, right? And so they have some knowledge from their prior experience, but they’re not able to go and do a lot of things that they used to ’cause they’re older or something like that, as another good one. Or maybe they don’t like the protagonist and they only help them begrudgingly and they resist helping them whenever they can.
Oren: Antagonistic mentors are great. I love them so much.
Chris: Yeah. There needs to be more antagonistic mentors. They really are the best.
Oren: And by antagonistic mentors, I mean like a mentor who doesn’t agree with the protagonist about something as opposed to a mentor who’s just a jerk, and then we later are like, “oh wow. By being a jerk, he was actually the best teacher!” Just to be clear.
Chris: Oh. Oren, you wanna tell me where those overcandied characters hurt you?
Oren: I don’t like them. I really don’t, and I especially don’t like it when they act like terrible teachers, and then the story rewards them by telling them what great teachers they are. Like, ’cause I’m kind of a teacher, like editing is kind of a teaching position and it’s just, I would never treat my clients the way that these mentors treat their students. And it’s upsetting to me when they get away with it.
Chris: Oh man. Yeah, we had a whole podcast episode about training. And it’s just the amount of toxic training material there is out there is just very sad.
Oren: Being mean to your students does not help them learn.
Chris: Mm-hmm. But for instance, your protagonist is out in the street, they meet another person out in the street who’s very experienced. They try to get that person to help them, but that person doesn’t have any reason to help them. Maybe they ask for payment or demand favors in return, or that would be, uh, somewhat antagonistic, semi-antagonistic mentor. That gives a reason why they’re not just doing things all the time. Okay, so again, if you can tone down their abilities a little bit or take them out or make them more antagonistic, those are all good steps to do. But sometimes in these situations, there are a couple sticking points. One is just the realism. If you have a child that has caretakers and you don’t want their caretakers to be terrible people; or another is that you have a wish fulfillment situation, for instance, a powerful love interest and it’s just really important to you, feel like it’s important to your readers. It definitely can be important to readers to have that super badass, sexy love interest that wants to protect their protagonist, for instance. That makes it a step harder.
Oren: Yeah, ’cause you can’t just banish that one, ’cause that’s the whole point of the story.
Chris: Um, so we have different solutions for this. We actually have several blog posts that you can look up. Oren has a great post on what to do with parents and one on what to do with authorities. And then I have one on what to do with powerful allies that works well for wish fulfillment, love interests, etc. But basically if you’re gonna have a character that’s like a powerful love interest, for instance, or a powerful wish fulfillment mentor of some kind that’s gonna, that’s you want to be around and you want them to be really powerful. It just requires a variety of techniques and constant management, right? It’s just something that you’re gonna have to think about for every conflict. How you’re going to make it so that your protagonist still makes a difference, and you don’t wanna use the same thing over and over again too many times because that starts to look contrived.
So you need a portfolio of tactics at that point. Make the ally go off on a mission sometimes. Injure them or make them sick sometimes. Find some situations in which they’re not so powerful, right? Give them a weakness. You can make it a curse if you wanna say, “oh, without the curse, they really could take care of everything but oh darn. With this curse, they’re not quite so powerful, but it’s totally not their fault. They really are the baddest ever.” So some situations in which- make them weak to water and put them in an island or something, or where they are off balance because they’re in an unfamiliar situation or some situations in which they are just not so powerful anymore. And then create some tasks that require at least two people doing stuff at the same time. Either because there are so many attackers and the ally can’t be everywhere at once, or one person has to do something while the other person protects them or something that requires two people. That way you can still have your ally around participating in some conflicts with your protagonist. It’s just, if you need to do that for every conflict, it’s gonna get hard.
Oren: Yeah, and that’s why this often pairs well with a story where your protagonist is going to become more powerful. You want them to start off all weak and relatable, but you want them to be a badass later. Okay, so you can manage this powerful ally/allies for a while, and then eventually your protagonist will unlock their true potential or what have you, and then they will be strong enough that they can do stuff even when the ally is around. And that is just much more manageable than trying to do this over the course of a series. It’s like, okay, you have book one where you have successfully tap danced your way around this really powerful ally. If by book two your protagonist hasn’t gotten strong enough to make a difference, you are probably gonna be in trouble.
Chris: Certainly, the protagonist should be this MVP for your climax. So you definitely have to find a way for them to do that. Okay. So problem three, which I have seen before – this is less common, but I’ve definitely seen it – where everything needs to go downhill. And so bad stuff is gonna be happening in the story, and you feel like, “okay, if the protagonist had their way, the bad stuff wouldn’t happen. So I guess I have no choice but to give them no agency.”
Oren: Right, there was no way they could have succeeded. They just fail. Nothing they do matters. They’ve just been swept along on a dark current of Evil Destiny.
Chris: Again, I have another article on this one ’cause we encounter these problems that often, but in this case, if you want things to go wrong, and you don’t know how your protagonist could make a difference when everything goes wrong. Three basic possibilities here: first, you could have them influence the plot in a negative direction, and this one is the most contentious. Yes, it does preserve agency to have the protagonist do things that have bad results. It does very easily frustrate the audience. They generally do not like that. So this one kind of has to be handled carefully. You have to try to make the situation as understandable as possible. It works, honestly, a lot better if you have lower stakes in your story, or you could have something where your protagonist does something that’s only a little bit wrong, and then the results are disproportionate. Right, but they still technically caused that. That’s a great way to have them feel really guilty and have them get blamed and all those other things. But if you make it disproportionate enough, it’ll create sympathy for them. ‘Cause it’s like, “hey, yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have done that, but really that wasn’t a big deal. And wow, all this happened.”
Oren: Yeah. Okay. So they shouldn’t have snuck out to go through a side gate when they were supposed to be attending, like the royal feast or whatever, but like they had no idea that there was an enemy army secretly camped outside that then used that same way to sneak in. There was no way they could have predicted that, but their actions still caused it.
Chris: And that can be a good way to have some sort of arc for them. Another way is to make it so the situation would’ve been even worse without them, and by doing something they preserve hope that things can someday recover. The town was invaded, but they managed to lock the inward keep. So there’s a few people who have not been captured inside. Or they snuck away with the secret invention that could allow them to cure all the ills that are happening.
Oren: Or like the bad guy came to steal the McGuffin that will let them take over the world. And the hero wasn’t able to stop them, but they were able to take a piece of the McGuffin, and now the McGuffin won’t work without it.
Chris: And then another way is to just pick, again: this is the same kind of lowering the scope, right? Let them achieve some kind of small objective, where they’re just trying to survive the situation and they have to use their ingenuity to survive. They can’t save the city, but they can escape or they can protect somebody or something small that they achieve in this.
Oren: Yeah, they can’t win the battle, but maybe they can save some of their soldiers, right? That sort of thing.
Chris: And then problem number four, the protagonist is supposed to be paralyzed or powerless.
Oren: Yeah, this one’s tough.
Chris: This one is a very tough one to do. Again, this is when the storyteller just has a goal that’s incompatible with agency. And look, I won’t say that there’s never a time, which if you have a specific goal, and that goal is more important to you than audience engagement, I’m not gonna argue with you. What’s important to you is what’s important to you. And maybe you have a really important point to make, and having the protagonist be completely powerless is part of that. I think where I have seen this is Don’t Look Up. Don’t Look Up is a cautionary tale. And the protagonists try really hard to stop tragedy and they do not succeed, and as a result, none of their actions end up mattering. So for most of the experience of the movie, it does feel like they have agency. And that reduces audience frustration. But in the end they don’t, and this is because this is meant to mirror a real life lesson. And the people who do have agency in that situation are the villains. But if we made those villains into the protagonist, we would be endorsing them on some level. And it’s like a society level cautionary tale. And so it focuses on the people who are trying. So that would be an example of where somebody decided to reduce agency for their character, and they had reasons for doing so that sort of filled a bigger purpose that had its value for audience members, and they also minimized the impacts of that.
But if you want a protagonist who is just paralyzed or powerless, I feel like you should try to go for effects that don’t quite remove agency, right? Not that you need agency for every scene. You could try a few startup scenes that don’t, again, minimize that effect, but I think reactivity is probably the way to go here.
Oren: And you can also, like, when people talk about wanting their character to be powerless, what that often means is systemically disadvantaged. People in that position, while they lack advantages, they don’t lose the ability to try to do things, right? And that you would be amazed at the ways people can figure out to improve their situation, even in really desperate times. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but one of my favorite examples is from The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, where the daughter, the eponymous daughter, is in this very difficult situation where she’s engaged to be married to a guy who she is into, but clearly is not a good guy. Like she’s into him the way that you’re into a first crush or whatever. And she’s trying to help her family, but she has very little influence. Like all of her power is basically just whatever the men in her life will let her do. And so she has to try to very carefully steer her fiancé in the direction she wants him to go and she can’t push too hard or he’ll realize what’s happening and he’ll backlash. So that was really interesting and super compelling. And then we ruined it so that another character could have his arc, which, I was so upset when that happened. But while it lasted, it was really great.
Chris: And again, you could try shrinking this plot scope so that they make a difference, but it’s to really little things. If they’re, for instance, in prison, maybe their ingenuity goes towards coping, right? And when it comes down to it, stories are about what people can do, and what power they do have, because they’re at some level kind of lessons for what people do in various situations. And so it’s not that there- that your protagonist can’t be in a world where they don’t have power over something. It’s just that the plot itself is focused on what they can achieve, right? So a factor in poverty, of course, can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just become rich, right? But maybe they can get by. So you can change the scope of what they’re affecting and make it so that problems appear and come to them. And then they just have to find a way that those problems don’t totally destroy them, and that will definitely make them feel pretty powerless without completely taking away their agency.
Oren: There is one more that I’ve encountered, which is like an odd one, but does come up sometimes, which is when you make the character a badass, but like the wrong kind of badass.
Chris: Fascinating.
Oren: Yeah, it’s weird. The place where I see it the most often, not universally, is when you have a female protagonist and the author has read some discourse about strong female protagonists or what have you, and so they’re like, okay, I’m gonna give my lady protagonist like, cool sword fighting skills, or I’m gonna make them a really talented politician, or whatever, right? They give them some kind of traditionally strong capability, but then the story isn’t about that thing they’ve given the protagonist and so then they’re just back to square one. Like you make your protagonist a really good sword fighter, but then the entire story hinges on spell casting ability that they don’t have. This sword never matters ’cause everything is solved by spell casting. And wouldn’t you know what the love interest is? The spellcaster.
I see that a fair amount of times and I’m sure some of that is just someone trying to deflect potential criticism where someone will criticize their book for their character never doing anything, and they’ll be like, “no, see, I made them strong! I made them a sword fighter!” But I think a more common explanation is that people just don’t always match character to plot properly, which is not to say your protagonist has to always be prepared for whatever problem that they encounter. A character’s dealing with stuff they’re not ready for is super fun and like arguably the entirety of stories, but they need to be able to interface with it on some level, right? So that doesn’t mean they have to be an expert spellcaster if the problems require spellcasting, but they need to spellcast at least a little bit, or they can’t do anything.
Chris: I will say a lot of these problems also can originate from not correctly understanding the role that characters play in the story, right? I’ve encountered at least one person who read a lot of writing advice that used the word character instead of the word protagonist. And we use the word protagonist for a reason. It’s ’cause a lot of the things that we’re saying don’t apply to other characters. They only apply to the protagonist or like your Team Good, right? You can have secondary protagonists too that they apply to towards a lesser extent, or an ensemble cast, whatever. When we say protagonist, we’re talking about the person somebody’s cheering for, the person who’s supposed to have the most agency, the person who’s supposed to make a difference and be the star of the show. And not all characters fit that bill. But if somebody, they’re writing and they’re not thinking about that and they think, “oh, well, characters have to make a difference,” then it could feel like it could be any character. And of course somehow it’s always women and sometimes children. We can, there have been male characters with agency problems. That’s something we’ve encountered, it’s just significantly less frequent.
Oren: Yeah, if you’re playing the numbers game, you can bet it’s gonna be a female protagonist who has agency problems. Okay. One thing we definitely have agency in is deciding when to end the podcast, and that part is now.
Chris: And if you feel more proactive and empowered as a result of this podcast, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
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