Hey all, so listen, I was talking to a client and a few friends about this the other day and it’s spurred an important conversation that I’d like to just take a second to hopefully assure some people and help clarify some craft technicalities. The active vs. inactive protagonist

Conversation does have a heavily western, white, 3-at structure involvement and basis behind it. What I’d like to hopefully help clarify though is that agency is a chain of decisions, choices, and the lack there of within a character’s story. This looks VERY DIFFERENT for POC,

BIPOC, neurodiverse people, and those who don’t follow western ideals and lifestyles/don’t live in a country that follows them. Agency can still be the choice to survive. The choice to follow the rules given to you for fear of repercussions. The decision to acknowledge your

Feelings of inadequacy or inferiority or whatever emotions you may be feeling. The choice to stand up for someone or to stand back in fear or shock or whatever it may be. Agency is the choices we make, either due to our own emotional acknowledgements and capacities, or because

It’s been absolutely bred into us to make such choices and to feel a certain way. Even if that feeling is numbness because of the way your character may have been raised or what they’ve experienced. These emotions, whether you realize it or not, are still a choice. They’re still

Agency, and NOT because you can control them (it’s very hard to control our emotions, correct?) but because we make the conscious decision to acknowledge them or push them down every single day, and our emotions are what then affect our actions and purpose. Sadness and a need to

Mourn and let society pass us by? Yes, that’s still agency. Your character is still actively participating in trying hard to manage and deal with the emotions in which they need to feel. This is all still valid agency, and I would love you all to understand that this agency looks

Different for every single person, but especially different for those who are not white and living in a western world. So when discussing agency and trying to figure your main characters out, I ask you to simply think about your characters motivations for the way they act and

Feel, and the smaller, conscious decisions they make everyday. Those small decisions (to smile through the tears, survive another day, not tell a family member about something, to run that red light, to eat that chocolate cake, to keep their head down, to follow society) are

What make your character an individual and give them drive and motivation and help to tell their story. And stories are not always linear. We have a lot of stories in which characters fall back 5 steps after taking two. That’s okay. They’re allowed to be messy with their own

Emotions and choices! They’re not perfect, and even backwards movement is still MOVEMENT and the movement is important. So yes, life happens to all of us and our characters, and many times we live very reactive lives to the events that happen to us. Having characters like that

Is a great thing too. Just make sure that as a writer, you understand the small choices and decisions and subconscious biases and actions of your own characters, so that we as readers can really work to understand them too. Do we need to understand every character we read,

Either? No. But should we try? Yes, most definitely yes. Especially in times like this.

I will also add one extra tweet here to say, a book I read many years ago comes to mind here as one of the quietest, most reactive and passive characters I’ve ever read, but she was SO EMOTIONALLY COMPELLING that I took the journey with her main character and balled my dang eyes

Out for a few hours during a scene or two before picking the book back up and having to read the rest of it. This book (like I said, it’s old and from a LONG time ago, and I’m sure you all have some great examples too *please respond with them!*) is Daughter of the Forest by

Juliette Marillier. I SOBBED ALL. I SOBBED. And this main character had no swords, no huge actions, and not even any words to say. So just understand your character and their emotions and subconscious choices and survival instincts, because as long as we can understand

And relate to your characters on an emotional level, we can see and understand the agency too (which is also why it’s been proven to be difficult as a POC, BIPOC, neurodiverse, and non-western author to be seen as writing active characters with agency). Agency is tied to emotions

And our subconscious decisions and choices and all of that agency and all of those emotions are allowed to be and should be different for all characters and stories. Okay, ending rant, and hopefully this helps some people continue on and keep writing and working hard. Dig deeper

You ever imagined you could for your characters!!! One day, your intricate understanding of your characters will pay off, I promise. And remember that my agency last night was actively going to the fridge for pickles and cheese because I couldn’t control anything else.

Love “yous guys”