On Cheating Agency

Being a man with very little focus, I recently let myself get distracted from the terrifying mountain of editing by an idea that occurred to me at work. I wrote a mini-treatment of it at work, talked to some friends (like I mentioned in the last article) and they encouraged me to write some of it. A couple of scenes formed in my head, so I did.

And hated them. They felt flat and short of colour. So I sat down and started considering why, and figured part of it was I'd started in a place and way that didn't showcase the characters' motivations. The agency was absent.

This isn't an article on how agency was important. I considered writing that article but if you're reading this, if you're interested in writing, you know that and you know why.

If I pursue the idea, I'm going to go and make the sense of agency in those characters more standout. But what if I didn't want to? What if I wanted to write an interesting story about people unsure of their place in the world and with no strong motivations? Storytelling's got a problem that can't do that. Hell, Fantasy's got a problem. Just look at all the characters over the years that have had weak agency. One of Fantasy's big archetypes is the great unknown finding someone unsure in their place in the world and changing them.

Now, yeah, the rules says that characters have to have agency. And they say that for a damn good reason. But to paraphrase Terry Rossio, great art is often great because it ignore the rules.

So it got me thinking. How do you ignore the rules of agency? How do you write great stories about passive reactive characters?

This is what I came up with:

1) Foreshadow Growth

I can think of very very few stories where the character lacks motivation the entire story long. If the character has an obvious growth path and arc, that can provide the sense of being interesting that can go missing with a lack of agency. We take that for granted in Coming of Age stories, particularly ones with big prophecies, but that's far from the only way to skin that particular cat. 

2) Between a Rock and a Hard Place

One of the reasons agency is so important is its such a great short cut to dramatic tension. Stick the character in a situation where they have to risk what they desire most and you get to see the wee bugger squirm and plot like mad. If the character doesn't have that sort of motivation, then plot events need to provide that sense of dramatic tension. Once you start forcing a character to choose, they develop agency whether they like it or not.

3) Write Incredibly Well

Its kinda obvious but needs to be said. Great books are rarely those that do everything well, they books that do something fantastically well. Take American Gods. I know people who hate Shadow, hate Gaiman's protagonists in general, but only oxygen has a universal fanbase and American Gods is objectively one of the classics of modern fantasy. Why? Because Gaiman has some of the best story ideas the genre has ever seen, great prose, and writes a killer scene. For a lot of people (including myself) that is more than enough to make a great read.

I'm sure there's other ways of beating traditional story structure here. And, much as I love traditional story structure and believe its valuable, authors should be trying to beat it. Because as one great storyteller said:

"Only a special hero can defy stories themselves - and wouldn't that make a cool story anyway?"