There’s one common term that I was pretty careful not to use in my writing advice book, Never Say You Can’t Survive: “agency.” As in, “characters in a story should have agency.” Because, as I explain the one time I mention this term:
The concept of “agency” is very culturally loaded, and rooted in a lot of Eurocentric cis male notions of “rugged individualism.”
Of course, in the very next sentence, I do go on to say that as a general rule, if it’s a story about searching for the magic bidet of the Elf King, the protagonist might need to spend some time looking for that bidet. (Though, hang on: I would read the heck out of a story about the one person who refuses to join in the collective magic-bidet-hunt. Somebody please write this!)
But anyway, I’ve tried to avoid talking about “agency” as a desirable trait in fictional heroes for a while now, because it does feel very culturally loaded and individualistic. Lately I’ve been thinking about a different term that I like better: “authority.”
When people talk about “agency,” it often implies that a character is able to bring about a material change in their own circumstances—which is so often not the case in real life. And in addition to the “individualism” thing I mentioned above, it also includes a lot of rigid notions of how a protagonist should operate: pursuing their goals and pushing back against whatever antagonist or obstacles stand in their way. It’s built for a story about conflict in its crudest form.
So instead of “agency,” which is all about action and personal success or failure, I’m increasingly thinking about “authority.” I do not mean “authority” in the sense of holding a position of power in which you get to tell other people what to do with their lives. I’m using “authority” more in the sense of expertise, meaning that everybody is an authority on their own life. Their perspective matters, even if they might be deluded or confused about some aspects of their situation. It doesn’t matter if their perspective is accurate—what matters is that it carries weight within the story. Their own lived experience is valid.
I also think “authority” is closely related to the word “author,” and a POV character is an author of their own story to some extent, even if we’re usually aware that there is a flesh and blood person somewhere whose name is on the cover of the book.
Before anyone jumps in here: I love unreliable narrators. I love characters who are ambivalent or confused about what’s going on. Not even remotely saying anything against those things.
But I’ve been thinking lately about what actually bugs me in fiction, and I think this might be what’s bugging other people, too.
I don’t mind at all if a character is passive, helpless, or just uninterested in taking action. But I’ve definitely read plenty of works of fiction that seemed not to respect their own protagonist’s viewpoint—either because the author really wants to make sure you know that the protagonist is full of shit, or because it feels as though the author has never quite done the imaginative work to figure out how this character sees things, and what they think has happened. Instead, we’re standing outside the ostensible POV character or protagonist, even as they’re describing events. Sometimes a POV character has a perspective that is inconsistent in a way that doesn’t feel intentional or easy to track. Or the opinions of supporting characters are given priority, and I don’t even know if the main character agrees with these people or not.
If we are getting someone’s point of view in a narrative, I want to understand their version of events, and feel as though their opinions carry some weight, even if those opinions are muddled. There are plenty of ways to do this while still letting the reader know that this protagonist might be missing a lot of stuff. (George R.R. Martin is a master of this.)
So I have a gut feeling, which could be completely mistaken, that a lot of what people complain about when they talk about “agency” is actually this related question of “authority.” Especially considering that this question is often gendered, and it’s often characters who aren’t cis men who get accused of lacking agency—and I think one of the failure modes of fiction is to discount the perspectives of women, transfolk and gender non-conforming people, even when they’re supposedly centered.
I think this could also be a general “writing the other” issue, where authors from a dominant group are writing marginalized identities, including BIPOC characters, but aren’t able to fully inhabit those perspectives due to cultural blinkers. (And if that’s you, please get help.)
Here’s where I admit that I don’t have any handy examples. I read a lot of fiction, and it all blurs together in my mind after a while, and I’m more likely to remember if a particular book had a glaring plot issue. Plus, I don’t actually want to be mean and single anybody out.
Some of my favorite stories feature characters who are not masters of their own fate. See: Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, pictured above. But I know exactly how Arthur Dent feels about everything that’s happening to him, at all times. And exactly none of my favorite stories feature characters who seem disconnected in such a fundamental way that I can’t even tell whether what they think is happening and how they might feel about it.
Anyway, this is just something I’ve been thinking about lately. And I’m going to keep thinking about it, and maybe some of y’all will comment below and give me some other ways to think about it that I hadn’t considered!
This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.
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Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness (which publishes on April 11, 2023), along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
I very much appreciate the desire to distance “agency” from a certain (maybe very general?) conception of white male individualism, though I think there are lots of ways of thinking about the term (and thinkers who use it) that don’t fall back on that particular coupling. In actor-network theory, agency very productively is used to describe the ways that non-human objects interact with people (and sometimes change our behaviors, or suggest new behaviors to us, for example). Can objects also have “authority”? Well, maybe some objects. But the insight of actor-network theory, anyway, is that anything can have agency (and also that we should look for forms of agency that don’t always match up with what people commonly think it should be). Anyway, not that that particular theory doesn’t also have its drawbacks, but the term can definitely be recuperated and does a lot of good work in forms of historical analysis that get away from “the great men” of history…
So, are you talking about the difference between having a fleshed out character with their own plot agenda vs a puppet who does what the author wants it to do whether it makes sense or not to them? If so, that’s the difference between good and bad writing.
I think associating agency and not authority with “rugged individualism” is a bit of a stretch — especially given that authority can also, as you note, have other connotations.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with works that focus more on what happens to a character than what a character does or can do in reaction or response, but whatever does happen to that character needs to have a driving impact on the narrative. Arthur Dent gets to be a popular character with no power over his situation because he’s a relatable viewpoint driven into the narrative by the other (zanier) characters. Agency is a clear way to provide that drive and establish a character at the same time, but it isn’t the only way.
In my world as a non-writer, “authority” sounds more blinkered than “agency.”
Is “agency” characters willingness to take action, or ability?
English not being my first language, I´m not sure if I understand the term “agency” correctly. But as I understand it, it seems to me maybe we need two terms instead of one.
One for how much is character actively doing things vs letting things happen to them.
One for how much are their circumstances letting them to do so.
What bugs me about this is that people are often complaining that this or that character lacks agency (meaning: they should do something, not just sit and mope and feel miserable, how boring!) but what I dislike most is a character with too much agency; when author just gives them a goal and they singlemindedly go over obstacles till they achieve it, the end, – it just feels like a DnD campaign, not a story.
Thinking about this reminded me of a scene in EEAAO, when Waymond asks something like: “Do you want to come with me and fill your ultimate potential, or do you want to lie here and face the consequences?” To which Evelyn answers: “I want to lie here.”
That would probably be considered “lack of agency,” right? But it was so wonderfully relatable…
@8: on the contrary. As I understand it, “agency” in fiction at least is simply a character inhabiting their own perspective and making their own choices. “Lie here and face the consequences” is a choice, even if it’s ultimately a poor choice.
Yeah, I’m also here to unload on the idea that ‘agency’ is about white male individualism; if anything I think agency is a critique leveled *at* that particular brand of individualism.
A lot of this piece seems to be about POV characters, but frankly speaking, the characters most frequently and obviously robbed of agency are not POV characters. They are frequently supporting or secondary caste, and authors rob them of agency usually to make the plot move in a particular direction, especially in a direction that lays the groundwork for the protagonist or other POV characters to shine as more special or shiney.
So in a White Messiah trope storyline– frequently the hapless indigenous people or other ethnic group are robbed of the agency to save themselves. So in Cameron’s “Avatar” movies, Jake Sully is the White Messiah; Cameron has robbed the Na’vi of the agency of saving themselves from the bad space Westerners, he tells instead a story where without the intervention of the White Savior, the indigenous Na’vi would have seen their world demolished. There’s a way of telling the story where many of the elements are the same, the Na’vi are instead capable of rallying to kick the space Westerners off thier planet, reducing Sully’s role to the hapless, goofy love interest Neytiri rescues on in her ascension to leading her people in war. But Cameron’s old white guy roots can’t imagine a world in which the tribal, indigenous people have sufficient knowledge of their own world to eject the alien invaders; he instead has to imagine a world where the White Messiah has to teach the tribal primitives how to use colonial weaponry, and a White Prophetess has to teach them scientific truths to harness the true potential of their own world. The Na’vi suffer from a deep lack of agency, not because the Na’vi characters lack authority, but because Cameron is not here to tell the story of how the indigenous aliens rescued themselves and the white people learn an important lesson without also becoming white messiahs.
‘Authority’ as you write about it has a better name, already in use: authenticity. Narrative voices that carry enough authority to convince the reader that their narratives are genuine have authenticity; it is a lack of authenticity that leads a reader to disengage from suspension of disbelief to start questioning whether or not a character has agency, is sufficiently authentic to be believable, to emotionally identify with.
Because that’s what this really about; at root, all fiction is a contrivance of the author or authors, a contrivance the audience is willing to follow along with. The social contract between author and audience is not such that the audience must simply accept that the contrivance of the narrative is unquestionable. Characters do not have to be masters of their own destiny to have agency; that is some ‘rugged individualism’ bullhockey. But they do need to be authentic enough respond to the environment and events established by the narrative in a manner the audience is willing to believe. And the narrative itself needs to be authentic enough that the audience doesn’t feel a need to stop and consider whether the events and circumstances of the narrative should be examined. Authors have to earn that authenticity, they have to earn that trust with the audience.
Earning that trust about authority; you can tell the story of Avatar with quite grand authority, but authority is not going to earn the trust of the audience. At root, Cameron is still basically telling a white Messiah story, and no matter how authitatively told, that fact is going to rob Cameron as the author of the audience’s trust, because the use of this trope, and the cultural implications, are a contrivance that the audience knows to look for. They know tor reject it for good reason.
@9 Thank you for explaining.
I probably should have googled a definition, not rely on understanding the term from various online discussions, before writing that previous comment.
Now I have and the def of agency is: “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.” Which seems to me more like what I thought it means…?
What you describe is more like whether the character is consistent, fleshed out, well written (also important, but not the same as having an agency.)
@11 In this specific context, it can mean that, but “power” doesn’t necessarily mean material power. A character with agency is a character who acts (or chooses not to act!) for their own reasons, not just because the plot requires that they behave a certain way or because some other character decides for them.
A lot of other commenters seem to be having the same issue with this article as I have: I fundamentally disagree with your definition of the term “agency.” In literary criticism, what is generally meant by a character having agency is that they feel like a fleshed-out person, making their own choices, with their own desires, motivations, and opinions, and do not merely serve as a tool of the plot with no individuality of their own. Reading this, it sounds very much to me like you’ve misdefined what agency means, and instead come up with a different term to effectively replace it.
A character can be passive, helpless, or uninterested in taking action, and still have agency! Arthur Dent, as you say, is very much not in control of his life, but he still has quite a lot of agency as a character. The fact that some people have made a habit of misusing the term doesn’t mean “a focus on rugged individualism” is what it’s for. That’s akin to the way people have misinterpreted “strong female character” (i.e. a fleshed-out, well-characterized woman with a rich inner life and strength of will) to mean “generic action hero, but a girl.” That was never what it meant!
I’m old enough to remember the discussions in the 1980s and 1990s about how problematic the terms “author” and “authority” are. So this suggestion to switch from “agency” to “authority” comes off to me as a suggestion for jumping from the frying pan into the burning pits of hell. Why not turn to another art form for a useful term here: “What’s my motivation here?” they always ask. It seems that’s really what you’re looking for. and, yes, finding some way, any way to avoid joining in the collective magic-bidet-hunt is a motivation that could manifest in all sorts of actions and thought trees.
Agency or no, I find that main characters in F/SF are usually very reactive. Even the hypercompetent ones, which for me sometimes undermines their aura of hypercompetence. They act, but usually they aren’t initiating action, they are dealing with whatever has been forced upon them–and not just in the broad strategic sense that it’s the bad guys generally trying to upset the world’s applecart, but in all the more immediate tactical stuff as well. There are good reasons for this, mind you–if you want tension, and cliffhangers, and stuff, one good way to get it is to have your character always scrambling to catch up with events, being wrongfooted by attacks they are unprepared for and do not understand the reasons for and so forth.
But I do really like to watch an exception now and then–like a Locke Lamora type getting some chunks of narrative where they have a chance to put together a good scam. And there are definitely times when I’m reading a book and this character is described as totally awesome in various ways, and they’re enmeshed in a situation, and they totally fail to do various things you would figure a character awesome in those ways would start doing to deal with it because the plot requires they be spending their time reacting instead of acting, so they can stay in sufficiently deep trouble and have required hair’s-breadth escapes and such, and it stretches my suspension of disbelief painfully.
In terms of what we’re calling authority, a big thing that undermines it is how often main characters do not know what they want (or who they are). It is hard to respect their point of view because in a sense they do not have one, or at least they don’t know what it is. They are often quite angsty about this. There are significant reasons for this, too–usually by the end of the book, or at least by the end of the series, they have in some way figured some of this stuff out and there’s your character development arc. I think this is done maybe too much though.
Secondary point: It seems to me if the story features mainly the one character who refused to engage in the magic bidet hunt, the story is not a story about the magic bidet hunt.
SO agree with the fact that a story does not require the main character to understand what is going on, or to have the power to change it (whether or they understand it or not). They must be true to themselves, and may act (or choose not to act) in a way that the reader can understand. They may or may not “save the world” during the story while trying to save something else (e.g. their sanity). The interest lies in what the reader can understand and follow. The whole point at the beginning of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is that Arthur Dent can’t save Earth. The reader(or listener, it was originally a radio drama) totally gets this as an example of bureaucracy and lack of concern by the Powers-That-Be. Hello, that’s the point. But still a great (and funny) story. The other characters who race around and seem to have “agency” also don’t achieve very much in the long run. Does the reader care about them? Not really, we care about poor Arthur who lost his home and planet.
this comment is quite long, so here is the summary:
agency is the difference between “I can’t tell my parents the truth! they will throw me to the street and I will be homeless!” and “I chose to lie to my parents because I don’t want to be homeless. in the meantime, i work toward financial independence, and search for friends and trusted family members that will give me place to sleep if my parents will find out and throw me to the street”
I rarely saw lack-of-agency criticism, but i did encounter some books that i criticize that way. and I’m sure there are people that use the concept wring, because it’s true to every useful word and concept that ever become popular enough, but it’s not a reason to give up on useful words. So I will explain what I understand under the word agency, and differentiate it from authority – which is definitely useful concept that I’m adding to my mental toolbox right now.
so, what does the opposite of agency look like? It looks like “I’m just following orders.” This is the archetypal example of anti-agency. doing something – very actively doing something, putting a lot of time and effort into something – while denying the choice.
I don’t like situations when characters really can’t do anything. I find them uninteresting to read. but this is not what I – or anyone who I saw use this concept – mean. What I mean is characters that behave as if they don’t have a choice – when they do. and unless someone is in come or sleeping or under spell that controls their actions, they have, in fact., agency. the question is if they choose to use it/ the question is if they SEE THE CHOICE.
This is also true about the real world. “I have no choice!” is a phrase that I find both wrong and annoying. attempt to escape responsibility for the choice one made. so, here is example that based on a story from the real world, not from a book:
There is a woman. Her family sucks, and disapproves of dating people outside of their race. The woman chose to date a not-from-her-race guy, and then chose to lie about that. when she and the guy argued about that, she said to him “I have no choice! They will disown me!”. and This is anti-agency.
What would an agency in such a situation look like? like this woman thinking – my family chose to be racist, and so put me before a sucky choice. I can tell them the truth, and risk being disowned. I can lie to them, and preserve contact with them. I can bid my time and hope they will get used to the idea and will have a chance to have both my love and my family in the future. then she could have talked with the guy, and they can discuss what the best action is in such a bad situation.
People that see their choices actually have more choices – as one needs to see options to use it, and sometimes options come to be only after preparation and pre-planning. a person that thinks things “just happen to them” and have “no choice” in how to react to them, is a person who sees only one option. and so is trapped in it.
Authority is something else. is the amount of power someone has in their situation. The woman from the story is not dependent on her parents. if they disown her, she will lose contact with them – that’s all. queer teenagers risk homelessness if they tell their parents the truth. they have less authority. but in spite of that, they often have more agency! They know they can choose to tell the truth and take the risk, or lie and be safe, or work toward financial independence and then tell the truth.
Thank you for this. Just by questioning what agency means, you have given me a lot to think about. Agency is wrapped up with the idea that doing things makes us complete. But a philosophical friend of mine likes to send out little messages that stress being over doing.
As I read the essay, my mind kept drifting off to an utterly off-the-wall, possibly off-point (but utterly delightful, to me) example of the “agency vs. authority” dichotomy – the Chet and Bernie mystery series by Spencer Quinn (a pseudonym of Peter Abraham). The narrator is a dog. Literally. Chet has very little agency, but complete authority over his point of view. The reader stands outside this point of view, and knows that Chet knows things that Bernie doesn’t know, and those things are important to solving the mystery, but Chet doesn’t know that they are important – because, well, he’s a dog. Not sure it fits in the SFF universe… but on the other hand, a dog telling a story certainly isn’t true-to-life, is it? Quinn does an excellent job of reproducing the “flavor” of dog-think, while still giving the reader all the information they need to comprehend the story.