What is Agency?

Okay, so let’s talk about damsels. Wait, I can hear you think, didn’t she title this “What is Agency?” Yes. Yes, she did. Agency, as it were, does make the difference between the classic damsel and someone close to the hero who just happened to get kidnapped.

When does a main character not have agency? There’s actually three main reasons why your character might feel like they’re missing something in that area.

1)      Your character is only reacting.

2)      Your character is only following orders.

3)      Your character is not able to make decisions.

Those are three ways to write your story where the main character doesn’t have an agency, even if it might look like they have. So, let’s look at those three ways.

Your character is only reacting. From what I’ve heard (I haven’t seen the movie yet), “Rise of Skywalker” has that problem. There’s always something happening, always a lot of action, chases, fights, etc. The characters have to react to what is happening around them, so they have no real choice about what to do. Choice is important for agency, because a character who is only doing what is necessary to survive isn’t developing. Characters should evolve during a story (but even if they don’t, they should make their own choices) and a character only reacting can’t evolve.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have situations in which the character has to react, but that shouldn’t be the whole story. Even a character on the run will, once the immediate danger has passed, get a chance to make choices, to decide where to go, whether to hide, run, or fight back. Choice matters, even if it’s the wrong one. Heck, a lot of character development is connected to people making wrong choices, so sometimes the wrong choice is the right one, speaking from a writer’s perspective.

Your character is only following orders. In addition to being the go-to excuse for people who did bad things, ‘only following orders’ is also a nice way not to have an agency. It’s again about choices. A character only following orders (whether they’re military or just following their parents’, spouse’s, or boss’s orders) doesn’t make decisions, but follows the agency of whoever gives the orders. That doesn’t mean that your character, being a soldier, for instance, can’t sometimes follow an order. To have agency, though, they also have to make decisions for themselves. In the heat of the battle, a soldier, to stay with that example, does have to make their own choices, even if it’s only whether to attack this enemy or that one.

Again, you can have a character who has to follow orders, but at some point, they also need to make their own decision. The daughter who has to get married, but can choose her fiancé. The employee who has to decide not to do something their boss wants them to do. The moment your character makes choices, even if it’s within a frame given by orders, they are developing an agency.

Your character is not able to make decisions. That’s quite often where the damsel comes in. When a character is either physically incapable of making choices (being unconscious, for instance) or mentally incapable of making choices (because they’re under the influence of a drug or a spell or suchlike), they don’t have an agency. Where would the agency come from? Quite often, the damsel falls into that trap. She (men are rarely damselled) is simply locked away and all ways of making decisions are seemingly taken from her. Because of that, she has no agency and just sits and waits for the hero to rescue her.

Your character can be in a situation short-term where they’re not capable of making decisions. They can be severely injured, unconscious, or in a mental state in which they can’t make a decision. But that state must end and at some point, they have to make their own decisions again.

Does my distaste for damsels mean that there can never be a situation in which someone close to the hero can be kidnapped to put pressure on them? No. The problem with the classic damsel isn’t that she gets kidnapped. That can also happen to the hero’s sidekick or mentor. The problem is that the damsel has no agency of her own. Even when you’re kidnapped, you can try to make life harder for those who caught you, you can try to escape (even if you fail), or you can try to gather intel which may be of use to the hero later. You can still be active, make decisions, try to take control of your fate, even if you fail. Making choices isn’t the same as always making the right choices, but from a storyteller’s perspective, a wrong choice is still better than no choice. A wrong choice can be much better, because they can cause a development in a character.

Another big problem with agency is when one character’s agency is merely to serve another character. This can often happen with love interests in non-romance stories. They are only there so the hero has someone to rescue and later on bed/marry/spend a night with. They are, to put it short, a prize. They are a fancy vase which the hero can put on the mantle of their fireplace or a medal to hang on the hero’s chest. That is the true problem with characters which only serve the hero. The same which goes for the damsel also goes for the fridged girlfriend or wife, for the rape victim which has a relationship with the hero. They have no existence outside of the hero’s and thus are not given any agency or development of their own. Admittedly, once you’re dead, there’s not much agency to be had (unless it’s a very special case and you come back as a vampire or something similar).

Agency is making choices and decisions. A character with agency has a plan of their own, wants to achieve something and is working towards that. They don’t just react to what happens around them, they don’t just take orders, and they need to be able to choose in some way. Choices don’t need to be good, but they need to be made. For a character’s development, a bad choice can be much more useful than a good one. Give your main characters agency and see how that plays out in a story.

Saying Farewell and Keeping a Graveyard

I admit it, I have a private graveyard - on my hard drive. It’s where I bury stories I don’t finish. However, I don’t just do that because I want to treat them well. No, I do it for some occasional necromancy. I reuse those ideas and I’m not ashamed to admit it. There’s no reason to be ashamed. I say farewell to them for the moment, but they may come back eventually. Many things do.

When I wrote my first novel, Secret Keeper, I recycled the villain from another story which had never gotten past the first chapter. Morgan Le Fay became the Morrigan, but most of her character was left intact. Like this, I could concentrate more on Jane, Steven, and the rest, which was important - especially looking back, given it’s the beginning of my longest-running series to date.

Sometimes, I just think of one or two scenes and try to write a story based on those, but it doesn’t work. Then I’m working on another book and realize that this scene or that from my graveyard can be used there and will fit very well. The same goes for characters or for certain situations which are composed of several scenes.

The point of this is that my kind of necromancy, of reviving characters or scenes or situations for another story, is extremely useful. The fact that a character, scene, or situation didn’t work where you originally put it doesn’t mean that it will never work. For every ten stories I start, I have realistically finished one or two in the past, the others all went to the graveyard. That’s a lot of material I found good at some point, a lot of material I put work into. It would be a shame to just let it rot.

There’s two lessons coming out of this, I think.

First of all, if you don’t finish all stories you start, you are not a failure. I’m pretty sure no single author out there has finished every story they ever started. We all have our graveyard, perhaps not on a hard drive, like me, but somewhere. There’s always stories where your realize at some point that they’re not going anywhere useful. The only right thing to do in this case is to abandon them and bury them in the graveyard. One of those days, you can then take a shovel and dig them out to reuse some parts (and not just for stories about necromancy, although I’ve finished a collection of novellas about that topic last month and have the notes for a novel with a similar theme which still needs writing).

The second lesson is that just because a character, scene, or situation didn’t work out in one story, that doesn’t mean they’re useless. You’ve found it interesting enough to invest time in it, so it’s likely to have some uses eventually. It challenged you or inspired you or both, so you wrote it down to keep it. Using it eventually is only logical.

I’m rarely going over the graveyard looking desperately for some kind of idea I can turn into a story. New ideas have always come easily to me. I’m good with beginnings and can do middles - my problem are the ends. Finding a new idea on how to start a story isn’t something which means I need to dig into my graveyard. The middles are where it usually starts, so I’m looking over my old stories, reread parts of this one, parts of that one, and wonder what I might be able to do with them. Then I read something which intrigues me, which feels right for the story I’m working on, and I think about how it can be incorporated. Eventually, it is integrated into the story I write. That’s how my kind of necromancy really works - no rituals with complex ingredients held in a dead language. I speak two languages well and none of them is dead.

It works the other way around as well. Sometimes, I’m writing a story I will definitely finish and I realize that something I planned for it won’t work out. It’s too much, it’s going in the wrong direction, it’s just not a good fit. That’s what happened with the casino subplot in “Grey Eminence” when I finally got around to plot it all out. I love this subplot; I spent a lot of time figuring out the details of this subplot, because it has logistics attached to it. The problem is that this subplot takes too much space and time away from other plots which are necessary for the endgame while not serving the endgame at all. It doesn’t fit with this one story I’m plotting. Am I never going to use it, therefore? No, I’m already wondering whether it can be part of the fourth Black Knight Agency novel, whether I can put it in the Knight Agency novel after “Ignition Rites”, whatever one that will be, or whether it could become a plot point when I return to the magpies for “Two for Joy”. Eventually, the casino subplot will see the light of day again. Until then, I hope it’s cosy in its grave.

Or let me tell you something about the time when I started writing novels. I wrote the first two Knight Agency novels, Secret Keeper and Key Pieces, in about one and a half months. Okay, they’re not the longest, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t take time to write. While I was writing “Key Pieces”, I had an idea about a kidnapping case, but it didn’t fit with the novel I was writing (which already had a kidnapping, but that was in a different context). It became a main plot point for the third novel, Crime Pays Sometimes, instead. That’s how it is sometimes - you have an idea and it doesn’t fit with the story you have it for, but it works well with another. Necromancy is the only solution there as well.

I’ve changed my working method a little while back and there might be less unfinished stories now, but I don’t believe that. There’s still times when I just have to write something down, shape it into the beginning of a story, without being sure that I will ever finish it. There will be new bodies for the graveyard, but perhaps less frequently. Well, there’s a lot there already, so it’s not as if I don’t have material. There’s a lot of zombies to raise already.

Keeping and Eye on your Endgame

If there’s one thing I learned from reworking my plans for two novels, then it is that you need to always keep an eye on your endgame. The whole story - in a multi-novel series perhaps more than one - relies on this endgame, on the big confrontation, on the resolution of the big question posed at the beginning.

Novels rarely have only one plot-thread, even my adventure stories usually unite two, three, or more plots. A really complex novel will have even more of them, but no matter how many there are, there will always be one main plot, one element which runs through the whole story and keeps it together. The most important thing at the beginning of the story is therefore to identify that one plot-thread which runs along the whole length.

There are only three difficult parts of a story, of course - beginning, middle, and end. I have most of a problem with the end of my stories, which might be why I really need to look at the endgame. It’s where I need to go to finish the story (the hardest part for me).

In a story, everything moves towards that big moment, towards the resolution. If you write a mystery story, that is when the mystery will be lifted. If you write a superhero romp, it’s where the big battle will happen. If you write a romance story, this is where all the misunderstandings will be cleared, so the ‘happily ever after’ can happen. No matter what you write, you will always have an endgame of sorts. Depending on whether you write a short story or something longer, you might have some parts after the endgame, bringing down the tension and letting the story finish on a high note, but even if you don’t, you will always have the endgame.

For my stories, that can mean different things. When I wrote “Stray”, the first novella for the first volume of “Theoretical Necromancy”, I was a little unsure about the endgame at the beginning. I had an idea about Gabrielle’s background and about her reason for being in a small North-Italian town, but I didn’t know what the big conflict would be. Once I realized that another group of criminals breaking into the same library and killing someone while Gabrielle was ‘liberating’ a book from there would bring in conflict, it was much easier. Once I realized that Gabrielle would need a very strong reason for finding those men and making sure they were caught, it was clear to me that I needed to bring Gabrielle down to rock bottom - which I did. I took all chances of getting away from her, one by one, until she had no other choice but to stand her ground, fight, and use all her skills to bring the criminals to justice. With Gabrielle being anything but a hero to sally forth and do the right thing, she needed enough of a push to do that.

For the John Stanton stories, the endgame is usually the solution to the mystery in question, but not always. “The Case of the Deadly Documents” has no mystery as a such, apart from ‘how will John and Markham survive the night’.

Of course, the endgame doesn’t work on its own. You need to build up to it and push the tension, to prepare the reader and make them curious. You have to suggest at some point what the endgame may be. In some cases, that’s quite obvious. In others, the endgame will be a twist, a surprise for the audience who has expected something different.

What does it mean, though, when I say that you need to keep an eye on your endgame? It means that you need to know what the big bang will be. I’ve been working as a discovery writer for a long time and I thought I’d never be able to write once I had plotted a story out in advance (I won’t lie, it’s less fun to write when I know where I’m going, but it’s more efficient). The big problem for me often was that I was meandering and needed to figure out what I was aiming for. Quite often, I did that subconsciously, quite often I knew what the endgame would be, even though I had not planned for it in advance. During other times, as with the two novels I plotted out ‘between the years’, I had no idea where the stories should go, no endgame. That was one reason why I couldn’t write the novels before. Now they’re plotted out, the endgame is clear, and I can go ahead and work on them.

So when you have the idea for a new story, ask yourself what your endgame will be. Do you have a mystery to be resolved? A big fight the main character needs to win? Misunderstandings to be cleared up? Once you know that, you can plot the course, add a few twists and turns, see who and what you need to make it all work. Once the endgame is clear, the road is clear as well. Quite often, you can even see the twists and turns. Other times, you will want to add a few to make the story a bit more interesting, but during all of them, you need to keep your eye on the goal.

I’m honest here: it’s become much easier for me to plot a story and to write it afterwards since I lean back and figure out the endgame first. Once I have that, everything else is pretty easy. Well, not that easy, but once I know where I’m going, I can figure out which detours from the direct path may be interesting and which additional plots would go well with it.

The endgame is important and you need to keep an eye on it while plotting and while writing. Will this additional scene serve the plot and lead towards the endgame? Is this character necessary or not? Does the additional plot you have added work well with the endgame or might it prove to be a roadblock? There’s a lot of things which become clear once you know where you’re going.

Taking Relationships Further

It’s weird once you think about it … many romance novels and other stories never get past the courting stage with their main characters. As soon as they are ‘together,’ the story ends - and if there’s a sequel, then the characters will have broken up for a reason or are breaking up at the beginning, so they can get back together at the end. What’s the problem with writing a long-term relationship?

Admittedly, I do not write romance stories, but I do have a few relationships which are past or will soon be past their initial courting. Jane Browne has Cedric Thornton, Jane Doe has Cynthia Wilmington, John Stanton has Manju Overton, Alex Dorsey has Lin Mei Liu, and in my latest finished book, Gabrielle Munson has her third cousin Abigail Munson. None of the couples is still in the courting stage by now.

For Jane Browne, giving her a steady boyfriend was partly due to me not wanting to invent new characters for every other novel. I’d given her two boyfriends in the first novel, Secret Keeper (none of whom she still was with at the end, one of whom she’d killed personally). I’d given her a friend with benefits for the next two novels, Key Pieces and Crime Pays Sometimes (Marcus, who went back to the US between novel number three and novel number four). When the fourth novel, A Plague of Rogues, came up, I decided I would let her go steady for a bit, even though I wasn’t sure she’d stay with her new boyfriend. She has stayed with him so far and he even got damselled in Grave Diggers, the newest Knight Agency novel.

Cedric needed to be a certain kind of guy: someone who would get noticed by Jane, someone who would come to accept that she was the one going out into danger, and someone who would love to take care of her when she came back injured. Cedric’s ‘hero complex’ meant he needed to come to terms with Jane’s job, but would be supportive of her afterwards. It also brought him into the whole story, risking his job to be a secret agent once in his life.

I just love to have downtime for Jane with Cedric in the stories. They have fun in and out of bed, they talk shop, they go to a role-playing evening once a week (Cedric brought Jane into that one), and they sometimes take a little holiday together. Cedric is Jane’s link to normality and the one who will take care of her injuries after an intense situation. They’re still in love, they definitely are still in lust, and they will stay that way for a while.

The same way, it’s perfectly fine for Jane Doe to have found her love at the tender age of eighteen and been with the same woman for seven years when Criminal Ventures reaches the ever-changing ‘here and now.’

I have to admit that I like having my main characters in a steady relationship. Since my stories aren’t romance stories, but adventure, pulp, or something similar (it’s more a question of style than of content - but then, write what you know, right?), I don’t need a new romance in every book.

What are good reasons not to have a long-term relationship in your books?

Well, if you’re in a romance novel, obviously. What would one of those be, if the couple started out together and still were together in the end?

If you are in a very dangerous job, it might also be bad to have a long-term relationship. Yet, Jane Browne is a Knight Agent and Cedric has been in danger because of this once (in A Plague of Rogues). He’s also been in danger once because she’s a member of high society with a low tolerance for classist idiots (in Grave Diggers). Some other lovers of my main characters would be dangerous by themselves, like Manju and Lin who both know how to fight.

Apart from that, I can’t really see a reason not to have a character in a steady relationship. It’s always a nice reason to save the world, there’s someone your character can come home to, and you don’t have to think up someone new, either.

One series which did long-term relationship very well, much to my surprise after the first three books, was the Miss Frost series which I’ve already reviewed on this blog. In the first three books, the series builds up a rather classic love triangle between Jayne Frost, ‘good boy’ Cooper, and ‘bad boy’ Greyson. The question seems to be whom she’ll find more interesting in the long run: her old flame Cooper (in every sense of the word, since he’s a summer elf and thus fiery) or the new guy Greyson (who has the added bonus of being a broody vampire). Book number four then simply cancels the love triangle and gives her a new love interest: doughnut baker and necromancer Sinclair who is supportive, understanding, also has a cat, and is even ready to put up with all the stuff a future consort to the Winter Queen has to learn. Sure, the necromancy and his love for black clothes give him some ‘bad boy’ vibes, but his actions are completely above board. Sin is just a nice guy and deserves to be the one she marries in the seventh novel.

In the fourth book, Sinclair and Jayne have her actual courting, before and after he accompanies her to the Halloween ball (important in Nocturne Falls). In the fifth, Sinclair assists Jayne with the yeti problem, doing what is necessary to help her, be it supply transport, bake sweets, or just be there for her to lean on. In the sixth, Sinclair keeps strong in the face of adversity when people at the North Pole are less than happy with a necromancer as the husband of their future queen. Finally in the seventh novel, he takes over his share of the wedding preparations and still finds time to help Jayne solve an old murder case. He’s there, he’s her support, and he never tries to steal her thunder. All of that makes him a great relationship for her.

Personally, I like making sure my characters have a significant other, if they need one, and keeping it at that. I’m not a fan of twenty books of ‘will they, won’t they’ when everyone can tell after book number two that they definitely will at some point. There are many ways to make life for a main character difficult, it doesn’t always have to be through relationships - unless we’re talking romance novels, perhaps.