At the end of my previous post, I recommended Jack M. Bickham’s book Scene and Structure to anyone who wants to write in what we might call the “heroic protagonist” mode. In my review of that book on Goodreads, I mention that the closer your story is to being an action thriller, the more applicable his advice will be.

I say this because different modes and genres of fiction deal differently with character agency. I think it’s worthwhile taking a post to think that over, since if you’re not writing the kind of story where your main character shows a lot of agency – a “heroic protagonist” story – a lot of the failure modes I talked about in the previous post are not as applicable. Also, this is a lead-in to the next post, in which I’ll consider how a diversity of voices changes how agency is represented in fiction.

First, let’s talk “literary” vs “genre”. This is a pairing that has some problems, not least that there is a genre often referred to as “literary” as well as a style that is “literary”, and it can also be an evaluative term. When I think of literary-as-genre, I think of a set of expectations and conventions, like the ones we have in other genres, and one of the characteristics that stands out to me is a difference in typical levels of protagonism between a literary-genre story and a heroic-protagonist story.

To generalise wildly, most literary-genre stories I have read – even the ones with fantastical elements – feature main characters who are not protagonists (that is, they are not struggling towards a goal, which is what “protagonist” means). Instead, their typical arc is through helplessness to hopelessness. Their relationships fall apart, their careers are revealed as hollow, they become alienated from society and its expectations, and they do little or nothing to remedy any of this. It’s as if, in Literary World, the truth is that everyone in the world is rather pathetic and doomed to unhappiness, and the story that gets told over and over is of someone realising that truth, or (if they never consciously acknowledge it) at least becoming victims of that truth.

The literary genre is a genre often seen as belonging to the elites, and other genres are seen as “popular”, of the masses. I invite you to reflect on the implications of the literature of the elites being about the hollowness of all striving, while the literature of the masses perpetuates a narrative of personal choice and agency.

Having been, no doubt, grossly unfair to many writers who I haven’t read (since I avoid the literary genre exactly because so much of it is so passive and hopeless), let’s move on to genres where I can speak from a much wider sample of texts: science fiction and fantasy (SFF). First, though, let’s take a detour into romance.

There was a brief period when I thought about writing romance; I still need to write the post about why I decided not to, but part of it involved the very strong genre conventions, some of which I didn’t think I could bind myself to. Although romance, like any genre of its vast size and popularity, has a good deal of diversity in it these days, there are still some powerful expectations. One is the Happily Ever After (so expected that it’s been abbreviated as HEA); whatever the couple’s struggles along the way, you can be confident going into a romance that they are going to end up together, basically from the moment of the Meet Cute, however unattractive either or both may seem as people and however poorly suited they appear. (And however much our real-life experience may suggest that many relationships do not, in fact, work out; though there is a nod to this in the HFN ending, Happy For Now.)

This fatedness reminds me of the Hero’s Journey. Going into any heroic story that we have no reason to suspect is a tragedy, we carry the expectation that right will triumph, that the apparently unworthy, unskilled, and unsuitable person we’re introduced to early on will somehow become an epic hero, and the seemingly powerful villain will be defeated. These strong expectations impose certain limits on agency. No matter how much the romance hero/heroine or the heroic protagonist screws up, refuses to learn, treats people around them badly, falls back into old habits, or is just unpleasant and unworthy in general, the result is still inevitable: HEA in the romance, victory in the heroic story. In unskillful hands, it becomes a flaw.

In historical romance, we get an extra level of constraints. Consider the Regency romance, for example. The woman is generally expected to be innocent and virginal, and her powerful imperative is to marry well, because her economic security depends on her ability to attract a wealthy and powerful man, however repellant. The man is generally expected, with some exceptions, to be sexually experienced, and to have the wealth and power that the woman needs her mate to have, and the arrogance that goes along with it; but he, too, is constrained, if to a much lesser extent, by the powerful expectations and conventions of society. At worst, these conventions become a cattle-chute directing them to their fate; at best, they kick against them a little, but somehow manage to end up in a happy situation within their society. Their choices are severely constrained, and part of the joy of a good Regency romance for me is seeing how the characters still look for and find agency within, or even outside, those constraints.

Turning, then, to SFF, where I am much more widely read in both classic and contemporary texts than in the genres I’ve just been discussing with an assumed air of authority: within this sprawling and diverse landscape, we inevitably find differences in agency. Some SFF stories show us people with enhanced levels of agency – wizards, for example, or supers – and must then give them challenges that are equally heightened to prevent their victory from being too easy. But there are parts of SFF that don’t give their main characters much agency at all. Many (not all) hard SF stories, for example, give us characters who are little more than cameras, witnessing wonders that they are too small and insignificant to affect. Much of Arthur C. Clarke’s work falls into this category.

I haven’t read much Mythos, and hardly any horror, but my impression is that Mythos, like hard SF, often (not always) confronts the characters with something so vast and implacable that the idea that they might have agency is almost ridiculous. The smallness and insignificance of humanity is part of the point. Mythos is one of the ancestors of modern horror, and (again, this is an impression, since I don’t enjoy horror and have read very little), often in horror the characters struggle futilely against the monster that will inevitably kill them. Again, the helplessness is part of what the author is going for.

One aspect of agency, which I’ve touched on when discussing the Regency romance, is: how powerful is the system? How much intertia does society have against change? And are the characters on the side of change, or the side of preservation of the status quo?

In many traditional heroic or “high” fantasy stories, the preservation or restoration of the status quo is a key, and unexamined, goal: the return of the king, the defeat of the Dark Lord who would bring change to everything, the defence of the empire (with all its faults) against the barbarians. Many military space operas share this stance. It’s one we also see in a lot of thrillers, where the protagonists are fighting against international criminals or terrorists who are out to destroy the stability of the system. And – unfortunately, in my view – it seems to be an unexamined assumption in a lot of steampunk, despite that genre’s vast and usually untapped potential to show us the kind of social change that technology brought about in the real 19th century, and is still bringing about today.

In sword-and-sorcery and its SF equivalent, which doesn’t have a name that I’m aware of but tends to feature a ragtag spaceship crew on the outskirts of society and the law, we see the opposite. The ultimate triumph of the system is seen as a negative, though usually still inevitable. The crew win what victories they can on the fringes, while the overall system mostly remains intact. The crew, indeed, are rarely even trying to change the system; that’s too large a goal for the level of agency they possess. Instead, they work around it or outside it as best they can. But there’s a sub-sub-genre in which this ragtag band, or perhaps an individual thief, used to having almost no agency and barely getting by, obtains something that puts them into an unaccustomed position of power and responsibility, and they must cope with the challenge of doing the right thing (and figuring out what that is). This is the opposite of the also popular “riches to rags to riches” structure, where someone who is used to a life of privilege and power has a fall – which sometimes is their fault, but usually is not – and their struggle is to regain control over their life.

There are stories about revolution and rebellion from the point of view of the rebels, too, scattered through the SFF landscape. Star Wars is an obvious example. In many technothrillers, most cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk stories, and a few fantasy and steampunk works, the protagonists struggle against The Man, the corrupt and cruel system that’s keeping people down, or trying to suppress the spread of some technology that could benefit society, or to prevent knowledge of something that could challenge the status quo from getting out. The ultimate example here is, of course, dystopian fiction such as The Hunger Games (which, I might add, does a better job than most of showing how the rebellion itself can be corrupted by the ambition of the powerful). Early dystopias like Brave New World and 1984 are tragedies of a sort, in which the failure of the protagonists is not a consequence of their personal tragic flaw but of the enormous power and momentum of the system; recent dystopias, particularly YA dystopias, more often feature a successful revolution. There are even a few elements of dystopia in Harry Potter, where Harry and his friends, low-status by reason of their age, are right when the Ministry is wrong, although the resolution to that is that they eventually end up in power within the system, not that the system is overthrown.

I don’t usually read “antihero” stories, but I should say something about them. The antihero is still a protagonist, still struggling for a goal, and this is what makes us want to follow them and even see them succeed, despite the fact that they are not, in many ways, admirable people, and their goals may not be admirable goals.

Taking this to a further extreme, grimdark fantasy (and SF) shows us unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to other unpleasant people in pursuit of mostly selfish and destructive goals. In grimdark, however much agency they may possess, nobody can escape the grim darkness of the world – and few even attempt to. It’s not so much the system itself, but the corrupt and hopeless nature of the system and indeed reality, that acts as a binding constraint. Interestingly, given that this is similar (at least in my eyes) to the nihilistic worldview of a lot of literary-genre stories, grimdark is often written in beautiful prose.

I’m part of the noblebright fantasy movement, formed as an explicit reaction to grimdark, so I’m hardly a neutral observer. In noblebright, the world is often dark, but we can and must struggle against it, and bring at least some light in the darkness. Noblebright celebrates everyone’s agency to oppose evil, which is probably why I like it, and why I’m sitting here writing a blog series about agency.

Let’s bring this to a conclusion. In our tour of various genres, we’ve seen different levels and types of agency. The kinds of questions to ask, when going into these genres, are:

• Do the main characters have a lot of agency, or only a little?
• Is there an expectation in the genre that they will (ultimately) be worthy and admirable people?
• What kind of goals are available to them in this genre?
• How much do they struggle for their goals, and how successful are they?
• How likely/expected is it that they will achieve those goals?
• What constraints are placed on them by the system in which they find themselves?
• What’s the disparity between their level of agency and the system’s inertia, and has the story been precipitated by a big change in that disparity (in either direction)?
• Are they fighting for the system, against the system, within the system, or around the system? Or is the system very much in the background?
• Is the system good, bad, or a mixture?
• Is the system expected or likely to change? Is that part of the characters’ goals?
• How much do you want to mess with the usual expectations of the genre?

I’ll go a little further into the idea of the system as constraint in my next post, the last in this series, where I look at diverse voices and what they’re doing to shift expectations about agency in fiction.

We’re in a time (again) where we’re asking questions of agency – does our vote count? Are we, and our fellow citizens, really exercising our own wills when voting? Will our voice be heard? Can we do anything?

Climate change; major powers making bad collective decisions that will impact us all; Russia setting out to turn the whole thing over so it can be more powerful; technology changing around us at a rapid pace and putting giant, almost uninfluencable corporations in charge of key elements of our daily lives… agency is something a lot of us are worried about. 

Colonized people, people of colour, and women will be familiar with the feeling; but now we all get to share it, even straight cis middle-aged white guys like me. To have any more hegemony, I’d have to be rich or dead, and yet there are still times when I look at the world and feel a lack of agency.

Since fiction is a thing I think about a lot, as both a writer and a reviewer, this therefore seems to me like an appropriate time to look at fiction through the lens of agency.

I’m not setting out to be Joseph Campbell here. Please don’t take it that way. This is not “the way everything works all the time”. It’s a lens, one of many we can look through, that might show us things that are not as visible through other lenses.

Having mentioned Joseph Campbell, let’s briefly discuss the Hero’s Journey, which (whatever Hollywood and its writers may have suggested to you) is only one possible story structure among many. The Hero’s Journey is both a celebration of agency (typically of young white men), and an imposed shape that bends the hero on his inevitable, predictable arc. The “fated hero” can neither be kept from his triumph, nor can he avoid his journey and its predetermined steps – and his companions, having less agency, usually bear the cost.

(My short story “Gatekeeper, What Toll?” takes the idea of the fated hero and examines it through the eyes of an outsider, who has seen many such heroes come and go and knows what disruptive forces they represent. I didn’t set out to write a story that did that, and only realized afterwards that I had done so; perhaps it was my fate.)

Anyway: Agency in contemporary Western fiction is typically expressed through protagonism, and the impact of the characters on the world, but also elements of coincidence, the help or hindrance of other characters, obstacles, and complications. (For the difference between an obstacle and a complication, see the Writing Excuses podcast, season 14, episode 13; but briefly, an obstacle is a challenge that the character encounters and either overcomes, or doesn’t, on the way to their goal; a complication turns the plot into a new direction.)

A typical template for a Western protagonist is: Circumstances are such that they must attempt to change the situation, or terrible consequences will ensue; but in making this attempt, they encounter opposition. In overcoming this opposition, they will have many defeats as well as victories, which will both shape and reveal their character. Ultimately, they will either triumph through their inherent abilities, the skills and knowledge they have gained in the course of their adventures, and the help of allies they have won through their right conduct or special identity; or they will fail through an inherent flaw, in which case the story is a tragedy.

That’s a story about agency. The character is (unless it’s a tragedy) ultimately able to change their situation for the better. But they don’t have unlimited agency; the opposition they face reminds us that they, too, like us, are human and subject to limitations, and it’s their struggle that makes the story interesting, just as their motivation to act makes it relatable, and their triumph makes it cathartic and inspirational.

We love this story because we want to be that person: the one who will fight for what we care about, the one who will make right choices (or, if we make wrong choices, will learn from it and change and become a better person), the one who will draw others to our cause, the one who can change the way things are (or put them back how they should be, according to taste), and the one who, as a reward for all of this, will achieve our goals and receive the admiration of people who are important to us. That’s not, of course, how life always goes; that’s one reason the story is so appealing. It’s a wish-fulfilment fantasy, about being better people than we often are, and about the world being fairer than it often is. It’s a fantasy of agency.

There are some inherent failure modes associated with this story format, and I’ll discuss them in another post. A third post will deal with different attitudes to agency, and different degrees of character agency, in different genres and subgenres (mostly SFF – science fiction and fantasy – since that’s what I mainly read). And a final post (unless I think of another one as I go along) will discuss how admitting new, diverse voices and different life experiences to the conversation of literature can change how agency works in fiction.

Stay tuned. Or not; you get to choose.

I woke up at two o’clock this morning and started thinking about fiction. (This is normal behaviour for a writer.) In the nonlinear way that brains work at 2am, my brain came up with a metaphor that I’d like to explore here.

Of the several ways in which fiction can be satisfying, here are two:

A. Events have an impact on characters.

B. Characters have an impact on events.

Those aren’t at opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re like sliders on a mixing board, which can be moved up and down independently. Let’s call them treble and bass, respectively.

underwhelmer / Foter / CC BY

Here’s a theory. The “sad puppies” (if you don’t know who they are, rejoice, and bail out now, because this post won’t make a lot of sense to you) are all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. (I’m generalising and exaggerating for the sake of a point; fair warning, I’ll be doing a lot of that, so take what I have to say with salt to taste.)

My speculation is that in the brief interval before they decided to engage in a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics, and then got hijacked by the king of the haters, the puppies may have thought, “We, and everyone we know whose opinion we respect, like fiction with lots of bass, and don’t care much about treble. These Hugo-winning stories have too much treble, and not enough bass. Since no right-thinking person would actually like them, there must be a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics! That’s so wrong! We should do it too!”

Incidentally, in my view the short stories–not so much the novels–that have won Hugos in recent years do tend to emphasise treble a lot more than bass, reflecting a wider trend in the pro magazines and anthologies. The novels have more of a balance between the two–at least, the ones I’ve read.

I personally prefer a balance: both treble and bass. I find bass-only stories as unsatisfying as treble-only stories. But let’s think about why people might write stories that are strongly one or the other. Wild speculation, OK? I could be completely wrong here.

Let’s say you’re a member of a historically disadvantaged and disempowered group (for our current purposes, any such group will do). What’s your experience going to be? Might it possibly be that you experience being impacted by events more than you experience impacting events? And might your fiction reflect that experience?

And if, by contrast, you’re a member of a historically advantaged and empowered group, won’t you tend to experience, and think in terms of, your actions impacting events? And (here the speculation goes completely wild) might there be reasons that you don’t want to think too hard about how events impact people? Why you might want to live in a universe where everyone is stoic and unmoved, and nobody’s life is defined by things that happen to them without their consent? Particularly if your group’s experience of unquestioned power is waning, and is now being constantly challenged, with questions being raised about whether your advantage over others is a good thing, even whether it will continue to exist?

Now, I want to live in a world where everyone can experience both bass and treble. I think that world is coming, but it isn’t here yet. During such a transition, fiction becomes a zone of conflict, because fiction is inherently political, because it’s a cultural product produced by people, who can’t help being political even if they think they aren’t.

And that is all I have to say about puppies.