This is a post about writing.  Specifically, it is a post about how characters interact with the events of a story and how the two things inform each other.

First, though, note the standard disclaimers about ‘writing advice’: Everybody writes differently.  Everyone has different things that allow them to connect with the story that they are trying to tell and to then get it to manifest in words, and also different stories often require different approaches.  Any ‘advice’ you might find in this post is very much skewed to my own way of thinking and writing, so if some of it is interesting or helpful to you, then that’s awesome.  But if it doesn’t make sense to you or trips you up, then feel free to ignore and/or mock this post to your heart’s content.

Anyway, it is my belief that anyone who’s been writing stories for any length of time will come up against the issue of agency.  Not because your main character has to have agency in order to be interesting.  Though that is common writing advice, I think we can all come up with a list of one or two or many very excellent books where either not much happens or else the main character is largely dragged along by the events of the story that are outside their control.  But rather, because whoever or whatever has agency is the thing that will drive the events happening in the story and/or will drive the scenes we writers will choose to write.  And whether or not the characters have agency, what we as readers are interested in is seeing how our characters will react to and/or navigate those events and scenes.

So, when I myself am writing and find myself stuck in that question of agency—what is my character doing? how are they affecting events? why are they the person I’m writing this story about?—it can often be at the level of: I’m trying to write this scene and it’s not working.  And at that point it really can feel like a tug-of-war between my character and the necessary agency to affect the plot.  It spirals out to: Is this the right scene? Will my plot follow logically from my character’s motivations and actions?  Do I even know my character well enough to realistically provide their motivations and actions?  And if not, what am I missing—what will make them suddenly become a three-dimensional character?!  Really, it becomes a huge snarl.

Now, at the scene level, and even a little beyond the scene level, there is sometimes a handy trick out of this snarl.  Usually, I see it as writing advice that says: ‘The character needs to always want something, even if it’s just a glass of water.’**  And I think for a lot of people this is helpful starting advice, because if the character wants something, then they have internal motivation to try to get or achieve that thing, compelling them to act and therefore exert or at least seek agency.  However, as noted above, I’m still not convinced that it has to be the main character who has all the agency, certainly not all the time, and I’ve just never really gotten this precise piece of advice to work well for me.  What, for me, works better (again, at the scene level) is: The character needs to always feel something, even if it’s just boredom.

Now, by this I do not mean that in every scene you should tell the reader exactly how your main character is feeling at that time.  Do not write:

John was sitting through a really boring meeting.  Harry was leading the meeting and whenever he did he talked way too much and it was soo boooring.  John was sooo boooooored.

But, if John is sitting in a meeting he thinks is boring, then that does affect how he’ll react to the meeting.  You might consider writing something like:

John sat in the meeting, doing his best to ignore whatever was being said while maintaining a straight enough face to make it seem like he was listening.  Harry was talking, again, and it was so much more pleasant, or at least marginally more pleasant, for John to wonder what he should have for lunch today, than to try to keep listening to Harry.

In the first example, we get very little of John’s personality, except maybe that he is very whiny.  If you want to write a whiny character, then maybe that’s the approach for you, but most of the time whiny characters are not super compelling characters, and I at least don’t want to keep reading about them.  In the second example, John is probably still not that compelling, but at least he’s not whiny, and we do get some sense of his personality.  John’s still not doing anything, but depending on reader taste, he might now seem interesting enough for a reader to read on and see how things go.  Certainly, as a writer, he’s now become more real and interesting enough for me to keep writing, which was the problem I was trying to solve in the first place.  If something happens in this meeting, I now have a little sense of how this character might respond, which will let me keep going and writing the scene.

And, of course, the other part of this trick is that different characters will express and respond to emotions (the same emotions) differently.  If I think dreamy, passive John is not interesting or won’t work for my story, I might find myself instead writing something like:

John ground his teeth, restraining himself to sit still and not fidget.  But Harry was in charge of leading this meeting, and he always took ten minutes to work his way around to a point that was obvious in the first ten seconds.  Whenever the man opened his mouth, John felt the terrible urge to jump up from the table, ram his hand up Harry’s ass like some macabre ventriloquist’s dummy, and force him to spit out the conclusion so they could all get on with things!

This version of John might not be doing anything yet, but it sure sounds like he’s getting ready to do something, and that something will probably be interesting, if also alarming.

So, whatever you think of those examples, you can see how adding emotion in at the scene level, as motivation, can make it easier for both reader and writer to connect with the character.  I tend to write in close third person (or sometimes first person), so the POV (point-of-view) character in any given scene is the main vehicle for experiencing the story; if the reader (or writer) struggles to connect with that character, then they’ll struggle to understand or care about the story.

The title of this post is ‘To Want Something Is Not Enough’, so perhaps at this point you think that I’m proposing that you just need to add what the character feels to what the character wants in order to flesh things out sufficiently and be done with character-building.  But I’ll say again, this is what’s needed at the scene level, to write a compelling scene.  To put together a whole story, you need more than this.  And that’s clear even from those three examples of bored Johns above.  Really, any one of those three could be just the ticket.  However, more probably, none of those three are what is needed by your particular story.  For your story, you either will have to choose or have already chosen things like: What sort of person is John? What sorts of things might happen in that meeting? How might John react, and how is he allowed to react (not by you, the writer, but by the circumstances of his world)?

And a lot of this can be very subconscious.  Some characters just jump off the page, walking and talking and doing interesting things right from the start without the writer hardly even having to think about it.  For me, that’s how it was with the sister and brother-in-law side characters in my Big Story #2.^^  I wanted the main character (MC) to have some specific family drama in his past, and because I’d put that together ahead of time, somehow that magically translated into these two characters being extremely easy to write, and who’ve always felt real to me whenever they come on scene (and despite me not giving them any specific attributes until they first came on scene).  Conversely, I am still struggling with an uncle side-character who I have put character-building and world-building work into—possibly struggling because I want the uncle character to be important to my MC’s future (the story), while his sister and brother-in-law are important to his past, something I already mostly know about (note: I am not the sort of writer who knows what all is going to happen in a story before I write…that’s why I’m writing the story, to find out).

Another example of a character I struggled with is Mina in ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’.  I knew the basics of her personality from the start (angsty, precocious teenager/pre-teen, check).  But everything about that story was being made up as I went along.##  I didn’t know how her world worked.  I didn’t know anything about her past.  And, actually, that’s one of the big reasons why that story has an Installment near about the 60%-mark that’s all flashback.  I’d fleshed out the location of her world pretty well by that point, but I still didn’t know her well enough to write her through to the end, with character growth and all that jazz.  I’d established what she wanted pretty much right at the start: survive her chores.  But…so what?  For a fulfilling story I needed access to other events that had shaped her in the past.

Because wanting something is not enough.  That wanting needs to have context.  And whatever forces are shaping the story need to have context.

You do not necessarily need to spell all of that context out for you or for your reader.  As noted, the subconscious can do wonderful things.  But it’s probably doing those things by making some broad assumptions about context you may not be directly aware of.  In my Big Story #2 example, I wanted past family drama, but I never really articulated, to myself, that I assumed the MC’s family was otherwise a loving one.  I grew up in a loving family, and so that’s my baseline.  Other writers may have other experiences and so make other subconscious assumptions, which may work equally well even though the results would be very different.  When it comes to writing fantasy, there are some things we might fill in subconsciously (unicorns look and act mostly like horses, check), and other things that might create massive, sudden pitfalls in the middle of drafting (wait, how long has this army been marching? and where is its food coming from? My Commander character would probably be just as concerned about food as about attack tactics since this is a totally new region to them, but I don’t want to write a book about an army looking for food… …and now I’m lost in a writing muddle).

And here is where I drag things back around to the question of agency, and that fact that multiple characters or even things in your story should probably have agency.  If you’re flailing in trying to write your story because you don’t know how to feed the army that you need to have march across two continents (for example), this might be the time to stop and consider who (or what) has the agency on this issue.  Is your MC really going to be the person dealing with this problem?  Are you so convinced that the MC has to have all the agency, that your army Commander must be the Solver of All Things?  Perhaps instead you should consider ceding some agency here, add in a little world-building (a little context) that says: Actually, this army is known for being kind of logistically terrifying and food is just not a problem.  Or maybe they do have to march a long way, but they’re on great terms with the local population they’re passing through and can buy whatever they need.  Or maybe they’re happy to pillage from everyone and everything in their path and your Commander character is happy to let them keep doing that.  Each of those options are choices of context that do have important implications for the sorts of events we might expect in your story, even though they mean that finding food does not need to be any sort of focus in any of the scenes that you write.  You can give that piece of story-agency to the world-building and let it do that work in the background, affecting events in ways neither you nor the reader might be directly aware of.  (E.g., of course there should eventually come an attack from the rear; they’ve been pillaging their way through two continents, which you don’t need to say, it just makes sense.)

Someone/something else that should probably have agency in your story? Your antagonist(s).  (Side note: an antagonist does not need to be a villain! just an impediment.)  Think about it.  If your MC is the only part of the story that has agency, the only element you’ve deemed important enough to flesh out with character quirks and backstory and useful skills for getting out of tricky situations, then your story is going to end up reading like a video game on easy mode.  Yes, you might still get to explore some cool things, but the world your character moves through won’t feel alive, and whatever stakes you set up will feel superficial.  Once we get to know your character, that will be it; there won’t really be any more surprises.  And as a writer you might find yourself struggling to continue writing, because it’s all sort of flat and boring.

Another common piece of writing advice is: ‘Stories are based on conflict.’  But again, I think that’s stating it more strongly than must.  To be interesting, stories need complication.  Either way, whether it’s conflict or complication, those things can’t happen without more than one element in the story possessing agency and context.  If your antagonist is a straight-up villain, aren’t the best villains more fun and interesting when we can sympathize with them a little bit, or when there’s something mysterious about them we’re curious to piece together?  Those things are difficult to write without fleshing them out and giving them context.  And if you give them context, then suddenly they’ll have much more interesting options for thwarting our MCs or complicating their lives.  If the antagonist is a hostile environment, on the other hand, then to make that come alive and be satisfying for the reader, the writer needs to know more than just that it’s hostile.  What makes it hostile, and are there any ‘weaknesses’ to that hostility the MCs can exploit?  Is there something about this hostile environment that has a history, either known or not, that can tie into the story?  (I just re-watched the movie Pitch Black, and that has a lot of antagonists, but one of them is definitely the alien planet.  The writers seed lots of clues as to the history of the planet’s hostility through many of the scenes, and those help the viewers connect both to the setting and to the story that’s taking place.)  Or perhaps the story you’re writing is more cozy, with no villains and a gentle environment.  But even the best of friends can add complications (interesting or vexing) to a MC’s life, through misunderstandings or misguided intentions, or simply by having some desire that conflicts with the MC’s plans.  All of those things are agency that live outside the realm of your MC’s agency, and they require context to arise and be discovered and play out.  Life is complicated because everyone and everything around us has some degree of agency, which will conflict and tangle on each other lots of the time.  Stories arise when those complications interact in interesting ways, and you’ll have lots more ideas for how to do that when you have some idea of your story’s contexts.

So, yes your characters need to want something, and yes your characters need to feel something.  But neither they nor the scene they are moving through exist in a vacuum.  There’s context, and context provides options (and restrictions), options provide agency, and agency leads to nifty complications that just might turn into an interesting story.

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** Note, here I want to link you to an excellent post on this subject that existed on the writing-advice blog magicalwords.net.  However, that website has since disappeared into the ether.  But, there is a book that was written from posts on that blog, and here is a link to the description of that book, which has a lot of great stuff in it.  (Also, random aside: This advice always makes me think of the Bruce Willis movie Hudson Hawk, a heist movie wherein the main character is on an eternal (side)quest for a decent cappuccino.)

^^ I don’t have a great reference link for this story-in-progress, but you can catch mention of it in my last yearly writing-progress post.

## Note, I think this is why I am instantly turned off by certain YA fantasy novels.  They are often excellent novels on multiple levels, but the female MCs in these books, to me, read as Buffy the Vampire Slayer transplanted into this new fantasy world, without any constraints on or variations of personality that would arise due the effects of growing up in that world.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great character, who is very much a product of being a late-twentieth-century American high-school student.  Yes, teenagers are teenagers are teenagers, but how they express themselves and what they expect out of life are massively dependent on the world that they’re raised in.  To not include those elements, I feel, really undercuts the world-building that goes into a fantasy novel, and world-building is always going to be one of my very favorite things.