The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 7: Character Motivation + Agency

I probably should have shoved this into the character-building chapters, but I think it warrants its own chapter...

Nature demands us to be selfish creatures. That's not our fault, and on the whole we're still a very altruistic species in comparison to literally anything else, but generally we just don't willingly do particularly hard or dangerous things without a good "why?" Being beholden to other people just sucks, so we avoid it as much as possible. But when you write your stories, you're creating an artificial situation where saying no is not an answer, no matter how much the character in question bitches about it. Bitching is not very fun to read, and in the case of protagonist/antagonist, it's not even an option at all when they are the ones driving the plot forward in the first place. Therefore, you have to answer: why?

This is character motivation. Agency is related, but they're not identical. Character agency refers to how much control the characters are willing (though may not necessarily be able) to exert on their situation, and motivation directly influences that. Neither necessarily make a great character on their own, but they certainly help and make a character more interesting and consistent.

Let's start with character motivation, since that's the more important of the two. And I'm going to say upfront: character motivations do not need to be very complicated. It is perfectly valid to make a stock orphan and say that their parents were killed by the BBEG, or say that this a paragon who does good things just because they're good. Both are fairly common, but they're not bad because they're common! Those can work. Characters can also have multiple, largely unrelated motivations to do the things that they do. For one example, take Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender. She technically has three motivations to leave her tribe and go globe-trotting: 1. To defeat the Fire Nation, who have harmed her people and home, 2. To help the chosen-one protagonist, 3. To learn waterbending from a master. These are the most important things to her, and Katara takes deliberate actions unrelated to the main storyline and characters to serve these motives.

The only real requirement here is that this character's motivations are realistic. Not necessarily, down-to-earth, per se, but...personal. Realistic, y'know? I admit "realistic" is pretty handwavey and bullshitty and nobody really knows what that means, but...most people should be able to get it. This is why "greed" or "powerhunger" isn't always enough for a villain, particularly groups of villains. They...can be, there are certainly real people like that, but those tend to be pretty uncomplicated characters, and not a ton of people IRL are actually like that. In some contexts (such as betrayal), you can't just say that a villain did an evil thing just cuz' they're powerhungry or whatever. Especially not groups of villains or ideologies, who probably have their own motives and aren't likely to act as a monolith.

But at least one of these motivations needs to be directly tied to the main conflict and participation in this conflict should bring them closer to that goal. Otherwise it doesn't make sense why they bother with it. Even if the characters are being forced to participate in the plot without much say in it themselves (which is a thing that happens and can lead to very interesting reluctant heroes) there should be a good reason why they're not trying to escape it and do...literally anything else. This is where agency comes into play.

Getting yanked by the wrist by the plot seems to be the usual method of turning farmer boys into Excalibur-wielding kings, but there's an odd effect of this where the protagonist seems oddly unconcerned that their old life got torched and their new life is fighting dark lords or something. Not to take low-hanging fruit, but Luke Skywalker is an example. In the first, original Star Wars, he never has any choice to get out of the extremely hectic plot and is just kind of dragged along, but oddly Luke just...never complains about it. Hell, he never even mentions about his aunt and uncle dying and is sadder about Obi-Wan's death. It doesn't necessarily make his character worse and he has more agency and direction in the plot of later Star Wars movies, but...still, it's an odd discrepency to notice.

The reason why agency is important is because it makes your characters seem more independent and active. They're the ones making the moves. The villain is responding to them, and that is a show of power to both the characters and to the audience. Or—alternatively—they don't have that independence, and they're just trying to make the best of their crazy shitty situation. Percy Jackson is one such example of a character who doesn't have a lot of control over the plot, but still shows agency by trying to do his own thing when he gets the chance. Either way, agency shows what kind of character and story you're telling, and how it interacts with the plot is a very interesting way to explore your characters.