Agency, in terms of character and plot, is something that has always been something of a mystery to me. So when my editor flagged that sometimes my characters lack agency, I was a little embarrassed that I didn't really understand what she meant. I had a vague notion, but it struck me that if she had felt the need to point it out, perhaps I needed to understand it a lot better.
When I discussed it with a few writer chums, I got a surprising number of uncertain looks. They thought they knew what it meant, but they weren't entirely sure, either.
What agency actually means
Agency means that your character's choices drive the story.
As simple as that.
A character with agency makes decisions — meaningful decisions that have consequences — and those decisions are what cause the plot to happen. The story exists because of what they choose to do.
A character without agency has things happen to them. The plot moves around them. Events occur, other characters act, circumstances shift — and your protagonist reacts, survives, gets rescued, or is simply carried along by the current. They're a passenger in their own story.
It's not, as I've heard some say, strength. It's not competence. It's not likeability. It's just choices with consequences.
Why people get confused
I suspect a lot of this confusion comes from conflating agency with other things.
Agency is not the same as being powerful
A character can be physically weak, politically powerless, and completely at the mercy of a brutal world — and still have full agency, if their choices are what matter. Offred in The Handmaid's Tale has almost no power. She has agency because the story is shaped by her decisions about how to survive, what to resist, who to trust and what to risk.
Agency is not the same as winning
A character can make choices, act decisively, and still fail spectacularly — and that's fine. Agency isn't about outcomes. It's about being the engine of the story rather than a passenger on it.
Agency is not the same as being active all the time
Characters react to events — that's normal and necessary. The question is whether their reactions are choices with weight, or whether they're simply being buffeted and doing random things because they (or you) feel they have to be doing something. Reacting decisively, choosing how to respond and when, deciding what to do next — that's agency.
Agency is not the same as being good or likeable
An antagonist with strong agency is often more compelling than a protagonist without it. Characters can be awful people and still drive the story through their choices. What they can't be, if they're your protagonist, is inert.
What the absence of agency looks like
You know your protagonist lacks agency when:
The plot would happen exactly the same way without them
Other characters do the important things. The protagonist observes, gets rescued, receives information, and reacts. Remove them from the story, and the events unfold identically.
Their choices don't matter
They make decisions, but those decisions have no real consequences. The story corrects around them. Whatever they do, the plot gets where it's going anyway.
Things happen to them, chapter after chapter
They're captured, rescued, transported, informed, threatened, saved. The verbs in their scenes are passive. They're the object of other people's sentences.
Other characters solve their problems
The mentor arrives with the answer. The ally handles the confrontation. The magical object resolves the conflict. The protagonist is present, but not necessary.
This is the agency problem. And it's more common than we realise because it often creeps in without us realising — one scene where someone else solves the problem, another where the protagonist gets rescued, a third where they're simply moved from one place to another by external forces. Individually, each feels fine. Cumulatively, the protagonist becomes a witness to their own story.
Why it matters
Readers need someone to follow, to root for, to invest in. That investment is built on wanting the protagonist to succeed — which requires knowing what the protagonist is trying to do, and believing that what they do matters.
If the protagonist isn't making meaningful choices, the reader has nothing to invest in. They're watching events happen to a person, which is not the same as following a character through a story. The emotional engine stalls.
There's also a deeper problem in that agency is how we understand character. We know who people are through what they choose to do when it costs them something. A character who doesn't make real choices is a character we can't really know, no matter how much backstory you give them or how vividly you describe their inner life.
Test your writing
Look through your work for when something important happens. Ask yourself, was it the protagonist's choices that led to this point? Now they are there, are they actively steering the direction of the story with what they are choosing to do? If they make a different choice, would the story be different?
If you can answer yes to all three questions — they have agency. The story is shaped by who they are and what they decide.
If no — the story would happen the same way regardless of what they did — you have a plot in search of a protagonist.
How to fix a lack of agency in your story
Give the protagonist a clear goal
Not just a vague desire — a specific, active goal that requires them to do things. Characters without goals drift. Characters with goals make choices.
Make their choices matter
If the protagonist makes a decision and nothing changes as a result, the decision has no weight. Real choices close off other possibilities. They have consequences the character has to live with.
Let them fail in ways that matter
Characters who are always rescued from the consequences of failure aren't making real choices — they're making attempts. Real agency means real stakes. They can be saved sometimes, but not always, and not from everything.
Give them the problem to solve
When other characters keep solving the protagonist's problems, ask: why isn't the protagonist solving this? Often the fix is simply to remove the helper and force the protagonist to find the answer themselves.
Give your protagonist back the wheel. Let them drive. And yes, it may involve a lot of rewriting, but it will make your work so much stronger, and you'll feel much happier with your hero.