Let's talk about your protagonist: the one who showed up in your imagination when you were just minding your own business one day, dragged you through draft after draft of an ever-changing plot, trotted through your head when you were trying to sleep and told you everything they were thinking and feeling, and felt like they could be your friend if you met in real life.
But beta readers, agents, and editors aren't as captivated by this character as you are. Instead, they say vague things about your protagonist being passive.
What???
You comb through your manuscript. Of course your beloved protagonist is active! Look at all those pages where you describe their goals and motivations! Your character has endearing quirks (that eyebrow waggle!) and a wry vocabulary, an inner journey and an outer one. But, well, sure, you can make them even more active. You add in more facial expressions, more gestures, more thoughts, and some turbulent emotions. You write more scenes and more dialogue. Again you send your story off, with the anxious question, "Is X more active?"
"I guess . . ." say your beta readers. It's not what you'd hoped to hear.
The conundrum of the active character
Developing active characters is one of the most difficult things a fiction author will ever get their head around. I know this because it is almost always one of the main issues that a client needs to deal with when I am doing a developmental edit. If you're having trouble writing active characters, then welcome to the author club!
Part of the difficulty is that active characters embrace two concepts:
Good storytelling depends on action (movement, change, people doing things, things happening).
Good characters need to act (not just react).
Your protagonist can feel active to you, the author, because you have an intimate understanding of the story's weight, meaning, flow, and climax. And the story is freighted with your own activity: you've written thousands of words and many drafts. But if you don't make that undercurrent of energy explicit, your readers will miss it—and your protagonist may seem passive.
To shift your characters from passive to active, you can use writing techniques that raise the level of action in your story, and you can make the characters themselves more active and less reactive. I'll share with you three strategies for achieving the first objective, plus one for the second.
1. Get outside of your character's head.
While knowing a character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations is important in a story, overemphasizing a protagonist's interior state can cause the story to stall out.
Here's a typical example:
Jorge stared at the door. Was Ellen about to come through it? If she did, what would he do? Ellen was the reason he had taken this job in the first place—and here he was, so nervous about the possibility of seeing her that his hands were sweating. What if he messed it all up? It reminded him of the time he had been so excited about winning the spelling bee that he had tripped while crossing the stage to receive the award. Ugh—the memory still made his face burn. No way did he want anything like that happening with Ellen. Maybe he could think of something to say when she walked in. "Hi, stranger!" Or maybe "Fancy meeting you here!" Worse and worse.
Unrestrained interiority may go on for too long, repeat information, or state the obvious. It wastes words and can bore readers.
A useful remedy is to focus on what actually happens rather than on what your character wants to happen or thinks may happen or is trying to avoid, or how they feel about it, or what caused it. The story will instantly become more interesting, and the character's interior world will emerge clearly. We could revise the sample paragraph above to:
Jorge stared at the door, wondering with every footstep in the hallway outside if Ellen was about to enter. His hands were sweating. He tried practicing what he would say when he saw her: "Hi, stranger!" "Fancy meeting you here!" Ugh, these lines were terrible! When the door finally opened and Ellen glided in—all dark, slanted eyes and plum-lipsticked smile—it didn't matter anyway, because all he could do was stare at her wordlessly with a ridiculous grin.
2. Highlight your character's notable actions.
A common writing misstep is to include a lot of boring action beats in a scene:
Jorge stared at the door and sighed. When Ellen walked in, she blinked in surprise. "Hi," said Jorge, his mouth curving into a little smile. Ellen dimpled at the sight of him. There was a long silence. "Hi," she said with a nod. Jorge bit his lip.
I think this sort of writing is a natural response to the prevalence of movies and television. Onscreen, a story can be told through facial expressions, gestures, tones of voice, and moments of stillness. However, this aspect of visual media doesn't translate well to written stories.
Consider the A&E production of Pride and Prejudice, with its lingering shots of Mr. Darcy gazing soulfully at Lizzie. By contrast, in the novel Jane Austen refers to ordinary gestures sparingly, to amplify a character or advance a scene. She writes before Darcy's proposal to Lizzie, "He sat down for a few moments, and then getting up, walked about the room." By describing Darcy's extraordinary behavior, Austen conveys his state of mind.
Don't clutter up your prose with meaningless action beats. Instead, focus on exceptional behaviors and events that add interest:
The door swung open. Ellen was behind it, and just as she came through—her broomstick skirt swishing around her legs—she tripped in her high heels. Jorge leapt forward to catch her. "Jorge," gasped Ellen, peering up into his face from her awkward position mid-fall. He helped her find her balance and stepped back, realizing that there was now a goofy grin across his face. "Wow, it is so great to see you," he said, forgetting whatever line it was he'd been practicing.
3. Elicit emotion rather than describing it.
Because emotion is so important in stories, authors sometimes attempt to arouse emotion in readers via explicit descriptions of it. Consider a paragraph such as this one:
Looking at the old man sleeping off his fishing trip, the boy felt a catch in his throat. He knew what the old man had been through: the fight with the big fish, his hands torn by hooks and lines, the stormy seas. He sniffled and then began to sob deeply. This man would forever be his hero.
Setting aside the fact that I didn't try to approximate Ernest Hemingway's style at all, did you feel much when you read those sentences? While they tell us something about a character's feelings, they don't create the conditions for us, the readers, to feel those feelings. Authors build a satisfying emotional experience for readers in a roundabout way: with absorbing plots, effective tension, meaningful scene and setting details, and fleshed-out characters with whom readers identify. These form a context for emotion to naturally arise. That's why Hemingway's actual paragraph in The Old Man and the Sea is so poignant:
He was asleep when the boy looked in the door in the morning. It was blowing so hard that the drifting-boats would not be going out and the boy had slept late and then come to the old man's shack as he had come each morning. The boy saw that the old man was breathing and then he saw the old man's hands and he started to cry. He went out very quietly to go to bring some coffee and all the way down the road he was crying.
Hemingway doesn't need to repeat for us what the old man has been through. Instead, he releases tension by addressing our anxiety about whether the man survived the night: "The boy saw that the old man was breathing." Certain details portray sacrifice, heroism, and sorrow: windy weather that keeps the boats ashore, and the old man's hands. When the boy cries, we identify with his feelings about the old man and also feel tenderness for the boy himself. And yes, I cried when I first read this novel 30-odd years ago.
All of the techniques that you can use to improve the emotional quality of your story have the bonus result of making your characters more active.
+1. Give your protagonist bigger and less reactive actions.
Every character has their own blend of influencing and being influenced by the plot and other characters. Generally, a protagonist should be capable of making interesting things happen of their own volition. It can be a helpful exercise to list out each major action your protagonist takes. Here's what that might look like for "Cinderella":
Asks stepmother if she can attend the ball
Tries to get stepsisters ready for ball so that she has time to make a dress for herself
Gives up and resigns herself to missing the ball
Is sent to the ball by her fairy godmother
Leaves ball almost on time and loses glass slipper
Asks to try on slipper
Marries prince
Cinderella's actions tend to consist of following rules, asking for permission, and giving up. She is only able to attend the ball because someone swoops in and rescues her. If this reminds you of your protagonist, consider brainstorming bigger actions they can take, and look for ways that they can influence the plot and other characters. What if, rather than asking for permission to attend the ball, Cinderella pawned her stepmother's Waterford crystal vase so she could buy a ballgown? This scenario would make Cinderella more compelling as a character and the plot more exciting.
I hope these ideas have given you a glimpse of how rewarding it can be to make a protagonist more active—whether that means you get to have more fun with the plot, or unleash your full creativity in portraying your character.
Banner photo by Nicolai Berntsen on Unsplash