The Difference Between Sitting Back and Taking Charge
By Evan Braun

Throughout the past year, I’ve been revising an old manuscript I wrote almost a decade ago. It’s a novel I was forced to abandon, despite still being excited about it. Without going into the specific circumstances, that book sat collecting dust for a long time, stuck at about the ninety percent mark. It was a good book that just didn’t have an ending.

When I had the opportunity to join a new critique group back in January, I decided to take another crack at this book. I figured all I needed was some encouragement to finally push it across the finish line.

On the first Tuesday of every month, each member of the group submits a maximum of seven thousand words. For me, that adds up to about two chapters. All year I’ve been scouring that original manuscript, polishing, excising, and augmenting it on the way to a final draft that’s been ten years in the making.

It hasn’t been as clean as I remember it. In fact, entire swaths have needed to be heavily revised or entirely replaced. Ten years is a long time in a writer’s career, after all. I was making some mistakes back then that I probably wouldn’t be making today.

One of the mistakes I made was to allow my main character to be too passive. It’s proved to be my biggest headache throughout the revision process.

As part of my previous blog posts related to grammar, I’ve written about passive and active sentence construction, and why active voice is almost always better than passive voice.

The issue of passive and active characterization is a completely unrelated subject, but the bottom line is the same: active characterization is almost always better than passive characterization.

Let’s dig into my own example to better understand the difference between the two approaches.

In my original manuscript, my main character, Lena, finds herself dropped into a truly perplexing situation. She wakes up one day in the body of a stranger, effectively taking over another woman’s life. Lena doesn’t have any concrete instructions or explanations, but she knows that she has been put in this scenario for a reason—to complete an important mission. It’s a mission she will have to discover along the way, since no one has laid it out for her.

This is, in theory, an exciting premise. However, it has to be handled with great care because it’s the quintessential setup for passive characterization.

In my first draft, Lena stumbles through this woman’s life for about four chapters, gradually picking out clues as to her purpose. These chapters were meant to be filled with tension and intrigue as Lena tackles the mystery of learning what she’s meant to accomplish, all while forcing herself to masquerade as a stranger to that person’s family and friends.

This can work—and in my revised draft, I think it does. But in the original, this section of the novel turned out to be a slog. Lena isn’t driving the action. She blunders her way from one scene to the next. The story is happening to her and that underlying passivity goes on far too long. The storytelling grows tedious.

I needed to find a way to recalibrate these chapters so that she wasn’t just sitting back and letting the story happen to her. I had to make sure she was the one in the driver’s seat. She needed to be more active.

Here’s the crux of it: readers love cheering for characters who take charge. They don’t just survive the onslaught of life, they move through the landscape of the story like a proverbial hurricane.

In the revised draft of my novel, I don’t rely so heavily on the mystery. Lena starts this adventure with a little bit more knowledge of her goal. There’s still a portion of the story where she’s trying to figure out her purpose, but it only lasts about one chapter. After that, she defines a clear goal and pursues it relentlessly.

That’s a character that I think my readers will be able to root for.

I’ve found that this a common mistake with less experienced authors. Many storytellers overemphasize a character’s cluelessness during a mystery, and in the process a lot of natural story tension can be squandered.

To make a long story short, by reconceptualizing the story to make my main character more active, I ended up coming up with the perfect ending to the book. All that trouble I had finding an ending? Well, it was directly related to my character’s passivity. By resolving that detail, I solved the big-picture problem that had been holding me back.

* * *

Did you enjoy this post? You may be interested in Proactive vs. Reactive Characters. For more great writing tips check out Evan's other posts, here.

About this Contributor:

Evan Braun is a full-time author and editor. He has authored three novels, the first of which, The Book of Creation, was shortlisted in two categories at the 2012 Word Awards. He has released two sequels, The City of Darkness (2013) and The Law of Radiance (2015), completing the series. Braun is an experienced professional editor, and has worked with Word Alive Press authors since 2006. He is also a regular contributor at The Fictorians, a popular writing blog.