Photo comes getting lost in a park in Wyoming this March. It wasn’t a very big park. I just got distracted. I’d been talking on the phone with a friend and ended up missing my turn in the dark. I was worried, but I didn’t panic (I was in the middle of a city, not the wilderness). I enjoyed the beauty and continued taking pictures, and eventually, I found my way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about agency recently. I always believed that I had the ability to make an impact in my own life. Whether it was a positive change or a negative change, I knew that my decisions had a lot of influence in the way my personal story turned out.

In English classes, they call this ability “agency.” In my experience, it is usually used to point out when a character does NOT have agency in a story. You can always tell, because they seem like they seem more like a plot device than a person.

Since my college used to be one of the few colleges for women in the U.S., my classes focused on the agency of female characters in novels written by dudes. But it’s also useful to consider the agency of BIPOC characters in novels written by white people. For example, compare the portrayal of black men’s agency in To Kill A Mockingbird (a story from by a white woman in Alabama writing fiction) as opposed to Just Mercy (a story from a black lawyer in Alabama writing about his actual experience).  

Reading about characters with little agency—especially young female characters--used to annoy the hiccups out of me. So, when I had the chance to write my own book, the same thing annoys the hiccups out of Rory too. In Of Giants and Ice, she is terrified of getting a Tale where she waits around to get kissed.

She is thinking specifically about Sleeping Beauty (if you’ve read the Ever Afters, that Tale becomes important). But recently, I’ve been contemplating another fairy tale, Snow White.

Most of us know that story: her father marries an evil stepmother, who gets jealous of Snow White’s beauty. The evil stepmother orders her huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and bring back the girl’s heart. Snow White pleads for mercy. The huntsman kills a deer and brings back the deer’s heart instead, tricking the evil stepmother. Meanwhile, Snow White runs through the woods and stumbles upon the Seven Dwarves. They adopt her as their honorary sister, and they live happily for a while until the evil stepmother finds out and manages to put a poisoned apple in Snow White’s hands. Snow White eats it and “dies,” poisoned. Her brother dwarves make her a glass coffin, and thank goodness it’s see-through, because a prince just happens to be riding by one day, sees this girl in a coffin, and falls in love at first sight. He kisses her, she wakes up, and happily ever after—yay!

I used to look at this story and think: Dude, where is Snow White’s AGENCY? Literally everyone is doing more than her in this story, and it’s supposed to be HER story.  

This only changed when I expanded my idea of agency: Agency means assessing your own circumstances and making a choice that changes your experience. That doesn’t mean you solve the problem at hand—in Snow White’s case, that problem would be defeating her evil stepmother or breaking the magic spell.

What she did instead is found herself in a bad situation: she was a protected, pampered princess brought to the woods by a man with a knife, and when she realizes that he means to kill her, she uses her agency to ask him to NOT kill her.

You may think that this is pretty basic—just a gut reaction for survival—but if you’ve ever been forced to read the earliest English-language novels (i.e. novels written in English in the 1700’s - 1800’s, mainly in England), you would be amazed at how many women don’t exert enough their agency to preserve their own life. (There is a heck of a lot of swooning, let me tell you.)

So, her first acts of agency are:

• deciding to live and

• asking the huntsman to spare her live.

Seems pretty basic, but if Snow White hadn’t done so, her story would end with the huntsman killing her. Overall, that would be much less interesting.

But she’s not done exerting her agency either. The huntsman leaves her in the woods. This is actually a big deal. Snow White has lived in her father’s kingdom her whole life, and it’s safe to assume that in her castle, she wasn’t being taught basic survival skills. As a princess, she probably had a team of people looking after her without her having to ask.

So, Snow White doesn’t just sit there in the woods and weep, waiting for someone to rescue her. (This is something that seems to happen a lot in English language novels in the 1700-1800’s.) She goes and looks for some help, and she finds the seven dwarves. She makes them her chosen family and makes a home for herself among them.

Also, it’s easy to dismiss this element of the story (since no one likes chores). But for a pampered princess to start to keep house for seven dudes, when she has spent her entire life with servants, that is a pretty steep learning curve on the homemaking front. Let’s ask ourselves: did she even know how to sweep when she got there? Learning chores to take care of her chosen family requires dedication, by which, I mean daily use of her agency to live the life she has chosen.

Another often dismissed aspect of the story: She connects with the dwarves. She develops a relationship with them, and as you get older, you start to realize that any relationship is an investment of time, energy, and—you guessed it—AGENCY. Her relationship with them is what ultimately saves her life. It’s the prince that kisses her and breaks the spell, but the dwarves created the conditions for that rescue.

They don’t just come home and see Snow White collapsed and think, “Wow, that’s too bad. Well, we’ll hold a funeral and return to our regularly scheduled program.” They care about her too much, because Snow White fostered a relationship with them. Instead, they decide to keep her around as best they can—glass coffin and all, and one of them is with her to explain details to the prince when he rides on by.

It may be not be obvious to us, but make no mistake: it’s Snow White’s agency that drives her story—she asks to live, she looks for help, and she connects with the dwarves. That’s why she is the main character. 

But just for another perspective, let’s consider other ways Snow White could have exerted agency in her story:

• She actually could have sat down in the forest and cried her eyes out. As Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, tears are cleansing—and they often numb pain. This emotional release would help Snow White think more clearly. If she was thinking more clearly, maybe she would have sat still long enough to integrate the fact that her stepmother was trying to kill her and that she had to look out for herself a bit. Then she might not have accepted the apple from a strange woman who turned out to be her stepmother.

• She could have stayed in the woods and calmed herself down until she could see its beauty. This may not sound like a big deal, but that takes a lot of emotional effort. A cheerful princess admiring the forest would have very likely attracted the notice of a woodland fairy, who could have probably helped Snow White with her stepmother situation.

• She could have stayed in the woods, developed some survival skills like archery. This is precisely what Snow does in the TV show Once Upon A Time.

• She could have decided that staying in her own kingdom was a dangerous idea and started traveling. Maybe she would have eventually made it to her prince’s kingdom, told him her story and allied with him (maybe through love and marriage, and maybe for more political reasons). Then with a prince as an ally, she could have returned to her kingdom and overthrown her stepmother as a usurper.

So, what’s the point?  

Hint: I’m not waxing philosophical about agency to prove that Snow White has a say in her own story.

For writers, understanding agency when developing your own characters is vital.

But here’s what’s more important: learning to see all the ways YOU have agency in your story, the one you’re living now.

When I say “Believe in your own story” in a copy of my books, or when I write about “Choose the how if you can’t choose the what,” what I’m really saying is this:

You have impact over your life, even when the outer world seems chaotic and messy, even when you are only changing your experience of your circumstances instead of the circumstances yourselves.

But one of the first ways of exerting your agency is recognizing the ways you CAN use it. One method to noticing the agency in others, whether it’s real life or fiction.

Here are a few personal and non-fairy tale examples from this message:

• I didn’t like the lack of agency in many fairy tales. Guided by that dislike, I gave Rory, the main character of the Ever Afters, heaps of agency.

• I reconsidered my understanding of agency and expanded it.

• I took another look at Snow White’s Tale—and then wrote a whole post about it.

• I got lost in the growing dark of the woods, specifically the park of the photo, and instead of panicking, I kept snapping pictures until I finally found my way.

Here’s another way I refer to agency: “personal power.”

As in, I have power over myself and the person I’m trying to become.

We are used to seeing power as bad, but if It was truly always problematic, why does the word “empowerment” inspire us? While we’re on the subject, do you think empowerment comes from outside you? Or is it agency—a.k.a. “personal power” –flowing out of you into action?

So, with (all) that said, what are some of the ways you’re using your agency in your own life? How are you using your personal power to write the story you’re living?