On autonomy, resistance, and the refusal to serve the story.
One of the quiet assumptions embedded in storytelling is that characters exist to be useful.
They advance the plot. They illuminate the protagonist. They arrive with clearly defined functions—mentor, obstacle, lover, foil—and exit once those functions have been fulfilled. Even when richly drawn, they are often tethered to the emotional needs of the main character, the protagonist, around whom the story revolves. These characters exist orbiting the protagonist’s transformation rather than possessing trajectories of their own.
This model is efficient. It is also limiting.
When characters exist primarily to serve the story, they risk becoming instruments rather than people. You can still write great characters with the limitations of them serving a singular purpose, but there is a whole other avenue to explore. Their choices can feel anticipatory if they don’t have reasons to anticipate anything else. Their dialogue can feel explanatory if they are there to explain. They behave as the narrative requires, not as their inner lives would naturally dictate. The result may be structurally sound, but it rarely feels alive.
Character autonomy—allowing fictional people to act independently of narrative convenience—changes this dynamic entirely.
Autonomous characters are not indifferent to the story; they are simply not subordinate to it. They carry their own histories, desires, blind spots, and resistances. They do not exist to complete the protagonist’s arc, and they do not adjust themselves to ensure narrative balance. These characters inhabit a world, the same one inhabited by the protagonist, and they have to coexist within it as equals. When they clash with the story’s demands, it is the story that must adapt.
This creates friction. And friction, in serious fiction, is where meaning tends to emerge. In many ways, friction is the core and crux of writing, of story, of drama, and all that we love to read and write.
One of the most telling signs of character autonomy is resistance. Autonomous characters refuse to behave. They don’t necessarily have to be resistant; they just don’t have to conform. They make choices that complicate rather than clarify, and that can lead to something interesting. They misunderstand one another. They withhold information not for suspense, but because withholding feels truer to who they are.
But that has its own drawbacks, too. This resistance can be misread as a lack of development, of characters behaving too ‘randomly.’ Real people are random in that sense, that their responses may be serving their own story, completely independent of whatever dialogue is being spoken in the moment, or by whom its being spoken.
That is the challenge of writing chaotic, independent characters. Making the randomness work and connect. Of course, making everything truly random is not the way to go. Even the most contrarian writers would agree that true randomness will be incredibly risk to write, not to mention incredibly difficult. That is why consistency and knowing the rules and when to break them is critical in writing independent characters.
Think of Lara not being organized around Daniel’s needs in Sometimes Goodbye, or Daniel himself serving as being a protagonist independent to the story. If your characters don’t learn the ‘right’ lessons, don’t follow the ‘right’ paths, it creates opportunity to bring something new, to bring ideas to yourself that you might not have otherwise considered because you were stuck writing how others do.
Fiction that allows characters this latitude risks discomfort. The plot may slow, as it is in Sometimes Goodbye. Resolution may be delayed or denied altogether. But what is gained is credibility. Authenticity. The characters begin to feel as though they would continue existing beyond the final page, not because the author has implied it, but because nothing about them feels artificially concluded.
The ‘happy ending’ makes it so that it’s an end. The arc has ended, but the characters also ‘end’ in that sense. Making your characters alive gives them life beyond, lets them be their own people.
This is particularly important in stories shaped by grief, love, and memory—experiences that rarely align neatly between individuals. These stories aren’t defined by the plot, but by the narrative and how it’s told. There is more credence to a story that changes with what it needs, and stories about loss need deep introspection and messiness that traditional writing styles does not offer.
But then again, you can always do what you feel like is best. I’m just an author with a book to show you, hoping that you’ll read it, and appreciate it for what it is.