Trauma Writing Lesson 3

Finding Agency in Your Garden Variety Aggravation Story

In Y.A. Kafka, my free Substack post last month, I noted that readers can engage with a trauma story more readily if the narrator can identify agency in the scene. I noted that if you are writing about a child narrator, it’s difficult to locate agency because children have so little power.

“As we all know, kids don’t have much power. Their lives are controlled by adult rules, and they are dependent upon adults for their survival. They don’t have as many choices as adults do. This disempowerment is one reason why we are warned against writing about childhood trauma,” I wrote.

You might encounter great difficulty locating your agency in any traumatic circumstances in which you were powerless. Yet I strongly believe you can find that empowerment. Today’s lesson and exercises will give you some strategies for doing so.

We’ll start with our garden variety aggravation stories, which you wrote last month.

First, let’s define our terms. Agency is acting on your own behalf. According to Merriam Webster, agency is “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.” Agency is the opposite of passivity, which is the process of being “acted upon, receptive to outside impressions or influences, lacking in energy or will, tending not to take the active or dominant part, not active or operating.”

One of the easiest ways to see the difference between agency and passivity, is to take a look at active versus passive voice at the sentence level. Here’s the difference as described by Montana State University:

The active voice matches the subject of the sentence with the actor:

• My brother ^{subject & actor} lost^verb themoney^object.

The passive voice switches the subject and object so that the actor appears after the verb, as an object:

• The money^subject was lost^verb by him^{object & actor}.

The passive voice can also exclude the actor entirely:

• The money was lost.

There is a time and place for passive voice which means you’ll often see it in academic science writing and business correspondence. You’ll also see it in public apologies where the wrongdoer won’t fully take responsibility, i.e. “The money was lost” rather than “I lost the money.”

Writers and readers of stories prefer active voice because it’s more direct and economical and cuts out the unnecessary prepositions such as “by him.” When I instruct my college writing students to use active voice I tell them to put a person in the driver’s seat of the sentence, the subject slot right at the beginning, “brother” here rather than “money” as the second word of the sentence.

So, in order to make yourself an active protagonist with agency in your garden variety aggravation story (rather than a passive object), you can write some active sentences with yourself in the driver’s seat right at the beginning of the sentence.

In a story about you, you need to make yourself an active protagonist (the “hero” of the story), and you can start by making yourself the subject of your sentences and your story.

I’ll use my own garden variety aggravation story to demonstrate. During the pandemic I waited for two men to move a car out of my way while I was walking my dog on a busy street, but they insisted I pass closely by them, which I didn’t want to do.

I’ll tell the story of that standoff, so we can take a look at subjects and objects.

Here, my aggressor/antagonist (person or force that works against the protagonist) is in the driver’s seat of the sentence:

The twenty-year-old guy jumped in his car and peeled out. He leaned out of his car window and yelled at me, “Idiot. You’re so stupid. Cunt! Karen!”

Notice that I’m not in the driver’s seat of the sentence: “me” is an object, not a subject. I’m being yelled at.

It’s fine, of course, to have a few sentences that work this way to describe the action of your antagonist, but you don’t want to give your whole story to the dickhead that attacked you. Please don’t make some jerk the protagonist of your story by letting them take all of the action. Find your agency in the story.

Let’s see what happens if I describe my action with “I” as subject:

Losing my temper, I stuck my middle finger out, arm held high and rigid. “FUCK YOU!” I yelled at the guy who called me “Karen,” which was much worse than calling me “cunt.”

“I” comes at the beginning of the sentence and I am acting, not being acted upon as an object. I am the active protagonist. I am taking action. I am the subject of the sentence, not the object. This is my story, my action. This is an obvious example of agency.

So, yes, I took this angry action as my trusty fight response kicked in, but I immediately regretted losing my cool because it put me in more danger. When I’m angry I forget that I’m only five-foot-two and don’t know how to fight. Here’s what happened next: