Activate Your Protagonist!

A passive POV character is NOT your narrative friend

Aimee Liu
The Writing Cooperative
8 min readNov 30, 2023

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Photo by Jonathan Tomas on Unsplash

Throughout my fifteen years teaching in an MFA program, the passive protagonist was one of the most common problems I spotted in student fiction. Female characters were especially likely to be hobbled, particularly when conceived by female writers born into generations that discouraged or prevented women from speaking up, acting…

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Author, Asian-American novels (Glorious Boy), nonfiction on eating disorders (Gaining), writing, wellness. Published @Hachette. MFA & more@ aimeeliu.net