Character Agency

Nooo, no burning the barn, that belonged to some poor farmer, you murder-hobo. :(

Or like Harry Dresden of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. He's always poking his nose into dangerous situations and back-sassing things powerful enough to kill him without breaking a sweat, and he gets hurt a LOT for it but always manages, somehow, to survive and save the day. But also getting himself into bigger, more profound messes he has to be clever to weasel out of.

Reading his definition of agency, I can say that all my characters have agency. With me, they literally HAVE to, or else they are flat and boring and lifeless; and I can't write lifeless characters, or characters without agency, unless they're side characters of little importance, because if my protags lack agency or aren't cooperating, then nothing happens in the story because trying to write a story with such characters is, for me, like trying to carve a statue from granite using only toothpicks. I set up the world, I come up with the basic plot and some basic details, I create the characters, and then I set things up and hit Go. Then I watch what happens and write it down as it does.

As a result, the characters often do things I never intended them to do. The story will go in directions I never expected. Sometimes I have to skip boring bits by stopping them and saying "Hey guys, if we continue at this rate we'll fill up 250 pages of two days' worth of dialogue, so maybe let's fast forward a bit." Other times, I have to pick them up and redirect them because they get WAY off track.

But for all the annoyances, this way of doing things is great, because it almost always ends up with awesome character developments I never would have thought of on my own, and the characters are really good at sneaking in foreshadowing that even *I* fail to notice, for things that surprise me later in the story, making me look like a much more thoughtful and skilled writer than I really am, because re-reading it people will think "OMG it must have taken her months to do this kind of detailed planning" but in reality my outline for that story was absurdly simple.
Like, for instance, let's say there's a story with this really cool twist, with brilliant foreshadowing, and you would think I had like 15 pages of outline for, but in truth my outline was basically "Well this is what they find at first, they go looking for clues, and in the end they find (X) did it." Like, I think my longest outline ever was maybe half a page long when typed out.

And even when I make outlines, the characters have a tendency to be like "Okay that sounds cool and all but I have a better idea. No no, just watch, you'll like this."

And then of course if I try to do something contrary to a character's character, the character will be like "Unless there's some really good reason for this, like mind control or 'do this or else the world explodes,' I ain't fuckin doin that." Like the story I've no doubt told you numerous times of my first encounter with Lyria.

TL;DR = I am a slave to my characters; they are the real writers. I am just their tool.