Passive Characters are a weakness in writing. As I write I am figuring this stuff out. If a Character is not doing something he is no a part of the story and therefore should not be written about. Characters who are just standing there doing nothing except piping in with exposition are death to a narrative.
I started to truely realize this not because I wrote a bunch of characters who did jack shit in a lot of scenes but when I started to religiously give characters something to do. This is something I started trying conciously this morning in fact, and it helps greatly. If a character is immobilized either physically or socially they must be aware of it and uncomfortable about it. A king sitting on a throne for example might have a sore arse.
A more pertinent example would be the bad guy high priest in Murder House Warriors. In earlier scenes I had him sitting off to one side doing very little. That made it difficult for me to expand upon his character it gave me few opportunities to frame him so he was very generic.
To fix this I have made him, in the current draft, the master of ceremonies when I introduce the other focal characters of this sequence of the book. He makes a big entrance and is presiding over the ceremony in question and being kind of a dick and gets told off a little bit by Enhengal. There is now tension in the scene Shirrock (the high preist) is prodding and being prodded back the reader is hence entertained.
and that's the most important thing
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