When you’re planning a book, you usually have your plot pretty well organized. Almost any writer of fiction who has spent a lifetime writing will tell you that your characters tend to do things you have not planned for them to do. Now you can insist that your characters do what you’ve planned for them to do. That is manipulating them. Or you can let your lovely plot go and listen to the characters and go where they want to go, which is usually wiser than where you wanted them to go. It’s usually more in key with their real character. It’s again what I’ve referred to as listening to your book.
I don’t know any writers who won’t say that their characters surprise them constantly, say things they didn’t expect them to say. But you are capable of manipulating your characters back into what you had planned. And any book you read that seems dead is usually where the writer has insisted on manipulating the characters and has refused to allow them to live their own lives.