Writing Female Characters
Writing female characters who feel real, well-rounded, and interesting can be a challenge, but it’s important to get it right. There are some blind spots that many of us—men and women alike—have when it comes to crafting compelling female characters.
I recently watched the old movie Charade and was surprised by how often I expected Audrey Hepburn to do something . . . and she didn’t! Cary Grant kept coming to her rescue. (She had some killer dialogue, though.) Our expectations about women have changed since 1963, and damsels in distress seem a bit dated, now. Most of us know to let women be active characters who make choices for themselves instead of simply damsels in distress.
More interesting female characters than if they were tied up on the tracks vaudeville-style. But maybe just as dangerous? They’re stressing me out! There might be trains coming!
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What not to do when writing female characters
But there are more subtle problems with many first-draft female characters. One of them is limiting women to being support staff. Now, I don’t mean that all main characters need to be female. Of course not! But the women in a man’s story shouldn’t exist merely to support him. Too often, I come across manuscripts where a man is having an adventure—great!—and the cute girl next door, the barista, his mom, his girlfriend, his co-workers, are all focused on his adventure as well. They exist merely to encourage the male main character and to support him emotionally and financially, to loan him their cars and ATM cards or to give him a pep talk and a shoulder to cry on. Show us why they’re invested in his success, and make sure there are some women in the story who don’t drop everything to help him and who have interesting goals and needs of their own.
Worse than limiting female characters to being support staff for the men is when they exist only to underscore the man’s pain. A male main character who is solely motivated by the rape, murder, or mutilation of his girlfriend, sister, mother, or wife is a tired cliché. Let the women in your stories be more than plot devices.
What to do when writing female characters
The Bechdel test is thirty-five years old, but many works of fiction still fail it. Does your manuscript include two named female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man? Their jobs, restaurants, the housing market, doctor recommendations, their mothers, their book club, a movie—anything! This is a low bar, so if your manuscript doesn’t clear it, it’s time to improve.
One simple way to represent our world more accurately is to not always default to traditional gender roles. Is it okay to cast women as third grade teachers and the nurse? Sure. But let a man teach second grade or work as the ultrasound technician, too, especially if you’re writing a contemporary story.
An important way to steer clear of flat female characters is to recognize that physical attractiveness is only one facet of a woman’s experience. This has two parts. The first is maintaining a solid, deep point of view when you’re writing from a woman’s perspective. Women can go days and days without noticing how perky their bosom is or without strapping on their sexiest high heels for the office, so female characters who mention their breasts often or solve crimes in stilettos can seem like a stereotype—especially when more than one woman does so, and it isn’t a conscious character choice for one particular person.
The second part of appearance is that women are more than eye candy. Sometimes writers fall into the trap of writing about men’s personality traits and women’s physical traits. For instance, George might be the intense intellectual or the detail-oriented detective while Georgette might be the leggy blonde or the seductive redhead. Staying away from this kind of shorthand in our outlines and our query letters will help us remember that George and Georgette are both more than their appearance.
But I like Eye Candy!
Me, too! It’s okay to include eye candy in your manuscripts. In fact, if you’re writing a romance or a strong romantic subplot, you’d better include some descriptions of appearances—of both men and women. But they need to be more than just their appearance. A romance might start with appreciating someone’s curves or abs or sparkling eyes, but it needs to dive deeper than that to really resonate with readers.
Last but not least, include a variety of women in your manuscripts. Family-oriented, driven, detail-oriented, dreamers, analytical, artistic, nurturing, selfish, thrift, wasteful, shy, gregarious, travelers, homebodies. Lawyers, physicians, pastors, stay-at-home mothers, volunteers, cashiers, auto mechanics, single mothers, retirees, inventors, preschool teachers. It’s easy to find a broad range of male characters in literature—let’s make sure we’re portraying the full spectrum of women, too.
If you’re aware of damsels in distress, women’s pain giving meaning to men’s quests, women as support staff, the Bechdel test, gender norm defaults, balancing male and female characters in supporting roles, point of view and characterization in describing appearances, eye candy only, and portraying a wide range of women, you’re in good shape for writing compelling female characters that your readers will eagerly root for.
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