There is one singularly important rule to writing good female characters. It’s a rule often forgotten (or possibly not known in the first place) by most writers. What is that rule? You can’t. That’s right, there is no such thing as a good female character. No good male characters either. The moment the character’s gender defines them, they cease to be good characters.
Your goal as a writer is to make two kinds of characters: Believable & Complex. Believable characters sometimes follow stereotypes (because real people do), and their gender might define them. These characters are useful, especially as secondary characters, because they ground the story in that space where the reader suspends all disbelief and accepts whatever else you throw at them. Complex characters, on the other hand, are actually more like real people than the believable ones. They remind that reader that not everyone is who they seem, and nothing they do is driven by a single desire. These are the good characters.
Every character you write can’t be good (the odds are against you), but they can all be good or useful. You have to decide when writing about the character if they are believable and useful, or good and complex.
How do you tell if you’re on the right track for writing a good character? First, ask what motivates them. If you don’t get back multiple answers and a flash of backstory, you aren’t there yet. If you get one of those things, you’re on the right path at least. Second, and this is something writing teachers should make their students do more often, swap the genders of all of your story’s characters. Yep, you heard me. That creepy stalker guy who wants to murder the innocent teenage girl? Turn it into a stalker girl who wants to murder a teenage boy. Does the story still work without changing anything?
Naturally, there are a few things that can’t survive a gender swap (Pregnancy is the most obvious), but 99% of the things in your story should work exactly the same if all of the characters swap genders. The muscle-headed barbarian can be a woman (without it turning comedic), the sexy stripper can be a man, the video game nerd can be a girl. Because people are like that in real life.
I once spoke to a man about the woman lead of his short story. He told me that he had something great, but that he was getting complaints about his lead from the women in his life. She was “too slutty, and it was demeaning to women”. But the story didn’t work if she wasn’t a slut. I said “so turn her into a man”. “But men can’t be sluts.” I took a moment to laugh at the absurdity of that statement (a very common belief I might add), and then told him “exactly”. If the story only worked with the main character being a sexed obsessed loser, then keep it that way, but gender isn’t important there. He did as I asked and his girlfriend told him how much better the story was. Literally nothing had changed. Because he had written a good character. (Side note: I have no idea if he ever tried to publish it.)
Many people write characters that are gimmicky, and no matter how complex of a character they are, the thing that makes them important is their sex organ. How man women in books get what they want because they walk around with their boobs out, how many men are defined by the conversations they have pissing in a urinal. (No lie, many a movie plots would cease to progress if two men used the stalls instead.)
You would have to decide for yourself if my debut novel is good or not. It’s up to the reader to decide if the characters come across the way they’re intended. What’s not up for debate? The characters are complex; they are good characters. Each of them is driven by three or four dominating forces, and a whole host of minor character flaws. You can swap the genders of everyone in my book and nothing in the story changes one bit. They are 4 brothers and their male friend, but that doesn’t define them. In fact a couple of them would be more socially accepted if they were women (though, again, it wouldn’t affect the story… only the reader’s opinion). They are real characters, experiencing real emotions and thoughts, waist deep in high fantasy.
The point of all of this is that you should never set out to write a character because their gender is not represented in your story. You should also not be afraid to write a character who happens to fall into a gender stereotype, so long as that doesn’t define them. If you do often write stereotypes, and are aware of this problem and want to fix it, change the genders of whichever character it happens to. Write them from the other gender. You’ll be surprised at how well rounded they end up being.
CrimsenOverlord's Creativity Corner 