How NOT to Write Women: ysabetwordsmith

How NOT to Write Women

Here is a piece of writing advice that fails with a mighty epic fail made of solid failmantium. Do NOT write female characters by writing men and putting women's names on them. It will suck like a black hole made by Microsoft. Here's how to do it right ...

1) "I want to write about a woman who wants to ..." have a goal of her own. Pick one. Common ones like that are easily relatable, but don't be afraid to make it unique and memorable.

2) "... and goes after it with all her might." Put in some actions and obstacles and more actions. There's your plot.

3) "I want her to feel like a real person ..." which requires her to have a balance of strengths and weaknesses. List some of each, and relate them to her personality and her goal.

4) "... and not just a guy in a skirt." Women have different experiences than men do. This tends to influence their problem-solving methods, how they think and move through the world. Show how that affects the story.

5) "I want to see her shake the world." Also a protagonist needs agency to drive the plot, and since men have more power than women, it helps if you define why she has enough to reach hera rank and how she uses it. My highwater mark for this is Lucy. I would love to see more stories where the hera drags everyone's agency down the street by the short hairs.

6) "It would also be great if she had some friends." Because it sucks when there's only one woman in the story who's worth anything. Make sure the supporting cast includes other female characters whose relationship with the hera matters and they talk about their goals, not just talk about men.

To take what the original article was trying to do and riff on it in a way that works to get past stereotypes, here is how I incorporate random factors ...

1) Decide the roles you want to feature in your cast list. Protagonist, love interest, best friend. Fighter, wizard, priest, ranger, thief. Captain, pilot, gunner, medic, scout, security, extra starship crew.

2) Randomly generate their demographic traits such as sex/gender, orientation, religion, intelligence type, ethnicity, etc. If you are working with a known setting, check local demographics. You can load in a list of races or faiths or whatever that are found there, which helps put some boots on the ground and distinguish this from other settings.

3) Consider how that combination of traits would influence each person's life experiences and development, then use that to flesh out the character. Add things like family ties, home background, how they relate to each other, and so on.

4) Just add plot. Usually the character development will suggest what kind of trouble they're likely to find or make. But you can also pick a challenge and ask how these particular people would handle it. Here are some fun plot shapes.

In other words, build from the core out, not the surface in. See the six steps. I know, if you read the book, it goes from the surface in like most people apparently work, but that method sucks. You don't build a skyscraper from the top down. You build it from the ground up. So pick either an idea or a medium, then fill in the other one of those two, and work out from there. You may find it helpful to bookmark a dice roller and the bingo card generator for its wealth of lists.

Here via the LJ home page

author_by_night

June 7 2015, 12:48:14 UTC 6 years ago

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Love this list!

I've been wondering about something with regards to #6. Do you think people have trouble writing female friendships? I've definitely noticed the lack of them, especially in shows and movies, but I've noticed a lag in literature as well.

Re: Here via the LJ home page

ysabetwordsmith

June 7 2015, 18:36:06 UTC 6 years ago

>> Love this list! <<

Thank you! I write anchor posts about writing periodically. If you click the "how to" tag you can see some of those. "Writing" has actual writing in it so finding the how-to stuff there is harder.

>> I've been wondering about something with regards to #6. Do you think people have trouble writing female friendships? I've definitely noticed the lack of them, especially in shows and movies, but I've noticed a lag in literature as well. <<

Yes, I think so.

Part of it is a genre problem. Some genres have features that work against women's relationships.

Frex, a majority of SF writers are men, so they have to work harder to observe, understand, and portray things that happen between two or more women -- it's a layer of society they're not native to, much of which happens outside their view. They have to look up resources where women talk about their own friendships, or catch pairs of women interacting in public. You miss a lot that way.

Since I don't do girltalk, a lot of my observation is secondhand. When I write women's relationships, which I often do across genres, they tend to be based on something else. Shahana and Ari in Path of the Paladins have a mentor-novice relationship; the Origami Mage and the Kirigami Mage in The Origami Mage are professional rivals. Dale and Kelly in Walking the Beat are married, and most of what I write about them is either curtainfic or community spirit. Farce and the female members of Damask in Polychrome Heroics go from rivals to friends. The teamfamily in Schrodinger's Heroes has a tight professional connection between Alex and Ash, and pretty close with female!Morgan too.

June 7 2015, 18:36:15 UTC 6 years ago

Conversely most romance is written by women, but almost all of it is M/F romance, which undermines F&F relationships because they are then viewed as a threat to the protagonist's chance of securing her love-interest.

Stepping outside of genre, the overall trend is for more male than female writers, editors, producers, etc. That makes it harder to get women's experiences published -- and means that the ones published are more likely to be those relatable to men, thus less focused on F&F relationships.

This is a place where crowdfunding becomes tremendously useful, because you can write whatever your readers want to buy, and not have to get some editor to like it. My audience is buying stuff hand over fist, much faster than conventional sales, and they like F&F friendships.

Another factor is that modern society simply doesn't value friendship very much. The phrase "just a friend" explicitly and pervasively devalues it. But friendships, whether platonic or romantic, can be just as deep and fond and meaningful in life as sexual relationships. So one terrific place to find friendfic is the asexual/aromantic community. For those acefolk who are inclined to form intimate connections at all, it's typically some kind of friendship, and friendship as a primary relationship is pretty amazing.

Looking at my work again, Shahana and Ari are both ace, which comes up later in the series. And one of my favorite relationships in Polychrome Heroics is between Fortressa and Socket. They're supervillains, so they're kind of messed up in some ways, but their relationship is in great shape. Because what happened is that Fortressa swore off love, and Socket -- who has a huge crush on her -- just accepted that and concentrated on building a platonic friendship instead. What Socket wanted was to be close to Fortressa and make her happier; friendship is what did that, so that's what Socket chose. See "Pulling Pigtails" and "A Cultural Control Problem" for examples of them in action.

I think that if people don't see women's relationships, don't value friendship in general, and/or also don't value women in general then you get this kind of dearth. It is frustrating and disappointing.

Hmm ... think I'll ask DW user Dialecticdreamer for some F&F, she's got a prompt call slated for Monday. That's another great thing about crowdfunding, you can ask for what you want and get it.

June 8 2015, 18:01:29 UTC 6 years ago Edited: June 8 2015, 18:04:39 UTC

Wow, good observations!

I do think there are a lot of people who don't necessarily value friendship on a deeper level, and if they're writing, that colors things. Plus, when I was thinking more about this, I realized a lot of friendships - especially female ones - are more shallow. If we go by the past five years, I've known a lot of women I'd call school/work friends, but that's about all we were/are. I liked my college friends very much, and it was always fun when there'd be events and we'd get to see each other then, but we had our own lives. And in fairness, if your setting IS school or a workplace, that's the most common relationship. At the same time, often these settings will still have strong bromances, but not necessarily strong... there's not even a female equivalent of bromance! Sisterhoods?

* Keeping in mind it was the sort of college where most of us commuted or lived 1-2 hours away, so at the very least almost everyone went home on the weekend. Ergo, everyone already had people to hang out with.

June 9 2015, 22:56:17 UTC 6 years ago

>> I do think there are a lot of people who don't necessarily value friendship on a deeper level, and if they're writing, that colors things. <<

Lived experience absolutely colors writing.

>> Plus, when I was thinking more about this, I realized a lot of friendships - especially female ones - are more shallow. <<

I call them "friendly acquaintances." Interactions are pleasant but not meaningful or intimate. I was 16 before I had any friends, because until then the number of people around me who were smart and had common interests was 0. I had adults that I liked, and I had a few people the same general age as myself who were nonhostile, but no actual peers. Currently my friends are scattered around the globe.

Contributing factors to a dearth of close relationships include the breakdown of the extended family (reducing social skills), increase of mobility (frequent moves break relationships), and increase of work hours required for survival (leaving no time or energy for anything else).