It seems that everywhere you look these days, there are strong female characters. Whether this is Captain Marvel from Marvel Comics, Wonder Woman from DC, or Red Sonja from the same titled film, strong women are everywhere. If you want to know how to write a strong female character for your manuscript, read on!
Writing a strong female character is not much different than writing about a strong male character. She may have different motivators in her life, but for the most part, male and females typically want the same things in life: security, recognition, love, and self-determination.
She’s a Person
Think of your female characters as a real person. All of your characters should have a brief character sheet written up about them. This includes a name, physical appearance, a few basic personality traits, a history, and goals in life.
Physical Appearance
As a writer, you most likely already have an idea of what your character looks like in your mind. Sarah may be pretty, petite, dark skin, and wears a wig of straight ebony hair hiding her natural short curls. Or, perhaps Gwen is a rotund female, with pale skin dotted by freckles, has full lips and wide hips, a small scar over her left eye, and speaks with a Southern drawl.
Now that you have a physical appearance, you can further develop the character by giving reasons to her appearance. Perhaps Sarah wears a wig because she is fussy about her hair? Or maybe Gwen is rotund because she inherited a barrel-shape from her grandmother’s side of the family? There are many possibilities to give your character depth based upon her appearance.
Personality Traits
Personality traits are an important aspect of what makes a person special. These include honesty, friendliness, reverence, and more. Your character can be virtuous, sly, a cheat, or a hopeless romantic.
Once you have selected a few personality traits for your character, you can further develop their back-story based on these traits. For example, maybe you have decided that Sarah is strong-willed because her mother raised her without a father and she had to be self-sufficient while her mother worked to support her. Perhaps she is also a hopeless romantic because she saw how much in love her grandparents were and wishes she could have such a relationship.
History
Developing a background story for your strong female character helps with bringing more depth to their behavior and helps to introduce additional characters and story arcs that tie back to the events of the main story. For example, Gwen may have a German-born grandmother who immigrated to the U.S. after WWII because her town and family diner was razed during the war. Having nothing else to lose, she decided to try her luck in America as a cook in a hotel kitchen.
Goals in Life
Good characters are more than just basic descriptions. They have a life and goals they want to accomplish in life. Think about how Wonder Woman must battle fierce enemies to defend humanity because she is driven by the need to protect that which she loves and to defend those who are weaker than she. Think about real life heroes like Harriet Tubman who risked her life as a black woman during the Civil War period to help escaped slaves flee from the South to reach Canada where freedom existed. Characters have goals that drive them as people.
Avoid Stereotypes
If you can’t easily swap the gender of your character from male to female, you have written a stereotype. You want to avoid stereotypes if you want your female characters to be strong and well-rounded. They may (or may not) wear a dress, but that doesn’t mean she is not able to do everything a male can do.
There may be story arcs where you will have difficulty with stereotypes. For example, if you are writing about a certain time in history when women were traditionally homemakers, you may find it difficult to write about a woman who led battalions of male soldiers into battle at Gettysburg. However, if you hope to write a good, strong female character, avoid stereotypes. There were a number of female soldiers who fought during the Civil War disguised as male soldiers. Additionally, there were males who dressed like female civilians to avoid getting captured by enemy combatants.
If you can’t pick a random slice of dialogue out of your manuscript and change the gender of who said it and it still make sense, then you should rethink how you’re writing your characters.
The Bechdel Test
The Bechdel Test often drives the development of female characters. It basicallyconsists of three things:
- Two named female characters
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than a man.
The basic premise of the Bechdel Test is sound. Your female characters’ conversations should revolve around more than just members of the opposite sex. They should discuss a wide variety of subjects, even if you are writing a romance novel.
To elaborate, think about your own life. Do you talk endlessly about love interests, or do you also talk about such things as the weather, local events, geological formations of the past hundred million years, or what your favorite sandwich is? With a little introspection, you will quickly identify that you have a variety of interests. Your characters should as well.
Don’t Be Boring
Your characters are people. They should behave that way. Just as there are a wide variety of characters in real life, you should have little problem creating a realistic female character.
Focusing too much on a character’s physical appearance is boring. We are all more than our bodies. We have interesting aspects of what makes us unique. Gwen may play an electric guitar and have an obsession with Pokemon trading cards. Sarah may love R&B music and finds desert plants terribly interesting. We all have hobbies, interests, and so on that make us more than our physical makeup.
That means if you are writing that kind of character, think about why they are the way they are. Come up with something unique and don’t fall back onto the sad, old tropes. There is something interesting about you. There should likewise be something interesting about your strong female character.
Do you have a strong female character in your novel? We’d like to know what makes your character unique! Tell us in the comments section below.
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