strong female characters

How to Create Strong Female Characters

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

I’ve been hinting at it for months now, but the time has finally come. I’ve released the first book in my Busy Writer’s Guides series! And I’ve priced it at 99 cents.

cover

The misconceptions around what writers mean when we talk about strong female characters make them one of the most difficult character types to write well. Do we have to strip away all femininity to make a female character strong? How do we keep a strong female character likeable? If we’re writing historical fiction or science fiction or fantasy based on a historical culture, how far can we stray from the historical records when creating our female characters?

In Strong Female Characters: A Busy Writer’s Guide you’ll learn

  • what “strong female characters” means,
  • the keys to writing characters who don’t match stereotypical male or female qualities,
  • how to keep strong female characters likeable, and
  • what roles women actually played in history.

Each book in the Busy Writer’s Guide series is intended to give you enough theory so that you can understand why things work and why they don’t, but also enough examples to see how that theory looks in practice. In addition, they provide tips and exercises to help you take it to the pages of your own story with an editor’s-eye view. I call them an accelerated master’s class in a topic.

Strong Female Characters is a mini-book of approximately 4,000 words.

You can buy a copy at Amazon, Amazon.ca, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or Smashwords. They’ll be available in more places soon 🙂

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3 tricks to keeping strong female characters likeable (Click to Tweet)

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Top 5 Writing Posts of 2012

I’m officially on a blogging vacation over the holidays, but for those of you who are now stuffed and content and looking for some reading, here are my top-ranked writing posts of 2012. Enjoy! 🙂

What Do We Mean By Strong Female Characters?

How to Keep Strong Female Characters Likeable

Four Little-Known Factors that Could Destroy Your Blog’s Chances of Success

7 Tricks to Add Variety to Your Dialogue

5 Basics About Dialogue You Need to Know

Going into the New Year, I have a lot of exciting things planned, but I always want this blog to be helpful to you. If there’s something writing-related you want me to cover, leave it in the comments.

Also, don’t miss the special discount I’m offering on the January session of my Twitter course.

Click here to register for the Silver Level.

Click here to register for the Bronze Level.

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What About Characters Who Don’t Match Stereotypical Male and Female Qualities?

In the previous post in this series on “How to Keep Strong Female Characters Likeable,” featuring Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Debra Kristi commented, “I always liked these characters because I saw something of me in them. I never felt the way you are describing. I guess I am in the minority.”

Sarah Zahorchak on Google+ also asked, “Are we geared to automatically like stereotypical male and female characters more? (I’m no psychologist, so maybe we do! I don’t actually know.)”

All those “stereotypical” male and female qualities are stereotypes because they contain some truth. Women generally do like shopping for a great pair of shoes or a killer purse. We generally are more emotional (or at least show our emotions more). We generally talk more. Writers in the Storm recently had an excellent guest post by Rob Preece called “Women Are From Venus, Men Are Annoying” on some of the key differences between the sexes and how this should affect the way we write our characters.

I think sometimes we fight so hard against admitting these differences because we’re afraid that, by admitting them, we’re saying men and women aren’t equal. But we can be different while still being equal. In fact, we should be proud of our differences. The differences between my husband and I work to our advantage in coming at problems from fresh angles, and force us to look outside ourselves and really consider someone else’s preferences.

But aren’t there exceptions? Don’t some men and women have characteristics that usually belong to the opposite sex?

Of course. As Debra mentioned, she’s an exception. So am I. If you bring a problem to me, instead of giving you empathy the way a normal woman would, I’m going to try to explain why it happened and find a solution for you, much like a man. It’s not that I don’t feel empathy. I feel your problem deeply, but I’m a born fixer.

Before you create a character who’s the exception, analyze your motivation.

NOTE: I’ve had to remove the rest of this post because it’s now a part of my book Strong Female Characters: A Busy Writer’s Guide. You can buy a copy at Amazon, Amazon.ca, Kobo, or Smashwords. They’ll be available in more places soon!

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How to Keep Strong Female Characters Likeable

A few weeks ago, I asked “What Do We Mean by Strong Female Characters?” and argued that a female character doesn’t have to deny traditionally feminine qualities to be strong.

But what if you need to write a physically strong woman with few of those traditionally feminine qualities?

Sometimes a story does call for this type of female character. In the novel I’m working on with my co-writer, Lisa Hall-Wilson, our main female character is an Amazon. She’s been raised to hate men and to see all signs of femininity as weakness. If we allow her too many feminine qualities (at least in the beginning), we’ll undermine the believability of her society and her character.

Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games is a great example of this as well, as is Kara “Starbuck” Thrace in Battlestar Galactica.

Katniss doesn’t want children. She’s more at home in the woods hunting than she is helping her mother nurse others. And she’s placed into a situation where it’s kill or be killed.

Starbuck is a fighter pilot who needs to be tough in order to get respect and survive. Her commander assigns her emotionally grueling tasks like interrogating (i.e., torturing) prisoners and assassinating a dangerous superior officer.

So how do you make sure this type of female character is still likeable?

Unfortunately, most of us can’t relate to this type of woman. She’s not like us. She’s not like our mothers or our best friends or our significant others. And when we feel like we have nothing in common with someone, it makes them difficult to like. If your reader doesn’t like your main character at all, that spells death for your story.

As writers, we have to do a little extra work to give that common ground if we’re creating a strong female character who denies traditional feminine qualities.

Answer the question “What made her this way?”

When Katniss’ father died in a mining accident, her mother sunk into a deep depression. Katniss had to feed and care for herself and her younger sister. She had to be the “man of the house.” She didn’t really have a choice. Her world dictated how she feels about motherhood as well. Why would she want to have children when they could be reaped for the Games and killed?

The writers of Battlestar Galactica also recognized the need to explain how Starbuck became so hard. We get glimpses of Starbuck’s abusive mother, one who told her daughter that she was weak and a failure, and who beat Starbuck so often that she came to believe pain was a way of life.

In showing how Katniss and Starbuck became who they are, the writers allowed us to sympathize with them, even pity them. And as the old English proverb says, “Pity is akin to love.”

NOTE: I’ve had to remove the rest of this post because it’s now a part of my book Strong Female Characters: A Busy Writer’s Guide. You can buy a copy at Amazon, Amazon.ca, Kobo, or Smashwords. They’ll be available in more places soon!

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What Do We Mean By “Strong Female Characters?”

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

I planned to post today on “Creating Strong Yet Likeable Female Characters.” As I was researching helpful links to include, I came across a post from the New York Times called “A Plague of Strong Female Characters.” And I realized that, before we can talk about how to make sure strong female characters are also likeable, I first need to cover the inevitable debate over what we mean by strong female character.

In the NYT article, Carina Chocano writes, “I get the feeling that what most people mean or hear when they say or hear strong female character is female characters who are tough, cold, terse, taciturn and prone to scowling. . . in order for a female character to be worth identifying with, she should really try to rein in the gross girly stuff.”

She goes on to conclude that “Strength, in the parlance, is the 21st-century equivalent of virtue. And what we think of as virtuous, or culturally sanctioned, socially acceptable behavior now, in women as in men, is the ability to play down qualities that have been traditionally considered feminine and play up the qualities that have traditionally been considered masculine. Strong female characters, in other words, are often just female characters with the gendered behavior taken out.”

And yes, those stereotypes float around in books and movies—the character that could go from being a woman to a man with a simple name change and a haircut.

But when you think about strong women in real life, is that the image that comes to mind? Because, you see, what makes for a strong female character is exactly what makes for a strong woman.

Strong female characters, like strong women, can enjoy painting their nails, wearing makeup, and putting on a beautiful dress. They can wear stilettos, or ballet flats, or hiking boots. They can be moms, even stay-at-home moms. They can be musicians or cooks or doctors. They can cry. They can comfort a friend. They can listen. And yes, they can even be afraid of bugs.

None of those things define a strong woman or a strong female character.

So what does it mean when we talk about a strong female character?

Strong Female Characters Are Smart

Smart can mean book smart the way a quantum physicist is, but it can also mean a woman with common sense that lets her find creative solutions to everyday problems. Or it can mean a woman who’s talented with using her hands and can paint a picture or fix a car.

She has a skill that earns respect and contributes to society. Her intelligence makes her competent, able to help others, and not totally dependent on another person for her entire existence. (Some dependence is okay—none of us are entirely self-sufficient.)

Hermione Granger’s character in Harry Potter didn’t “play down qualities that have been traditionally considered feminine and play up the qualities that have traditionally been considered masculine,” yet she was a strong female character largely because of her intelligence and magical talent. She contributed to the search for Horcruxes in a meaningful way, so much so that Ron (in the movie version) admitted, “We wouldn’t last two days without her.”

Strong Female Characters Act

We’ve all seen the female character who stands by when she clearly should have acted. As much as I love the classic The Princess Bride, would it have killed Buttercup to whack the ROUS with a stick while it was gnawing on Wesley? A strong woman would have defended her beloved.

When she can, a strong female character escapes on her own rather than waiting for someone else to rescue her. Tameri Etherton wrote an excellent post on Danielle from Ever After, a strong female character who worked to change her bad situation.

A strong female character also makes decisions, rather than always waiting on someone else to call the shots. Captain Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager listens to advice from Chakotay (her male first officer) and Tuvok (her male chief of security), but she doesn’t always take it, and if they’re not there to advise her, she’s strong enough to act on her own.

The difference between a strong female character who acts and a weak one who simply reacts is the difference between Buffy and Bella.

Strong Female Characters Stand Up for What They Believe In

Whether or not you agree with all the decisions made by President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica, she stood up for what she thought was right. From sending Starbuck back to Caprica to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo (that’s supposed to help lead them to Earth) to fixing the election to prevent sniveling Dr. Gaius Baltar from being elected, she didn’t sit by if what was happening violated her beliefs of right and wrong.

She might be frightened and injured, and risking great loss, but as her hands shake and tears well up in her eyes, a strong woman stands up for what she believes in.

A strong female character, like a strong woman, can stand side-by-side with a man, confident in the knowledge that they are different but nevertheless equal.

How do you define strength in a woman? What do you think goes into a strong female character?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Deep Point of View is now available! (You might also want to check out Internal Dialogue or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

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