Some really good points. I like the ‘look around you’ advice, save for the minor (and perhaps unnecessary?) caveat to those of us who are married to women. As much as we love our wives, our stories will rarely be served by including an “expy” of the missus.

Also, apologies for the panty-itching. But I didn’t think “No Sex” by itself would communicate my point. Mostly because folk would fill in the rest of the title with “In The Champagne Room.”

Some really good points. I like the ‘look around you’ advice, save for the minor (and perhaps unnecessary?) caveat to those of us who are married to women. As much as we love our wives, our stories will rarely be served by including an “expy” of the missus.

Also, apologies for the panty-itching. But I didn’t think “No Sex” by itself would communicate my point. Mostly because folk would fill in the rest of the title with “In The Champagne Room.”

Champagne room.

Heh, well-played.

As for the “wives” issue — oh, I don’t recommend taking the wives and placing them precisely into a story, but hey, I know my wife better than I know a lot of people, and she has a ton of compelling traits that make her, well, awesome. It would be totally valuable to embrace some of those qualities and traits and let them find their way into characters I write. Not explicitly, not directly, but as one component.

– c.

I think that I do a fairly decent job at writing women as secondary characters. Where I get very nervous is writing women as primary characters. I can look around and see what women do. What I’ve never been able to grok is how women think. I always feel like I am missing some crucial element, and that my female characters come off false for it.

I do realize that I’m probably over-thinking it, and projecting my personal insecurities into the equation. But, hey, I’ve got to project them somewhere.

@Lugh:

You might be overthinking it — I mean, I don’t know how anybody other than me thinks. Not really. But I can imagine. And I don’t imagine women think so differently.

– c.

I wrote about 800 characters and realized that a blog comment cannot even encapsulate how I feel about women in fiction. I deleted it.

Now I’m almost inspired to blog about it myself, from a personal viewpoint. I’m not a writer, but I am a reader.

If I do, I’ll link here.

Thanks for the excellent post.

@Jennifer:

Absolutely, please link!

Glad you appreciated the post!

– c.

Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test Bechdel test .

It is the best thing.

(For those who need a link to the Bechdel test) — Link.

Only thing I don’t like about that test is the “Number Of Women” qualifier. I don’t like the necessity of number — quantity is meaningless in terms of character, and it also smacks of tokenism. I think the quality of the female character is far more important than number (and in fact, I don’t know that number is *necessarily* significant).

I do like that it demands that the female characters present exist as real characters, not as mouthpieces to chatter about men (or themselves in relation to men).

– c.

Very good, and informative post.

For whatever reason, I’ve been Role Playing female characters online, and off, for over a decade now. Had a lot of help from “omg real females”, and it has been interesting for the perspective. I really agree with the “being a female can be a trait, but it shouldn’t be a strength or weakness”. It may also be worth pointing out that often our weaknesses show our strengths, especially in fiction. A character who isn’t particularly physically strong, is often smart and clever, or fast and agile, to make up for it. The same is true for gender (though not necessarily in physical departments), but for every “weaknesses” that may or may not be present, there is also a strength. If only from having to deal with that ‘flaw’.

I think I’m rambling in tired brain mode now though, so just going to say good post, and thanks for the insight.

@Chuck That’s a more complicated version of the test than the original. The one I know is 1) There are two or more women in this work 2) Who talk to each other 3) About something other than a man.

The ‘two or more’ quantifier has got to be there so two women -can- talk to each other. Not sure it’s tokenism?

It’s only tokenism if you don’t write the characters well, if they’re not-real, cardboard cut-outs, they for the sake of being there. And one of the ways to make them -more- real is to have them talk to each other, like real women do, we talk to each other. For which you need more than one woman in the story.

Hollywood doesn’t think we do though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s

It’s the tongue thing, definitely. I posed this question because of a screenplay I am writing with a colleague which got some pretty decent professional folk to give it a serious read. The horror of writing for film is that someone is always going to mention the 4 corners of demographics, which makes you do the worst thing in the world, second guess whether you are pleasing all the people all the time.
“That’s a dude flick” or “all the hero men should look like Johnny Depp” is about all I could gather from non-pro female reads (I’ve found) so I’ll try stickin with pros on that count (of either sex). After beating my head on this for a bit, I realized I’d already written a short story inhabited mostly by women, each with very different characters, and it wasn’t the least bit an issue for me. It wasn’t really that I had difficulty writing for women, generally, but rather it was just something about that particular character and her relationship to the entire story that had us bouncing chaotically between too strong, too bitchy and too soft and too lovey. I am going to have to go revisit that at some point and hopefully I can overcome the damage done, un-think some of those thoughts and recognize the real problem I’m having with this character probably has less to do with the fact she’s a woman and more to do with how she had become a device more than a ‘person’. Until then though, I’ve got this tongue, see…;)

Also have you heard of the Frank Millar test?

http://www.shortpacked.com/blog/comic/book-2-pulls-the-drama-tag/06-the-drama-tag/whores/

A whole lot of my writing (eg Memory Sticks, Frances, Lucy) stood or fell on how I wrote women. This is the part where you tell me how awesome that was etc.

I think that women are people. Just people. You either write good characters or you don’t. If you don’t have enough empathy, if you seriously don’t have the ability to put yourself in someone’s shoes, you’re stuffed. I don’t think, as you said, though, that ignorance of gender is it.

More, it’s about understanding, common human feeling. Even when you’re empathising about something that’s impossible.

This is a criminal. I shall put myself in his shoes. This is a vampire. I shall put myself in his shoes. This is a man who is considering killing someone. I shall put myself in his shoes. This woman works in an office and is getting the life crushed out of her. I shall put myself in her shoes. And so on.

Every human individual is trapped in an eternal state of enforced and inescapable singularity. Each of us is shaped by the psychological tectonics of our own experiences. The years have shoved up mountains of achievement, carved out gorges of despair, covered some minds with fertile sediment and left others scorched and violent deserts that grow only pain. Compared with those effects, the biological accident of genitalia is trivial. Understand who your characters are and how they got that way. Sure, their sex informs their lives, but it does not rule them. Some men are pussies even if they need to stuff their member down their pant legs to their knees. Some women are big swinging dicks even if they can wear low-rise pants with comfort. And most of us are a muddle mass of contradictions.

Dan

@Jenni –

Yes, I suppose that’s true — two women talking to one another necessitates, erm, two women.

Even still, something about the Bechdel test rubs me the wrong way. I guess it’s that I don’t necessarily like that stories should come down to demographics — like, you could do a totally kick-ass version of Glengarry Glen Ross where it’s all women inhabiting those or similar roles, but just because it’s not doesn’t necessarily mean it’s somehow anti-feminist. (Though on the other side, the problem lies with the Whole Enchilada, where few storytellers *are* utilizing female characters, and so someone needs to suggest that creators go the extra mile.)

For me, the takeaway of the Bechdel test is really that female characters shouldn’t be written in relation to male characters. They inhabit their own space and are fully-envisioned (or should be). The problem is when I’ve seen the test touted as if it’s a critical storytelling component, allowing a story to “pass muster” in terms of feminism. And that feels like it both overly simplifies women, and overly simplifies the nature of storytelling.

(Oh, and that Frank Miller test just officially make me snort and nod. Word to that.)

– c.

whoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhor-

Sure, their sex informs their lives, but it does not rule them.

That, definitely that. Both sex and gender are part of those elements that shape us for good or ill.

The thing to remember is that both culture and biology have a lot to say about being a man or being a woman — and a lot of these things are wrong, or deeply skewed, but no less formative. Growing up, I was far less masculine than my father, and that was something of a known quantity — I understood that because I was made to understand it. That means that the characters inhabiting our stories may very well have suffered the same slings and arrows over sex and gender.

A thing worth considering, anyway.

– c.

The Bechdel test is overly simplistic, yes, when taken at face (so a movie passes if someone talk about a monster, etc is stupid) but I think there is something in it.

Basically, the spirit of the three rules (1. Women exist; 2. They have something to say; 3. they’re not defined by men) is terribly worthwhile. Following it to the letter gets you nowhere, though, I’ll grant you that.

@Wood, you handle female characters lovingly.

Women are just people, yes, though I worry that such a comment drifts both toward the absurd and the irrelevant — I prefer instead that “women are just characters,” as here we’re talking about the narrative context. If I’m writing a vampire, as you say, or a hyper-intelligent sea cucumber, they’re all just characters. Inhabiting those characters is key — but for me, there exists an experiential thing that shouldn’t be ignored. A vampire experiences sometimes things that are specific to vampires, just as women sometimes experience things that are specific to women. I fear being so reductive that suddenly we’re all just blandly human.

– c.

@Wood –

The spirit of the thing, yes. Absolutely.

– c.

Excellent post. As a woman writing about men, I experience it from the opposite angle; writing believable male characters is surprisingly tough! In my first drafts, my male characters, no matter who they are or what their purpose, always talk too much about their feelings, and not enough about cooking outdoors and such.

You can clean it up in revisions, of course. But it’s astonishing how your biases in how you perceive the world color your prose without your knowledge.

You can clean it up in revisions, of course. But it’s astonishing how your biases in how you perceive the world color your prose without your knowledge.

Amen to that, Lara!

– c.

@Chuckles: I think I was wrong to write “just” people, actually. That was a mistake. Because there’s no such thing as “just” people, and that’s not actually what I meant.

Out of interest, I find that female writers are often better at writing about men than men are about women, and and I think that there’s something in how our culture expects and trains women to be more empathic etc. But it’s not across the board, and I have on occasion written books by women who can’t write male characters, either (Poppy Z Brite springs to mind. I mean, Lost Souls, holy God).

I think women can write misogynist fiction too — Nancy A. Collins’ Sunglasses After Dark is evidence of that.

But then, horror, because of its nature (fear of helplessness = horror’s meat and two veg, and women = usually on the wrong side when power relations come into play) is very difficult not to make misogynistic, and there can be a fine line (like, what side of it does the movie Candyman fall?)

“I don’t think an ignorance of gender is automatically a good thing, just as I don’t think ignorance of race or nationality is immediately a good thing, either.”

I’m glad that you brought this up. Gender does change our experience of the world. A lot of my experience of being a woman is informed by how I am treated by the world. The way my employer was confused that I had programming skills, or how sometimes I’m sexually harassed on the street.

These events inform my experiences as a woman. Men have different experiences that inform how they view the world. These experiences shape who we are as people. It’s important, when you are writing anyone who is different from you, to think about what experiences they might have had that were different from your own.

Aw, I’m late to the party of the topic I requested. And then Dan went and pretty much stole my comment (and said it far better than I ever could).

Not to say that there isn’t any influence at all from gender/culture/religion/race. But often it isn’t as big of a factor in the overall makeup of a character and their traits as “outsiders” (I hate that word) might think. Sometimes it’s just a subtle nuance. A nod here or there might be all the author needs to do. Its when you start overthinking and worry about not appearing sensitive enough that I find writers complain about having trouble characters. Unless you’re specifically targeting a character’s gender/culture/religion/race as the issue of the story, it shouldn’t be treated as an issue.

Very timely post, Chuck.

Recently received a ton of feedback from my editor. Biggest weakness in the manuscript? My female protagonist. She (my editor) was right, apparently I’m a male chauvunist pig hehe.

I’ve been working on revisions since and my guidelines are to make my female protagonist rounder and fuller (portly with characterization even).

Great post.

It’s interesting that the topic of female characters has been so much a topic of conversation lately. I had a conversation with one of my regular customers yesterday, started by him, about the uproar over the portrayal of Samus in the recent Metroid: Other M. His take on it was cynical, but reasonable: No matter how a male writer portrays a female character, some people are going to interpret it as a negative portrayal. We just need to accept that fact and keep going.

One thing that I noticed as a fan of Stephen King, that has intrigued me for years is that prior to the mid-90′s, he wasn’t particularly adept at writing female characters (that weren’t criminally insane). Then, in about 1993, he figured it out. I remember at the time, people accused him of having Tabitha ghost write for him. I’m guessing he just finally got comfortable writing female characters.

Sorry for the tangent, but like I said, that always intrigued me, how an established writer selling millions of books just has something like that click one day.

Not sure if women have the same anxieties about writing male characters. Perhaps that is a stupid observation. I am wary of the adult male writers, even of YA fiction, who seem to be perpetually writing about 16yo girls.

W

I’m probably better at writing female characters than male ones, honestly. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s only been in the last year that people stopped calling me “ma’am” in person.

But I found myself caught in the “aware of your tongue” situation in the last short story I was working on, for Under Torn Skies. Mostly because I see so many people (rightfully, I think) complaining about the prevalence of the “bound woman” on covers, and etc. In the story, there’s a reversal where a female character suddenly becomes an unknown quantity, and the others have to bind her so they can interrogate her.

Honestly, academically, logically, that should be fine. She should be tied up, it’s the logical thing for the characters to do, regardless of her gender. But because there’s such a stigma, I find myself worrying about it. Is it going to be taken as misogynistic?

That kind of thing can by paralyzing.

Oh, and @Wood: Poppy’s books aren’t good, but they’re a fairly accurate portrayal of a certain class of American goth boys from the time period.

Okay, question. When I’m writing from a male point of view, I almost always put something in there to the effect that women are hard to understand. I almost always get a “Ain’t that the truth…I’m surprised you’re perceptive enough to understand that, being a woman” reaction from a couple of my male readers.

Does that make me evil?!?

Personally, I don’t have anxieties about writing male characters. I don’t write “male” characters–I write my uncles, my coworkers…

I wrote a short story with a neutral character. THAT was hard.

Not every work *has* to pass the Bechdel Test. A lot of very fine works of art don’t, and couldn’t be made to without losing something for it. The point is more to underline broad patterns, in media and in your own work. If you never, ever pass the Bechdel test… maybe you should think about why. But shoving unnecessary women into your mid-century boys’ boarding school coming-of-age story isn’t doing anybody any favors, either.

And: I actually think a lot of bad female characters come from that self-consciousness, the idea that women are some fundamentally different, alien race, who like shoes and shopping and go hormone-crazy. That’s nonsense. Female characters are human beings, and you should write their internal motivations as such.

The way you can trip yourself up with the othering, though, and make a bunch of white/male/straight/cis/etc. characters who are allegedly diverse but don’t ring true… that’s when you’re creating a character without adequately reflecting on how the world treats that kind of person, and how they’ve been shaped by and react to that treatment. Or when you make a bunch of assumptions about motivations (like “all girls love shopping,” “all fat people are always eating and never exercise”) that don’t actually reflect the authentic experiences of people in those positions.

Beta readers are good for this. Have women read your female characters. Have teens read your teens. Have Koreans read your Koreans. If you screw it up and go down the path of shallow, offensive, or just plain wrong, they might be able to help you to fix it before it’s too late, and they’ll point out the unexamined biases you need to ditch so you don’t do it again in the future.

Fascinating post! I am often amused at the way men write women … Some male authors tend to make their female characters too calculating and coldly logical without tying in emotion or at least referencing it.

I would consider myself a very logical person (so I’m NOT saying women can’t be logical!!), yet in relation to that logical aspect of myself I am always aware of my emotions and their nuances in a way my husband and brothers aren’t. I’m not trying to say that ALL women are this way, but when I read a book that has 4 female viewpoints who are supposed to be wildly different personalities and they are all thinking in the same detached, cold, computer-like way, the dude writing the book doesn’t know how to depict a woman’s mind. End of story.

Also, you can debate nature vs nurture all day, but there are significant gender differences in our society and that (how the two sexes are treated, spoken to, socialized, etc) affects the way men and women think.

[...] the sex thing. Chuck Wendig’s blog today is about dudes writing chicks and the challenges therein. And I tossed in my usual two cents, [...]

I’m on to you, Wendig. You start these cool topics and then you suck me in and I write a few hundred words FOR YOUR BLOG! Not this time, bucko. I got more to say on this, but I’m saying it on my home turf. http://danielboshea.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/dudes-writing-chicks-redux-its-the-story-stupid/

Boobies!

Someone had to do that. Eventually.

Good post today, Chuck.

If you want to learn more about women, have a daughter. It’s one thing to know women, but watching them grow and become one. It’s an eye opener. I have a younger sister, but I was already out of the house when she was a teen, and I suspect brothers closer in age don’t pay attention to their sisters other to torture or be tortured.

Not to say that there isn’t any influence at all from gender/culture/religion/race. But often it isn’t as big of a factor in the overall makeup of a character and their traits as “outsiders” (I hate that word) might think. Sometimes it’s just a subtle nuance. A nod here or there might be all the author needs to do. Its when you start overthinking and worry about not appearing sensitive enough that I find writers complain about having trouble characters. Unless you’re specifically targeting a character’s gender/culture/religion/race as the issue of the story, it shouldn’t be treated as an issue.

@Kate –

I agree to a point. I definitely agree that overthinking is bad. I also agree that it (sex, gender, identity) needn’t be treated as an issue.

But to clarify my POV (which maybe I don’t need to do — ahh, oversensitivity!), I’m only suggesting that, like J.R. Blackwell points out, no character exists in a vacuum. Men and women undergo experience based on culture (and to a limited extend, biology) that shouldn’t be ignored. All too often I find that writers — especially ones afraid of offense — so water their female characters down that they’re either a) boring or b) men.

Women are still women, men are still men. Daughters aren’t sons, sisters aren’t brothers, and mothers aren’t fathers. We don’t need to take a hardline on those things as authors, and we certainly shouldn’t make those things stereotypes (“All Women Like Shoes! All Men Watch NASCAR!”) but they’re still experiential roles and identities that have meaning, even if that meaning isn’t pushed front and center as an “issue.”

If that makes sense? It may not.

To bring it to the realm of the real –

I consider myself a guy.

I don’t mean that — “Hey, look, a dick and balls.” That’s par for the course. But I mean, as an identifier, I think, “I’m a guy. A dude.”

I don’t know that I mean to. I think it’s a societal thing? I’m taught that men are a certain way, and in a lot of ways, I’m very much *not* that. I cook, I clean, I’m sometimes too sensitive, I get weepy at sad movies, blah blah blah. And yet, I like guns and violence and getting muddy and I do things that I know my wife and others feel are very… “male” expressions. An unwillingness to talk, a certain (ahem) clutter-blindness, whatever. Now, these may not actually be male traits biologically, but they may be there culturally? Or maybe it really has to do with some kind of male/female brain wiring thing. Point being, it feels that some authors want to (almost pun incoming) neuter sex and gender in terms of characters and storytelling, as if those things don’t matter. They do matter. They matter to real people, and so they matter to characters.

Or something like that.

– c.

I think you and I are missing each other’s points, Chuck. Or just not making ourselves clear. Or I’m not making myself clear (and this is what I get for staying up half the night like a little book nerd). I get what you’re saying, and I agree with it 100%. It isn’t so much that there’s a vacuum, but there’s so much more that informs the character than just components A, B and C. And then there’s the influence of the plot and the setting itself that should determine just how much those components are expressed.

Like if you take a lesbian character. I’m going to write a Catholic teen vastly different then I would a Third Wave Feminist. Both women, both lesbians (not that I think all feminists are, this imaginary one just happens to be), but both with vastly different experiences. And its their different settings and the different characters around them that determine how they grow and react.

Bah, I think I’m just muddling myself more. :-p Read Dan’s corresponding post. He says what I’m trying to.

@Kate:

I completely agree. Re-reading your comment I think I’m actually responding to a whole different angle, so, sorry for that.

– c.

Oooh! Let me ping-pong back here from a comment I left at Dan’s blog.

Dan talks a little in the comments about assumptions, and I’d like to speak a little to maybe how male writers fail at writing female characters:

The male writer is in danger of assuming one of two things:

a) A female character’s sex/gender matters *too much*

or

b) A female character’s sex/gender matters *not at all*

I think some male authors go the other way with b), and end up removing the female DNA from female characters — turning them into hollow characters, pure objects, or, in essence, men.

– c.

I don’t think there’s much actual science behind the idea that men’s and women’s brains are biologically different (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth-cordelia-fine ) — but that’s really not the point.

There’s not much biological difference between different races or religions or nationalities, either, and nobody’s arguing that differences don’t emerge (though they don’t always manifest in *the same way*).

The final result, who a person is, is very much affected by this stuff, even if the seed is absolutely the same. Cultural constructions around our identities are shape us from very early on.

The fact that I wear mascara doesn’t mean I’m genetically predisposed to wear cosmetics, it means that I’ve received positive social feedback from media and interpersonal reactions that has taught me that people like me better and I have a higher social value when I make my eyes look bigger. Alas.

@Andrea:

Absolutely don’t want to fall into a nature/nurture brain-hardwiring issue — apologies for seeming to do so. Just throwing out there that those constructions — be they nature or nurture are there, and writers are fools to ignore them (especially when those things can contribute to character or conflict).

– c.

It’s an interesting subtopic, Chuck. ^_^ And it’s a place where writing and ideology can have a bit of a tussle sometimes, too. I’ve had a post brewing for some time on Why I’m A Feminist to talk about some of that. Maybe in a couple of weeks I’ll find the time to hash it out.

Bechdel test, huh? 2 or more women who have names and talk to each other about something besides a man?

Zombie Strippers PASSES. I find that hilarious.

Excellent insightful comments from Andrea, Chris and Blackwell.

@DeAnna- It’s widely accepted that men don’t understand women. We know this to be true because many men in positions of social power say so, like sitcom dads or grizzled barflies. Now if Tony Danza cant understand why Alyssa Milano wants to “use a diffuser,” what chance to the rest of us have?

This was a great post, and great advice to budding writers (ahem, me) I have similar blocks writing men. I sit back and go “Am I just writing a female character with a dick? Am I putting too much emphasis on gender?” then I go and hyperventilate in the corner until I can safely ignore my tongue-in-mouth feeling.

@Shannon:

Much thanks! The hyperventilate-in-corner is a common response. Today was, for me, a big hyperventilate day.

Don’t tell your father you’re over here. He’ll beat in my skull with a tire iron.

– c.

@Matt Zombie Strippers is STILL a film about women! I enjoyed it. I appreciated the fact that it passed the test.

Doesn’t pass the Frank Miller test though.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Writers going “Hmmm… if I’m going to have two women on screen talking about something that’s not a man, how the hell am I going to keep the men in the audience interested? Everyone knows those poor easily-distracted men get bored when women open their mouths. I know!! I’ll give them something sexy to look at.”

Obvs just because something passes Bechdel doesn’t mean it’s automatically non-objectionable in its treatment of gender, and just because it doesn’t pass doesn’t mean it’s automatically non-feminist. But you knew that.

[...] they know and what they are familiar with. I’m not saying that there are no female characters written by a man. What I’m suggesting, however, is that perhaps the bulk of video game characters out there [...]