The idea of writing a “strong female character” isn’t enough.

As shorthand, it sounds noble. It seems spot on. But a lot of writers — and writing advice about the subject — seem to get it wrong. I get asked about this a lot, I guess because write women or girl characters like Miriam Black or Atlanta Burns who, on paper, kick a lot of ass.

And that is often the focus of the question — they’re characters who can fight, scrap, throw a punch, fire a gun, and that seems to end up the focus of the question. It’s where the buck stops. But for me, that’s never where it begins. It’s not even what makes them who they are.

Instead of writing “strong female characters,” try to aim for “women or girls that possess agency.” I’ve defined agency before and so I’ll repeat that definition here:

Character agency is… a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

Strong is a word with an often male connotation — it carries with it a lot of baggage. And what we end up with are female characters who are physically strong and little else. Meaning, they can fight, scrap, throw punches, fire guns.

But their ability to fight isn’t what makes them interesting.

What makes them interesting is that they choose to fight.

And it’s that word — “choose” — that matters.

We focus so much on their Powers, we forget about empowering them with the ability to choose, to have wants and needs and to make decisions based on those things. (You know, like real people do.) We think of Abilities and Skills like they’re stats on a character sheet rather than thinking about what abilities women possess inside the story to affect that story. We think of Powers like She Can Fly or She Knows Kung Fu or She Has Mastered The Ancient Art Of Laser Kegels when we should be focusing on the character’s internal power, her narrative power to push on the story, to be a well-rounded human being, no matter how vulnerable, no matter how strong.

Look at it this way: video game characters are notoriously without agency largely by design. The technology of a game doesn’t allow for a great deal of free-range character choice — in Halo, I can’t take my character outside the mission boundaries. In Tomb Raider I can’t say, “I want Lara Croft to leave this life of horrific blood-soaked spelunking to become a well-paid, respected accountant,” because she’s not my character. I only inhabit her and can only inhabit that character insofar as the technology allows, but the illusion is enough inside a video game for the most part because it feels active — video games are very good at lending you the illusion of choice, making you feel like, because you can choose a bow or a gun or because you can go down the left passage instead of the right, you have agency in the world.

But you’re not writing a video game character.

The illusion of choice is not enough.

The physical, violent strength of the character is not a meaningful metric.

Many “strong female characters” feel like something ripped out of a video game. Or worse, they feel like toys — objects that look tough, hold guns, wield swords, have karate-chop arms, but are ultimately plastic, posable action figures. Empty and maneuverable, they go where you tell them to go because they’re just devices.

Alison Bechdel coined the Bechdel Test, which asks if the story (or an overall body of storytelling) features at least two women who talk about something other than a man.

Gail Simone talks about the “Women in Refrigerators” problem, where women and girls inside comic books are used as fodder — raped, killed, or otherwise excised of power through violence (and often to make a male character feel something). The only power these women have in the story is to be damaged enough to motivate the story or the male characters in it.

Kelly Sue DeConnick talks about the “Sexy Lamp” test, which says, if you can replace the woman in the story with a sexy lamp and it doesn’t affect the story outcome, well, fuck you, that’s what.

It’s no surprise that these three amazing writers come out of comic books, where women superheroes are often hyper-sexualized and contextualized as objects — and you’ll note that’s the theme that runs through these three tests, and what I’m getting at here. Women in fiction are often presented as objects. They’re pieces to move around a chess board. They’re toys and devices and objects of lust and precious treasures to save and mirrors to reflect ManPain and things to break so that ManTears happen. They’re sexy lamps, cold corpses, and singular creatures who only exist in relation to the male characters around them. And we need to test against this.

(This is ostensibly why we see a lot of pushback against a story like Twilight or its sexualized fan-fic reiteration, 50 Shades of Grey — it’s because of the toxicity that results when your women and girl protagonists are given almost no agency within the stories themselves. They’re just pretty dolls floating down river, picked up by men who find them fetching.)

Thing is, we often expect that we’re undercutting this objectification by making the characters “strong, kick-ass female characters,” but what happens is:

Forget about kicking ass.

That’s not the metric you need to worry about.

The only ass that your female character need to kick is the ass of the story — that’s the power you want to give them. The power of agency. They can be sexy and sexual without being sexualized or objectified. They can kick ass or not kick ass or have Power or Not Have Powers as long as you elevate them above mere action figures (“Look how poseable she is when she does her sexy high-kicks!”) They can be vulnerable or flawed or unlikeable as long as you treat them like real people, not like video game characters or a list of abilities or dolls or lamps or The Reason That Dude Does The Thing He’s Meant To Do. They’re not proxies, they’re not mannequins, they’re not mirrors, they’re not Walking Talking FleshLights, they’re not princesses in towers waiting to be saved, they’re not emotionless ass-kicking chicks who still don’t kick as much ass as the hero. I’d even argue that calling them “female characters” has its problems because it sounds clinical, distant, a characteristic, a check box, a footnote.

Think of them as women or as girls.

Think of them as people.

Then give them agency within your story, within its world, and equal to the other characters.

So endeth my rant.

And now I ask you:

Who are some of your favorite women and girls in fiction (books, comics, film, TV, what-have-you) that possess agency? Drop in the comments and sound off. Offer your thoughts, too — am I getting this wrong? This feels right to me, but happy as always to discuss. Just be polite, because the SPAM OUBLIETTE awaits those who act as dire shitbirds.

It’s that time again, word-nerds.

The comments on this post is now an open forum where you can drop a paragraph of your work-in-progress (aka “WIP”) — limited to ~100 words or so. Pop it in the comments and others may offer some critique — critique not meaning, “Tear it to shreds,” but rather, “An evaluation of the good and bad elements of the work.”

(This is salient, by the way, as this week I’ll have a short post about critique.)

The one rule is:

If you post a paragraph for critique…

You must then also offer critique for someone else’s paragraph.

Quid pro quo, Clarice.

As to what paragraph you choose?

You might choose an opening paragraph, or a paragraph that’s giving you some trouble.

Good luck.

Be kind.

Be constructive, not destructive.

Go forth and help one another.

And we’re back.

Go, visit the page for Part One of this challenge.

The task here is to hop into the comments, check out the (incomplete) stories there, find one you like, and continue it by writing part two of that story.

You have another 1000 words to do this.

Make sure to identify which story you are continuing and who the writer was.

Do not continue your own story.

Do not end this story — you’re writing the second of four total parts.

You can partake in round two even if you didn’t participate in round one.

You must finish your second entry by noon, EST, next Friday (the 20th).

THAT IS ALL.

Now get to work, weirdos.

Mediator Ayala Storme kills demons by night and handles PR by day. She avoids Mediator luncheons and a fellow Mediator who’s been trying to get in her pants for years. She does her job. She keeps her sword clean and her body count high. But when a rash of disappearances leads her to discover that Nashville’s hellkin are spawning a new race of monster on human hosts, Ayala will be the first line of defense against these day-walking killers. That is, until one of them saves her life. Dodging the Mediators and the demons alike, Ayala’s new knowledge of the hybrids’ free will challenges everything she’s ever known about her job. Racing the clock and trying to outrun her comrades and enemies alike, she’s not sure who will catch her first…

* * *

Lesson the First: It’s Okay to Play God

When I first started writing, I was a die-hard pantser. I wrote two and a half books you will never ever ever see, and I did it resting in the soaring butt-ress of my trouser bottoms. (#butts)

Some people can keep on that way and their work flows and molds itself into the elegant forms of a glass sculpture that started out a vase and turned into this platter of perfection.

Hahaha, not me.

Those first 2.5 books started out like books and grew into Cthulu-esque page monsters with plots dangling from every orifice. I tried to query one of them. I’ll sit here and eat popcorn while you imagine how that went.

Yep.

When I went back to STORM after a long hiatus, the central feature of the book had to go. I’d learned that from a blunt literary agent at a conference who wasn’t even talking about that book. For the first time, I looked at my book and told it that it needed to be what I wanted it to be instead of what it’d slimed all over the page — and lo and behold, the dangling plots retracted, the drips of ink coagulated into words, and when I was done I had the strongest book I’d written at that point.

Through that, I learned that I could be god in my fictional worlds. (Maybe in this one too. YOU’RE NOT MY MOM.)

Lesson the Second: You’re the Only One on the Racetrack

I’ve got a lot of really successful friends.

(Hi, Chuck.)

Like…even present host-face excluded? I have a self-published author friend whose books are perpetually at least eight out of the top twenty books in her category on Amazon. She just owns that list. Always. She just hangs out there and kicks her feet back and watches editors not buy urban fantasy knowing her readers are just slavering for her next book.

I know a lot of authors who are just…everywhere. Doin’ their thing and doing it WELL.

On release day, STORM cracked the 10,000th rank on Amazon, and I cried because I was so excited and happy and overwhelmed. My trad published book didn’t do that when it came out last year, even though I’d put together a 40 stop blog tour and basically was wearing my rib cage as a hat by the end of it.

I had this…moment after I shared a screencap of my book at #9388 on Amazon’s paid Best Seller rank where I thought, “There are 9387 people ahead of me. Most of my friends’ books LAUGH at numbers like this as they go speeding by. I look like a fool.”

But then I took a deep breath and looked back to December where over 80 people, some friends and some strangers, literally saved me from losing my car and probably my home. Those names are listed in the back of STORM. All 80 of those people got an ARC of Storm and almost half of them bought the book anyway.

You’re the only one on the track, and the only bunny you’re chasing is the one you put there for yourself. That’s the only one that matters. You chase that bunny, keep your eyes on it, and never forget that for the people who seem to be ahead of you, there’s someone who seems to be ahead of them. We’re all chasing our own bunnies, and art is not a zero sum game.

Lesson the Third: It’s Okay to Walk Away

STORM was offered a publishing deal.

It was with a small press that had a stellar reputation. They told me and my agent that it’d be published in print and ebook, and we felt great about it. But then the terms changed very suddenly, and we decided to back out.

Had I not had a conversation with an author friend at Capclave the week before about just that, I don’t know that I would have had it in me to walk away, even though it was the right thing to do for my book.

What he told me, sitting on a couch on the last day of a long, grueling weekend where he’d had some serious ups and downs, was that it’s okay to walk away. That they should want you as much as they want them. So often in publishing we turn to the relationship metaphors, but it’s really true. If you want the sweet romantic footrubs and tuna melts in bed with The Bachelor blasting on the TV but their idea of romance is a mud pie and a beatific smile? The metaphor kind of fits. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

It’s okay to walk away if you don’t think someone will be good to you. It’s also okay to walk away if they’re just not right for you.

Lesson the Fourth: Sometimes You Need a Bunny

Those bunnies. They just keep GOING. And going and going like tired 90s references.

STORM gave me something to chase again. I took a beating in 2014, and not just because of the aforementioned shenanigans. The decision to put STORM out on my own rejuvenated me in a lot of ways. It was a terrifying decision for me, not unlike sticking a hand into a dark hole on the side of the tree. (PS: I know what’s in those. Spiders. Spiders are what’s in those.)

I learned a lot of things I didn’t know I was capable of doing. Thank the Scrivener gods for having useful tools, because without them I would have been holding that bunny between two shaking hands and snotting all over it.

For the last three months of 2014, I felt like the biggest failure in this galaxy. I was stalled on my new manuscript. Broke and about to lose my car and the single room I rent. Going through a divorce. Dealing with [redacted because reasons, gah] and generally feeling like no matter what I did, it would never be enough.

For eight years now, I’ve worked 80-130 hours a week (I actually clocked a 130+ hour week just two weeks ago) because I want writing to be my career…but I also like eating, and so do my cats. I came to a broken, broken place in December, yo. Things were not good.

STORM became my bunny. It became my way of fighting back, of chasing this thing I’ve been chasing for so long (far, far longer than these last eight years).

And funny story? On STORM’s release day, SFWA announced they’re gonna start letting self-published and small press published authors join their club. While not strictly relevant to me at the moment, it felt like a nice indication that doing my thing could dovetail with the other dreams that still stick in my head.

Lesson the Fifth: Sometimes the Goal is Just Past the Tape

A few years ago, if you’d asked me what my writing goals were, I would probably have told you sort of pompously like a jackass that “BOOK ON SHELF BECAUSE SHELF.”

I wanted to see my books on a shelf. I think to me the shelf was always a metaphor, but I was totes McGotes missing the point.

The shelf was never really the goal — and when I had this epiphany about eleven days ago, I wanted to put myself on a shelf without any dinner.

The shelf had been the tape for me at the finish line. This thing by which I would measure success. Each book I’d written from book 1-3 I’d thought it would be The One. Until the epiphany.

Which was this:

Readers are the goal. The shelf might be a way to get the book to them, but the shelf is not the ultimate goal. Because if a book’s on a shelf, it’s not open in anyone’s hands. (This also goes for digital shelves.) The readers are the real goal, and to get to them, there usually isn’t just ONE book. Few people write a single book, snag a hefty book deal, and waddle off to the bank to a chorus of adoring, angelic fans pelting them with rose petals and whisky.

There’s not a THE One. But there are many. There’s the one that you first finish. There’s the one that’ll get you an agent, if that’s what you want. There’s the one that’ll get you a publishing deal. There’s the one that will bring you your first tweet that happened at 4:30 AM, where you wake up to see it and someone’s yelling at you for keeping them up all night because your book was SO DAMN GOOD. There’s the one that will bring your first email from a reader telling you that your book moved them. Changed them. Saved them. There’s the one that breaks 10,000 on Amazon’s rankings for the first time. Or the one that, while you’re signing them in line, someone breaks down in tears and tells you that they wouldn’t be here without those words you wrote.

There’s the one you’ll write and go back and read and feel real pride at the world you built from nothing. There’s the one people will tattoo onto their skin. There’s the one that will make you a friend you never thought you’d meet. There’s the one that will break you to write, but heal others to read.

It’s probably not going to be just one book. There isn’t just ONE that will do all those things, most likely.

But writing just one story was never the bunny, was it?

* * *

Emmie Mears: Website | Twitter

Storm in a Teacup: Amazon | B&N

Veranix Calbert leads a double life. By day, he’s a struggling magic student at the University of Maradaine. At night, he spoils the drug trade of Willem Fenmere, crime boss of Dentonhill and murderer of Veranix’s father. He’s determined to shut Fenmere down.

With that goal in mind, Veranix disrupts the delivery of two magical artifacts meant for Fenmere’s clients, the mages of the Blue Hand Circle. Using these power-filled objects in his fight, he quickly becomes a real thorn in Fenmere’s side.

So much so that soon not only Fenmere, but powerful mages, assassins, and street gangs all want a piece of “The Thorn.” And with professors and prefects on the verge of discovering his secrets, Veranix’s double life might just fall apart. Unless, of course, Fenmere puts an end to it first.

***

ONE: I AM NOT A PANTSER; IN WHICH I EMBRACE OUTLINING

I wrote two now-trunked novel-resembling-things before I started working on Thorn of Dentonhill. They were not novels. Novels have a structure, a plot. These were more “a collection of things that happen to people who may or may not be characters”. I’m saying they weren’t good, but in a way I could learn from. One of the things I learned was to abandon my romantic notions of “I’ll just write and see where it takes me.” It took me to a mess that only looked like a novel if you squinted and looked at it sideways. So I realized I needed to outline my next attempt at a novel.

TWO: I HATE THREE-ACT STRUCTURE; IN WHICH I FIGURE OUT HOW TO OUTLINE

I found a lot of guidelines and advice out there of “how to outline a novel” fantastically unhelpful. Because so many boiled down to “Three Act Structure: That’s Your Outline.” What’s three act structure? It’s a beginning, a middle and an end. Frankly, that doesn’t tell me much I didn’t already know. Especially since the “middle” part of three acts tends to be “Rising Action: More Stuff Happens”. What kind of stuff? STUFF. Stuff that RISES.

I also studied the Hero’s Journey, but I also found this less than helpful in coming up with an outline structure— it was a tool for analyzing stories, but not for building them. It was like trying to bake cookies using only the nutritional information as a guide.

So I did my own story-hacking, studying books, movies, comics, television— taking them apart and figuring out what all the moving parts were. I emerged from this with a powerful, flexible outlining tool at my disposal: a twelve-part story structure.

THREE: EMBRACE THE HERO’S FLAWS; IN WHICH I GO WITH THE STUPID CHOICES

There’s a pair of tropes out there called “the idiot ball” and “the idiot plot”. The gist of both involve plots and twists that only work if the character is stupid. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing— sometimes your character needs to do the stupid thing. Sometimes it’s the most in-character action they can take.

Veranix is a guy who keeps doing the stupid thing. He can’t help himself.

There are several points in the story where the smartest thing Veranix could is just walk away, let it go. He knows that getting himself involved in stopping drug dealers or street toughs or even a sociopathic circle of mages is incredibly stupid, and on any given night it would be best for him to head back to campus, get a good night’s sleep and study all day. But then he’ll see one more dealer working, one more addict overdosing, one more victim crying for help— and off he runs into the fray.

FOUR: LOVE EVERY CHARACTER; IN WHICH EVERY PLAYER HAS HIS DAY

There’s an adage out there that every villain is the hero of their own story. Way back in the day, I was a stage actor, and more than once I played “2^ndSoldier” or “Citizen #4”. Small parts, but I treated them like they mattered. I considered every role to be someone who has a rich life outside of the scope of the play. That was the same mindset I took with every character, regardless of their role. The obnoxious prefect who keeps getting in Veranix’s face; the grizzled street boss who wasn’t expecting a fight, but is ready for one; the three Rose Street Princes who are part of Colin’s crew; even two random constabulary officers who wander onto the scene. All of them could be their own hero. And more to the point, I let myself really enjoy getting into each and every one of them.

FIVE: SIZE MATTERS; IN WHICH I BULK UP

I started the process of querying my finished manuscript, woefully unaware that I had made a glaring mistake, until I got this response from one agent: “I really like the book. I read it all today. Bad News: It’s too short for sale at this point. It’d need to be at least 20k longer for most houses.”

Yeah, I had absorbed bad information about how long a novel needed to be, and Thorn was way too short. So I had to make it longer without losing pacing or tightness. Add muscle and bone. Armed with that knowledge, I dove back in, whipping it into shape and proper size.

When I had that done, you better believe that agent was the first one I sent it to. He’s who represents me now, he’s who sold it, and it’s thanks to him that the book is what it is today.

***

Marshall Ryan Maresca grew up in upstate New York and studied film and video production at Penn State. He now lives in Austin with his wife and son. His work appeared in Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction and Rick Klaw’s anthology Rayguns Over Texas. He also has had several short plays produced and has worked as a stage actor, a theatrical director and an amateur chef.

Marshall Ryan Maresca: Website | Twitter

Thorn of Dentonhill: Amazon | B&N | IndieBound | Goodreads

Title says it all.

Fuck your pre-rejection.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? See if you’ve ever done this:

You wrote something. Maybe you edited it. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you didn’t even finish it. Then, you concoct a series of reasons inside your head why nobody will give a hot wet fuck about it. Nobody will wanna read it. Nobody will wanna buy it. You’ve got your reasons — maybe one reason, maybe a whole catalog full of them. And frankly? They all sound good. This isn’t the one, you tell yourself. It’s not yet right. And soon it becomes smart because, hey, you don’t want that thing you wrote out there. This is a sound business decision. This is a practical creative decision. Not everything you write is going to be aces. And so you open a drawer and you chuck this manuscript into it. It lands on top of five, ten, twenty others. A cloud of dust kicks up like an allergenic mushroom cloud — poof. And then you close the drawer.

That is pre-rejection.

You have killed the thing you created because you imagine its inevitable rejection.

It’s the same way you don’t ask that guy out because you already know how he’ll say no, and it’ll be embarrassing, and jeez even if you did date, he’d probably be a jerk, and even if he wasn’t a jerk, the marriage you’d eventually have would suck, and the kids would be shitheads, and it’d end in divorce and misery and death.

Don’t take that job — you’ll only get fired.

Don’t move to a new house — probably be haunted.

Don’t step outside — ha ha ha, you’ll probably just fucking die. (And so many ways to die! Flu ebola measles stabbing shooting planking rabid bears assassin bugs arsenic in the water shanked by a free range Gary Busey, and so on, and so forth.)

The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full — it’s just full of scalding hot cat urine! YUM.

Except, yeah, no.

Pre-rejection is bullshit.

It’s a control thing, a power trip, a grotesquely pessimistic fantasy. I know, you’re saying, uhh, it’s not a fantasy, weirdo — except, au contraire, panda bear, it is a fantasy. It’s much easier to reject ourselves than it is to weather the crotch-kicks delivered by someone else. You could far easier slide a knife across your open palm than let someone else do it — it’s so much better when we control the pain that’s sure to come. It’s comforting, easy, lazy even to just get that rejection out of the way now rather than later.

Fuck that static.

The pain isn’t sure to come.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

But if you’re going to do this thing, you need to get hard to it. You need to be not just ready for rejection — you need to be willing to embrace rejection. Not your own — but proper rejection. Rejection you don’t control. You need those calluses and scars. Rejection is always a part of who we are and what we do, and that’s not just in writing. That’s in life. What, you think you’ll get every job? Every date? Every bit of approval from every corner of your life? Life isn’t just a series of hand-jobs and clit-tickles, folks. You will be rejected. It is part of what we do. It is proof that you are doing what you love. It is evidence of the fight you contain within you.

You must defeat the urge to pre-reject.

I’m not saying everything you write is going to be perfect. Far from it. But rejection is clarifying. And it feels awful at first — until it feels awesome. Awesome because this is what successful people go through. Writers who get published are writers who have collected ten rejections (or more, many more) for every one acceptance. Cherish your rejections. Hell, collect ’em. Staple-gun them to your chest like merit badges for a particularly psychopathic branch of the Scouts. Certainly this also doesn’t mean you should send out any old piece of laundry you have hanging around in the hopes some drunken editor will buy it accidentally. But the signs of pre-rejection don’t linger at just one story left unsent. It’s when those start to pile up. It’s when you go beyond feeling that this one isn’t right and start crafting a morbid, macabre fantasy about all the terrible things that’ll happen when you send this manuscript and all the others out.

How do you defeat it?

Practice, for one. Stop thinking so much. Stop worrying. Start submitting. Editors need material. Agents need material. Readers need stories to read.

Let other people read the work. Let them send it out, if you must.

Don’t worry about the things you can’t control. Control what you can — and no, that doesn’t mean to pre-reject, it just means, write the best story, and find your feet with writing.

You didn’t get published, you didn’t win the award, you got a bad review.

Repeat after me:

That’s all right. I can try again. I can get better.

But you have to give yourself the chance to try again.

You don’t get better by just chucking manuscripts in a drawer.

You need the agitation.

You need that fear, that uncertainty, that courage.

You need input from other human beings. Which means:

Fuck your pre-rejection.

You want to get rejected? Do it the old-fashioned way.

Let someone else reject you. Take your shot. Worst you can do is fail. And failure fucking rocks.

Sure, maybe you’ll get rejected. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite will happen.

How else do stories reach their audiences, you think?