Why I Never Want to be Asked About Strong Female Characters Again

The more you as the writer are able to step outside your own sexist cultural biases and see women as full, complete human beings replete with all the strengths and weaknesses that bless and plague all people, the easier it will be for you to write female characters well.

In asking the question, “how do I write strong female characters,” you may already have set yourself up to make the task much more difficult than it needs to be. Let’s dig into this oft-asked question, the reasons why it is not my favorite, and what other questions you might be better off asking instead.

Strong

There are several ways to interpret this adjective, strong, and I imagine that different askers may mean different things by it. Here’s one possible (and somewhat uncharitable) interpretation of the question that I hope is never what’s being asked: “How do I write women who are strong? It’s hard, because women are so naturally weak!”

Probably this is not what the asker means to say: some of the strongest people I know are women, and I know strong women in great abundance. There are examples of strong women everywhere and hundreds of ways for your character to be one. I know women who are strong because they are outspoken and unafraid to express themselves, and women who are strong because they know how to be quiet and careful with their own language. I know women who are strong because they keep it together and remain composed in the face of horrifying tragedy and women who are strong because they’re unafraid to break down and show emotion and vulnerability. I know women who are strong because they support themselves and their families financially in difficult circumstances and women who are strong because they get up day after day and care for children or sick or elderly relatives without pay and often without thanks or recognition. I know women who are strong because they exercise their bodies in ways that build physical strength and women who are strong because they endure health challenges that leave them physically weak and emotionally drained. And, as with all of these seemingly conflicting traits, sometimes they are the same woman.

Women are strong in every way people are strong, because women are people. So if this is what the questioner means to ask, perhaps a better way to ask the question would be this: how do I write strong characters? How do I make sure my characters have strengths? By asking this question equally about characters of all genders, we don’t single women out as singularly difficult to write with strength-related traits.

But also, why do women have to be strong? Women aren’t always strong, because people are not always strong. Women, like people of any gender, should be allowed to be strong, but they should also be allowed to be weak. Every woman should not have to be a martial artist in order to be considered a worthy character. Female characters should not have to be good at everything. Women can inhabit a space anywhere on the spectrum of strength and weakness, because people have varied strengths and weaknesses. There is no limit to how strong or weak your female character can be, and there is space in stories for all kinds of women, just as there is space for all kinds of characters in general.

Let’s discuss what I consider the more probable and also the most charitable interpretation of the question. Perhaps the asker isn’t concerned about the relative strength or weakness of the woman in question. Perhaps the asker only wants to know how to make sure their characterization is strong. Perhaps what they earnestly mean to ask is how do I write women well?

Female

Aspiring to write women well is admirable. It suggests that you know that women have been written poorly with great frequency, reduced to stereotypes and gendered supporting roles, always the mother or the damsel or found dead in the refrigerator. It suggests that you want to avoid some of the problematic ways women have been portrayed in the past and do better in your own work. That is fantastic, and I have good news: it isn’t really all that hard to do better.

The vast majority of experiences in life are not gendered experiences. In most circumstances, you’ll steer yourself right by treating your female characters as you would your male characters—as people who have many traits, one of which is their gender. Allow them to be a plethora of other things, some of which may be influenced by their womanhood but none of which are defined by it. 

Let’s look at a somewhat pedantic example: I am a woman. But when I grocery shop, I don’t grocery shop as a woman. I go to the store with a grocery list, not because I’m a woman, but because I have a brain that has a hard time remembering things. When my partner goes to the grocery store, he carries the very same list, so this is not a gendered trait. I frequently buy olives. I hate olives. I don’t eat them. I buy olives because I am a parent, and my children like them. When my husband goes to the store with the list, he also buys the very same olives, though he happens to like them. If he didn’t like them, he would still buy them, because he is a parent, and the children like them. We do this because we are human beings who need food, because we are parents who need to provide food for our children, because we are suburbanites who live near a plethora of grocery stores and don’t grow our own food. When I grocery shop, many of my intersecting identities absolutely influence what I buy at the store, but most are not influenced by my femaleness. Likewise, the vast majority of things I do in my life are far more influenced by other traits that hold an equal or more important sway over my decision making and personality.

I am woman, but I am also a writer, a parent, a geek, a Christian, a hater of olives. I have some traits that one might stereotypically associate with femaleness: I like romance novels and I cry copiously when I feel strong emotion. I also have traits that one might stereotypically associate with maleness: I’m decisive, a problem solver, a direct communicator. Being female is part of my identity, but it is only one part.

One of the ways that women have been written so poorly in the past is that they have so often been reduced to their femininity. They are female and nothing else. They have no other traits, no interests, no goals. They are defined, even imprisoned by their womanhood. By allowing your characters to be many other things in addition to female, you will already be well on your way to writing women far better than many of your predecessors.

If your story is about gender, you might need to concern yourself about feminine ways to be a spy, or to murder someone, or to ride dragons. But most people wondering about writing strong female characters are probably not writing stories about gender. They’re writing stories about women, and women can spy or murder or ride dragons in many of the same ways that men do. Instead of writing a story about a female spy, you can write a story about a spy, one of whose many traits is that she happens to be female. Then you won’t need to worry about how to write strong female characters, only about how to write characters in their multitude of complexities. Their womanhood may absolutely affect many of their choices, but so will their other intersecting identities.

But what if there are aspects of womanhood that are important to your story, aspects that you personally have no experience with?

Writing a woman whilst not being one shouldn’t be any more difficult than writing a dragon rider. Presumably you’ve never ridden a dragon, but you can imagine what it might be like to do so. The main difference, of course, is that no one else in this world has ever ridden a dragon either, so no one can tell you that you’re misrepresenting the experience. I have good news for you on that front as well. If you’re willing to do your research, an enormous percentage of the population of the earth is qualified to assist you.

If you are writing about an experience that is commonly female and you find yourself lacking in personal experience, I’d recommend you do what you would do with any other bit of research: ask someone with experience and listen to what they say. If your character needs to comment on menstruation and you have no personal experience with it, ask a person who has a period. If your character is experiencing gender-based discrimination and you, yourself are a person with gender privilege such that you’ve never been on the receiving end, ask someone who has. Ask multiple someones. Get a variety of viewpoints, because no two people experience discrimination (or anything else) in exactly the same way.

Once you’ve done your research, you can draw from those viewpoints to decide how this character will respond to the harassment or comment on their own period—there are certainly some ways to comment on these issues and sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about, but there are hundreds more ways to do it right and do it well. Even better, include multiple women in your work who respond to these issues in different ways. Let them interact with each other, so we can see their opinions, their experiences, their strengths and weaknesses playing off each other, in conflict with each other, supporting each other despite their differences.

To return to the anxiety behind the question, to the knowledge that women have been written poorly in the past, may I present to you one last better question on the subject: how do I avoid sexist stereotypes? Fleshing your female characters out into people with many traits besides their gender will go a long way, because many sexist female stereotypes are rooted in a lack of dimension and agency. Including more than one woman in your piece will also help, because when all other characters are male, every trait your woman has looks like a comment on womanhood, but when you represent many women with many different traits, they’re just facets of what makes each character unique.

But if you’re still concerned about writing women in stereotypical ways (and the problem is so prevalent that you probably should be), the best way to avoid these stereotypes is to educate yourself about them. Sexist tropes pervade stories in all media, so it’s easy to fall into them without realizing it. It’s much easier to spot a woman in a refrigerator or a screaming woman or a damsel in distress when you’ve taken the time to research the tropes and understand what makes them problematic. (And indeed, once you’ve educated yourself, you will not be able to stop seeing them! Everywhere! All media will be ruined for you: you’re welcome.)

If you’re avoiding (or intentionally complicating) sexist stereotypes, running unfamiliar experiences by knowledgeable experts, and writing women who have many identities and traits outside of their gender, you will be well on your way to writing women well. Moreover, when we stop thinking of the world as divided first by gender—the female experience and the male experience—and begin to think of characters of all genders as people who are having a human experience—influenced partly by gender but also by a myriad of other, equally important traits—then all our characters will become more round, complex, and interesting. We’ll write better women, yes, but that will be a byproduct of writing better people.

Characters

So, finally, let’s talk about writing characters who happen to be female. I think you should write some! If you’re writing about earth or an earth-like setting, a large percentage of your characters should be women! You can write women who are strong, women who are weak, women who are smart, women who are dumb, women who are good, women who are evil, and best of all, women who are all these things at different times and in different circumstances. Your female characters will have strengths and weaknesses, they will have a variety of interests, traits, backgrounds, and identities, all of which have an important influence on who they are and how they interact with your plot, your setting, and your other characters.

Well-written characters of all genders will not only have multiple identities, cultural influences, and traits—they will also have conflicting identities and traits. I’m a person who cares deeply about other people’s feelings, but I’m also a direct communicator who often hurts people’s feelings because of my own haste and poor phrasing. These traits often come into conflict in my own life and cause me no end of grief, but they can also both be used for good. I wouldn’t want to be a person who is callous about the pain she causes orand has a hard time saying what she means. I’m happy being who I am, even if it causes me conflict sometimes, even if I, like all people, frequently struggle with how to be myself and also be a good member of my communities.

As a final thought, I probably shouldn’t be so hard on the question of how to write strong female characters. Asking it implies that you’re aware that women have been written badly and you want to do better, which is admirable. But when we move past this question and on to questions like “How do I make my characters people, in all of their complex variety?” we will write better characters across the board, and some of them will naturally be female.

So please, let’s stop talking about writing strong female characters. Let’s start thinking instead about seeing women as people, about letting our female characters have every ounce as much freedom to be whoever they are (strong and weak, good and bad, complex and conflicting) as we grant to our other characters. There are as many right ways to be a woman as there are women in the world, which is to say, literally billions! And while there are a few stereotypes that you’ll want to avoid, the first step toward avoiding them is not to try to find the one right way to write a strong woman. It’s to recognize that the more interesting, complex, and diversified your characters are, the stronger your female characters will naturally be.