The world is ending. Again. So what role do your female characters play in a crisis and how can you avoid one of the most common male-written pitfalls out there? Once you read this, you will see it over and over again in movies and serialised dramas. It’s so prevalent it’s almost standard… and it’s about as far from reality as it’s possible to be.

I’m talking about the moment in the story when the woman looks at the man and asks… 

“What are we going to do?!”

Gents, in this series I’ve been providing non-judgemental tips and tricks to ensure your female characters score highly on depth and integrity.

This time I’m looking at the subject of how women view men, the things we notice and the thoughts we have but don’t necessarily verbalise. If you’re writing from a female perspective you may struggle to inject these realistic focal points. This is totally understandable… and fixable…

It’s understandable when tired tropes find their way into your writing, but there are good reasons to be aware of them. Introducing nuance to your villainous women will help you to give your writing credibility while maintaining your female readership. It’s all about integrity, which is something most, if not all, writers aspire to.

I see a lot of posts highlighting examples of male writers getting descriptions of female characters wrong. Of male writers falling back on tired sexist tropes that place women as props in the male MC’s storyline. But in a world where it’s quite possible to read works only written by men… and I must stress here the importance of diversifying if you haven’t already… it can be difficult to know how NOT to do those things.

As far as I’m concerned this is very simple. A dragon is a dragon, a wyvern is a wyvern. We have names for these things that are long-established. It is simply what they are called.

BUT

There are a few good reasons for authors to call wyverns dragons, and these come down to accessibility and marketing.