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.

The self-interview is a very useful exercise. As a writer you’re creating something that others will hopefully one day consume. Whatever you choose to do to your characters, you should have a ready answer for the inevitable questions that will spring up on social media, on your Discord server, or during an author event.

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.

TW - violence in narrative including killing, dying, sexual assault, loss

In a previous blog post I talked about how character actions should be supported by an appropriate amount of context. i.e.:

Is the context of X and Y enough to plausibly support the action of Z?

In this blog, I’m going to address how some contexts require a reaction: