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.

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.

While writing my epic trilogy of novels I adopted a “lighting of the beacons” approach, discovering the path between set moments, always with a clear destination in mind. And you might think that writing a series would follow a similar format, with every episode focusing on a key moment. But the truth is episodic dramas improve with better planning. They also improve when you know the complete journey from the start.

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: