Tips in writing a female protagonist

[Super Mario]

I've noticed in some of my next projects involves more leading female protagonists than I've had in the Distortionverse (eg. Octo/Beatrice, Sylene, Elizabeth, Shwell the vampiress). The only referencial point on writing a strong female protagonist I've had in recent memory were from Hayao Miyazaki or I normally convert concepts I've written for MALE characters into females instead. I would like to inquire if there are any other tips I can have from this wonderful community in avoiding troperific cliches in writing female leads? This will help me better write in later stories too.

 

[Max Caulfield]

Um... let's see. One thing might be to look at common female tropes in whatever your genre is and check to see if any of your female characters fit into those tropes (in regards to their jobs, personalities, hobbies, backstories, etc.) and if they are, change them or decide if that's just how your character is. Characters can fit certain tropes and still be original, well-written, and interesting.

EDIT: Another thing is also to really flesh out their backstory and personality so you really see them as a completely unique personal and character. Even if the audience doesn't see it overtly, it comes out in your writing and the smaller details you do reveal about your character.

 

[Super Mario]

The hardest I find to write is Sylene from Shadelocke, to conflict her human half and her wish to become a unicorn again lol. I don't know if I should put her as a supporting character for Shadelocke's quests to steal or hinder him while finding a means to undo the magic that keeps her trapped as a woman despite the fact that she is attracted to him due to

Spoiler

being a virgin

.

 

[Max Caulfield]

The hardest I find to write is Sylene from Shadelocke, to conflict her human half and her wish to become a unicorn again lol. I don't know if I should put her as a supporting character for Shadelocke's quests to steal or hinder him while finding a means to undo the magic that keeps her trapped as a woman despite the fact that she is attracted to him due to

Spoiler

being a virgin

.

Aaah. So do you feel her succumbing to her attraction to Shadelocke would be too tropic?

 

[Super Mario]

That and her fanservicey look, she's extremely tall (6'2") in contrast to Shadelocke (5'6"). The development I had for her is to dress less fanservicey as the story progresses (by the events of Book 2 she becomes a unicorn again). I want to know if I should have her conflict with her

Spoiler

unicorn's tendency to like virgins

be a plot point or is it too troperific?

Octo is another case as

Spoiler

TERISA is her child from her human mate, whom her father, Time himself had erased from existence

, Is she spiting her father for her love for her mate? Or is she trying to undo it and change the laws of reality?

 

[Max Caulfield]

That is a toughy. I guess you could find ways to make those things not tropic. The height difference can not be brought up except in the most normal, casual, factual way. As for the other one, I'm drawing a blank. Maybe you could even make that a struggle for her: Did she choose her mate to spite her father or for love? People are complex. Sometimes they don't even know that shit.

 

[Super Mario]

I think I got the latter already addressed with but I think I can resolve it by making it vague for the early books. The former I will check since I'm currently stopping Shadelocke to focus on world building to understand how I want to convey the fantasy world.

 

[Cthulhu]

Have you read Game of Thrones? Its female characters are generally considered to be well-written, doubly so / contrasted by the fact it takes place in a very archaic, patriarchic society (forced / planned weddings and such, not to mention rape left and right). As to why the female characters are well-written...

 

[Cabaret]

with ^ that in mind, why not try reading/watching a story with a female character you like, then imagine them in the same scene as a male character. See how you'd have written them as a male and that should help you see a difference perhaps?

I tend to have a habit of making my male characters too verbally 'deep' and telling all their feelings! I always have to edit spoken word to thought and use delete liberally!

 

[Hisako]

Yeah my facetious remark was basically going to be "just ignore the ovaries and focus on the feelings"

Gender as a device is a fair trope but you need to tread softly with it. Familial issues are almost always universal and can easily be non-specific to gender regardless of fathers and mothers and what-not. Sex and sexuality is pretty fluid too. Nothing wrong with exploiting fantasy tropes as long as you're looking to ground it with familiar emotions.

 

[Starling]

Ideally, your character should work just fine regardless of gender. The only thing it should matter for is you're dealing with stuff like gender identity, pregnancy and so on. You should be able to construct a solid character independent of their gender, allowing you to avoid gender biases.

 

[Jason Tandro]

When possible I try not to make sex anything more than an incidental factor. There have been a few places where I have used gender as a form of comic relief (for both males and females) and women and men do general differences but ultimately yeah, it comes down to the fact that we're all people and we're each going to respond to situations on the basis of our past experiences which only (ideally) tangentially relate to our sex.

A few examples from my writing: In my fantasy trilogy there are an equal number of male and female characters (main characters anyways) and each of them are soldiers / warriors except one male and one female (though, to be fair, the one civilian male was once in the navy, but he dies early on if that helps #spoilerforabookyou'llprobablyneverread). I wanted the focus to be on who they were as people and soldiers and not force gender roles. That was foremost in my mind as in a lot of fantasy women tend to get shunted into support roles or love interests.

You know one thing Harry Potter nailed? Women. Hermione was a stronger wizard than Harry was. Like legit, his power came mostly from circumstance and balls (the metaphorical kind here). When it came to straight "I know what the fuck I'm doing" it was Hermione who saved the day.

I can't say how much I have done for writing females in my horror writing as generally the cast there has been male, but I do try to keep things in consideration.

 

[Super Mario]

My problem with the unicorn is she is indebted to Shadey for rescuing her and going by lore and due to the fact that our anti-hero is

Spoiler

a virgin.

I am afraid having her conflicting feelings of finding her way to undo the spell that trap her as a woman vs. the attraction she has for Shadey due to his balls to the wall adventures equivalent to bugs bunny will not sit well with readers or may find it sexist or forced (as of writing Shadelocke, I've only depicted reluctance on her attraction but also finds his criminal activities repulsive yet she always looks out for him and is supportive of him as a young man than that of a criminal). Do note I've tailored her to be Machiavellian in her quest to return to unicornhood and she may indirectly betray Shadey + Cab's syndicate if it deems fit to justify her way to return to her immortal form.



As for Octo, I'm still working on her being a mother and loving wife vs. a responsible aspect of time for her 3 mil sisters + father and her rivalry with Liccy, Death/Atticus and Entropy. I'm working on whether she is a trickster/deceiving goddess or if she's with blue and orange morality that doesn't make sense to humans and aliens like Liccy, Fangu, Mage and Berniticia.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

with ^ that in mind, why not try reading/watching a story with a female character you like, then imagine them in the same scene as a male character. See how you'd have written them as a male and that should help you see a difference perhaps?

I tend to have a habit of making my male characters too verbally 'deep' and telling all their feelings! I always have to edit spoken word to thought and use delete liberally!

I have that problem too. Then again, there is always the exception that proves the rule. My brother in law spills his emotions to all and sundry more than anyone I've ever met. He also, probably as a corollary, has the gift of making people confide their deepest secrets and feelings to him. We always say he should have been a priest! (He's Irish).

My advice to you, Lupin, is to remember that within the female gender you'll find representatives of the full gamut of human experience. Women can be and do anything a man can be and do, both for good and ill: this isn't a statement of principle, it's just a fact. Women probably do talk more than men, but even in my classroom I have girls who, when all the girly chit-chat is going on, sit at the back playing games on their laptop, and I have boys who happily join in with the chit-chat. I have girls who never say a word and boys who never shut up. Female characters don't have to be typical of their gender, whatever that means, or representative of their gender. They just have to be individuals.

Don't worry about being tropey. For one thing, there's a trope for everything nowadays so being tropey is unavoidable, and for another thing, most people like their fiction to be predictable. Look at the success of the Hero's Journey. Like the Hero's Journey, tropes fill a human need for meaning and significance.

 

[Clement Rage]

May I rant?

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Personal pet peeve for female characters: calling attention to the fact that they are female characters as opposed to characters that just so happen to be female. Goes double if the story takes place in a 'verse where historically gender hasn't been an issue.

 

[Starling]

Regarding tropes, there are tropes about trope usage and writing, if that helps. You're bound to find something about pitfalls to avoid and things to try out if you have the time to look up tropes about what you might include in your story. For that kind of thing, I'd recommend looking at the trope tropes and literary tropes indexes. The useful notes section is also quite helpful if you can find a relevant entry.

 

[Flare]

Maybe it's already been said before, but I think listing down the most well-known tropes, or other common ones, is the easiest way to see if your character fits any of them. I think it's okay to have tropes in a character if they're not overly done or just one big walking trope.
By the way, a super tall woman isn't something I've ever considered a trope myself, but I guess it depends if she can also kick ass and is super attractive and saves the day/year/galaxy along with it.

Just make her believable, like a girl you know/could see yourself knowing. Making a character realistic and to the point where they could be real people, I think that will help to get rid of tropes.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

As someone who lurks on TvTropes a lot, I only find tropes annoying if there's not a decent in-universe justification for them. So long as there is one, then all the tropes in the world can apply to a character and I'll be fine with it. If there isn't one, then a character doesn't have to be all that tropey and I'll still find them annoying.

 

[Clement Rage]

For me, it stands or falls on the minor characters. Make sure your main characters aren't the only ones that exist in the world and give them varying personalities and you should be okay.

Also, only make gender politics an issue if it actually makes sense to do so.

 

[Channy]

That and her fanservicey look, she's extremely tall (6'2") in contrast to Shadelocke (5'6").

This is actually rather subversive, as 90% of the books I've read, the main heroine/love interest is always this small, petite little thing who can kept swept away in the wind. You don't see enough averagely tall (or even taller) leading females.

My thoughts to avoid with regards to the ladies:

Make them varied in as many ways as possible. You only get into tropey-waters if they're so one way it's cliche.

You have a stoic character who focuses on her career as an adventurer and doesn't care about relationships or men? - Don't make her a rigid bitch. Have a few flings throughout her life, meaningless probably, sure, but it shows that she's not a frigid she-beast who only cares about her quality as an adventurer, and then when that one guy does come around, it's not viewed as him being the all-mighty magical penis who changed her life.

She's a leader/independent/never shows fear in the face of danger? - Show she has a vulnerable side. And don't have her "shedding the lone tear over her family who passed away". Women have just as many varied reactions as men, and they're not always crying. Women get angry, irrationally at times, but also in grief, or confusion. Men sometimes tend to shut down when they're upset, bottle it up or try to resolve it... women usually want to voice their frustrations, even if it's just throwing something at the wall.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

They don't have to be nice. Not even deep down.

 

[Super Mario]

Thanks alot for the tips, ladies and gentlemen. I'm applying what I learned once I overcome the blocks.

 

[Flintlock]

Can I hijack your thread for a second, since you seem to have got what you wanted from it?

I'm designing a Pathfinder campaign for some IRL friends of mine to play, and while I'm not strictly writing the protagonists' parts (the players get to do that themselves), I am writing a lot of NPC parts, many of whom are protagonist-friendly. I decided to do something I've been wanting to do for at least a decade, since I first had the idea: write a story in which every character's gender is a coinflip. A literal random.org coinflip, in this case.* I'm writing characters first and determining their genders and names second, in the hope that (a) I will avoid gender tropes and stereotypes, and (b) I'll write a lot more women into the story than I might have done otherwise. I try not to be biased but it's always easiest to "write what you know", and I know the life of a man.

My method has just given me my first lesbian pairing: the leader of a city and her female partner. Our first session is tomorrow and I'm already intrigued to find out how the players react to it, because I won't be drawing attention to it at all. If anyone's interested, I'll let you know how it goes.

Apologies if the hijack was out of line, but I didn't feel like making my own thread for this.

* I know there are more than two genders, but I've chosen to stick with male and female for the time being. I intend to include an ambiguous or non-binary character further down the line.

 

[Flare]

^Whoa, I love that idea! Usually characters just pop into my story from, I dunno my mind I suppose, and if it feels right for them to be there they'll stay, but I love the thoughts of figuring out a character and then randomly determining the gender. I can imagine there'd be some interesting 'coin flip' characters that can come from that. I think I'm going to have to try this out myself now. Thanks Flint!

Also, not sure about anyone else, but I'd like to see how the players react to the lesbian NPC's. I always love it when someone shows characters instead of tells them, so I suppose in that case, if you wouldn't mind I'd also enjoy hearing about how you 'showed' these two characters along with what the players picked up from it.
All up to you of course, but it sounds interesting and, well, I love seeing how others write so that I can hopefully learn from it myself.