How To Write Bad Female Characters

A Hack Writer's Guide

For decades, the accepted advice on writing female characters has been something like this: don’t try to write good female characters, write good characters who are female! And while there is a chunk of wisdom in this aphorism, one cannot help but discern the steely glare of the fanatical egalitarian behind it. You wouldn’t want to imply that there are any differences between men and women, it seems to say. Someone’s social credit might get hurt.

It’s true that most of the interesting character-defining traits are not the preserve of a particular sex. But by closing ourselves off from this perspective of character design, are we not subtly constraining our creative process, for reasons that have nothing to do with the story?

In today’s article, I’ll briefly address some of the ideas around designing characters, and what challenges apply to female characters in particular. While the art of character design is an enormous field, upon which many teaching careers rest, this summary should give you some new ideas and approaches for creating your own.

Designing Characters: Personality and Social Role

There is a very easy way to make convincing characters in a hurry: personality typologies. Whether it be Western horoscopes, the Eastern zodiac, the MBTI test, the Four Humours, or the Five Factors, humans have been morbidly interested in personality typing for a very long time. Simply pick and choose – preferably from a few different typologies, so that your characters don’t fit each other too well – and you can guarantee yourself a quirky cast of interesting people. These systems provide a lot of the background information needed to round out a character’s personality.

Is your character loud or quiet, strong or weak, greedy or selfless, euphoric or depressive? You can construct your own typology out of a series of dichotomies, which encourages conflict to arise naturally in the story from personalities who occupy opposite poles. Conflict, by the way, is the key driver of reader interest in story progression.

Or you could decide on a signature behaviour, ideal, attribute, or relationship that defines the character, and construct the rest from there. If the signature is strong enough, the story will lead the way.

Next comes the assignment of the character’s social role, which need not be closely welded to personality. Here one considers the character’s job, status, wealth, age – and only here does the character’s sex become important, as one factor among many in what I call their social role.

Of course, there are many more possible processes for creating characters. It’s an area of creativity that abounds with free choices. The writer may also begin from the social role, and build a personality that complements or contrasts with it. For example, one might expect a small-town taxi driver to be stereotypically talkative, but what if they were painfully shy? Or, what sort of personality might suit a military leader in a harsh, post-apocalyptic setting?

One thing that I cannot stress enough is that not all characters in a story need to be rounded, three-dimensional characters. Comedy is full of caricatures; giving Polly from Fawlty Towers a deep and engaging backstory would simply waste the viewer’s time. Even in more serious works, applying depth to the background cast can often distract from the three-dimensionality of the lead characters.

Rendering Characters in Writing

While most of character portrayal simply comes under the practice of ‘good writing’ there are a few useful rules to bear in mind. Chief among these is show, don’t tell. It’s almost always better to have a character’s personality revealed through their words, expressions, and actions, rather than telling the reader directly in text or via another character’s speech. Using each passage of writing to convey messages on multiple levels is more engaging to the reader’s imagination than a simple series of sequential descriptions.

When one character talks about another, this should be used to convey more about the speaker than the spoken-about – just as it does in real life.

This principle doesn’t render narration obsolete, but mandates a bit of extra cleverness when narrating. Sometimes the narrator is a character in themselves, and not necessarily a reliable source for the story they’re relating. Other times, the narrator is aligned with the point of view of the protagonist, and so narrative descriptions of other characters may be seen as representative of the protagonist’s personality.

Story Role

Different characters contribute to the story in different ways, and this contribution tends to be particular to each genre. A murder mystery requires a murderer, a victim, and an investigator, for example. This is the story role, and in my mind, completes the triple recipe for a character: personality, social role, and story role. For more central characters, you may proceed to add a lengthy backstory, a set of dreams and fears and relationships, and so on.

When we talk about Female Characters, we aren’t really talking about every character in a work who is female. We’re talking about a particular perspective for creating characters who are distinctly and meaningfully female.

One example of this might be Lady de Winter, from Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. In the novel, de Winter is a primary antagonist of D’Artagnan and the musketeers. She is an early femme fatale, a woman who compensates for a lack of physical strength with beauty that hides a ruthless and manipulative mind. Lady de Winter is a liar, a chameleon, a consummate temptress, and a murderer. This archetype is compelling because it is believable; a deadly exaggeration of the traditional differences between men and women (both mental and physical).

The homme fatal, by contrast, is a character in the mould of James Bond or Han Solo – a violent killer with a thin veneer of respectability. Only when he is working for the wrong side does he become a villain, and not a rugged hero. A man who behaved as a femme fatale and occupied the same story role would be unlikely to work. In a man, physical weakness and submissiveness would be seen as revolting character flaws, unless balanced out by a compelling set of skills that distract from the core archetype. (If you think you can make this character work, though, try flipping the gender roles in a femme fatale short story and see what the end product looks like. In fiction as in science, experiment is the test of all assertions.)

While not every woman is Lady de Winter, and not every man is James Bond, one might reasonably believe that there is a bit of de Winter in every woman, and a bit of Bond in every man. Whether this is proof of insightful character design, or a causal loop resulting from super-popular archetypes setting the dynamics of relationship role behaviour, the reader may ponder for themselves. The fact is that it works.

Writing Bad Female Characters

It’s true that stories influence reality. But it’s a truth that the writer is often wise to ignore when they sit down to type. If writers fixate upon the real-world impact of their work, the result is invariably bad fiction, political polemic, or both at the same time.

Overemphasis on the real-world impact of stories is one reason for the slew of bad female characters in recent years. The modern writer, once filtered through the censorious barriers of the established publishing and TV/film industries, is likely to have a progressive cast of mind. She (slash her) will be sympathetic to the credo that “a good story is one that makes the real world a better place.” To that end, the story must advance all the right causes, and derogate all the wrong ones; it must subvert all the boorish stereotypes, while saying nothing that could be interpreted as retrograde.

Unfortunately for stories, today’s dominant paradigm is terribly confused about sex and sexuality, with rancorous debates raging over questions as fundamental as the definition of woman. How can one write a good female character, if one can’t define a woman to begin with? The end result is that female heroes are masculinised: physically strong, socially independent women who don’t need any help from anyone. Such characters rarely display an iota of femininity, with the authors implicitly equating femininity to weakness.

I feel this problem has been *discussed to death* over the past few years: completely independent characters are boring and unrelatable. Innovations of the type “what if Superman were exactly the same character, but a woman?” are invariably tedious. And so on. The fact that these problems persist is proof of the capture of publishing media by political actors, to the detriment of story.

Writing should not be used as a platform for boosting the author’s social credit. A good writer allows the story to lead, to go where it wants to go, with minimal concern for ‘real world impact’.

But even if one lacks a political agenda, there are plenty of ways to write cringe-inducing, cardboard-flavoured female characters. The English analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell spilled some ink on this subject before third wave feminism was even a tiny gleam in Satan’s eye. Russell was arguing from an early liberal position, and criticised the many inaccurate generalisations of women throughout the ages. In this aside on popular literature, he noted that creating compelling female characters is as much a challenge for the female author as for the male.

The deeply irrational attitude of each sex towards women may be seen in novels, particularly bad novels. In bad novels by men, there is the woman with whom the author is in love, who usually possesses every charm, but is somewhat helpless, and requires male protection; sometimes, however, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, she is an object of exasperated hatred, and is thought to be deeply and desperately wicked. In portraying the heroine, the male author does not write from observation, but merely objectifies his own emotions. In regard to his other female characters, he is more objective, and may even depend upon his notebook; but when he is in love, his passion makes a mist between him and the object of his devotion.

Women novelists, also, have two kinds of women in their books. One is themselves, glamorous and kind, an object of lust to the wicked and of love to the good, sensitive, high-souled, and constantly misjudged. The other kind is represented by all other women, and is usually portrayed as petty, spiteful, cruel, and deceitful. It would seem that to judge women without bias is not easy either for men or for women.

Bertrand Russell on Generalisations About Women (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish)

Some introspection clearly helps to prune bad female characters of their authors’ worst misapprehensions about women. In practice, this is often achieved by a second opinion, or a good editor.

Universals and Particulars

When writing a character of a particular category, there are features that are universal to that category, and those that are particular to a specific time and place in which the character may be found.

For example, male characters are equipped with a certain biology, expected to have two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head – these may safely be called universal characteristics, with the forbearance of paraplegic readers. The male life cycle begins with childhood, ventures into adolescence, grows into the prime of life, and experiences a long and slow deterioration of health with age, finally ending in death. This too is universal. But what about the phenomenon of the midlife crisis – is this not rather particular to modern times?

Would a mediaeval knight experience one, and if so, would he have the words to describe it? If he rode back into his castle having spent a fortune on a brand new warhorse that will never trot within a hundred miles of a battle, would the stable hands say to each other: “Sir Crustalot’s having a midlife crisis?” I rather doubt it.

One of the great challenges of historical writing is developing characters who are authentic to their setting. Many writers inadvertently export the ideas, behaviours, phrases, and attitudes of modern times to their historical setting (through sheer blithe ignorance, if you ask me). Thus we see the mediaeval and imperial periods littered with atheists and feminists and homosexuals and ‘marginalised groups’ who have internalised none of the moral messaging of their time, and would feel perfectly at home in a California Starbucks. The only authentic part of these characters is often their costume: this is fancy-dress, not historical fiction.

When done self-consciously, the effect can be brilliant. A prime example of this is the BBC comedy series Blackadder, in which the eponymous protagonist is a cynical, modern schemer inserted into various historical epochs. His surrounding cast are caricatures of the beliefs of the time which the writers thought most worthy of derision (chiefly monarchism, nationalism, and the aristocracy, though the English working class gets a good ribbing in the idiotic form of Baldrick). It’s very well-written, past the first season, and hilarity ensues.

Blackadder would be rather dull if there were more than one Blackadder, however. If the whole cast from Edmund to Melchett to Queen Elizabeth behaved like modern cynics, you would wonder how their monarchic society could even exist.

Particulars of Femininity

There is an immense amount of scholarship on ‘masculinity and femininity’ in different cultures and time periods around the world. Most of this work is derided by the political right. While it’s true that plenty of this scholarship is aimed at subverting established gender norms for political ends, the idea that the changing nature of masculinity and femininity should not be studied is rather limiting. These things are, at least partially, social constructs.

A writer looking to describe standards of femininity in a historical or fantastical setting would do well to look through history. We have valued some truly bizarre attributes in female beauty. The Chinese famously broke their daughters’ feet in half and bound them for the rest of their lives, because small feet were seen as cute and petite. Mediaeval Japanese women dyed their teeth black, shaved their eyebrows completely, and painted them back on. 19th Century European women would bind their waists with metal hoops to ensure the growth of a dainty physique, and in earlier generations applied cosmetics based on arsenic. Even today, Western women undergo plastic surgery in the form of lip fillers and botulinum toxin, and colour themselves like baked beans in order to attain the ideal standards of Instagram beauty. In short, there is no measure of beauty too ridiculous or debilitating for a human culture to adopt.

There is some debate over how these fashions are constructed. The feminist assertion is that beauty tortures were perpetrated by toxic patriarchal societies, whose inherent fragility drove them to repress women in cruel and unusual ways. Judging by the social standards of the present age, however, it appears that competition among women for peer group status appears to be the predominant driver of beautification behaviour. Nobody wants to be seen as dowdy or unfashionable, after all.

Incidentally, I have yet to meet a single bloke in favour of lip fillers, which rather undermines the argument that women compete in beautification solely in order to attract male attention.

More subtle than these hair-raising beauty treatments are the ways in which feminine behaviour has changed over the years. In Victorian England, it was considered feminine for a high-class woman to faint at the sight of something unpleasant, which we deride nowadays. This expectation governed social behaviours that infantilised women, shielding them from unpleasant sights, and actually encouraged the prevalence of women fainting. Conversely, in mediaeval Japan a samurai wife was expected not only to tolerate the sight of blood, but to defend the family castle personally with a lethal nine-foot polearm. Femininity in these two cultures clearly meant something rather different.

Universals of Femininity

Aside from the basic biology, and the life cycle that leads from infant to maiden to crone, there are a few key differences between the sexes which help to inform the writing of good female characters. The Five Factors personality test, considered the gold standard for personality research in academic psychology, indicates that women tend to be more agreeable and more orderly than men. In other words, the average woman is less likely to initiate confrontation, particularly with strangers, and more likely to keep a tidy house. However, these differences are rather small, meaning that an exceptionally disagreeable or disorderly woman would not be an ‘unrealistic’ character.

In intelligence research, women and men possess the same mean intelligence, but men have a higher standard deviation of intelligence. This means in practice that the greatest geniuses and most idiotic imbeciles are much more likely to be male, but does not preclude the existence of female geniuses or female idiots.

These results have been repeated across multiple cultures, which indicates a degree of universality to the results that isn’t determined by particular sociocultural contexts. However, a society with a particularly gender-biased culture would be able to skew these psychological results through cultural programming.

To Conclude: Chill Out, Man

Writing a decent female character is not particularly difficult. Much of the anxiety surrounding the writing of ‘bad female characters’ seems to come from outside the world of story: from writers who are concerned that readers will make deeply negative character assessments of the author if they write a female character ‘wrong’. Similar concerns are often voiced about characters from ethnic or sexual minorities (in the West). But this is really a commentary on the toxicity of modern culture, not the challenges of story.

Personally, I believe that the literary and creative industries have become so corrupted by identity politics that anonymous/pseudonymous publication is the best solution. That way, the reader is forced to judge the work based on its quality, and not whether its creator is a member of a despised or exalted demographic. This is why I strongly encourage contributing writers at Creative Liberty to use pseudonyms; they are thus able to receive quality feedback without any possibility of identity-based criticism.

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Stay tuned for next week’s article (17th August), which will expand on the polysystems argument from last week.

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