Why I Write “Strong Female Characters” "I write characters". As an amateur writer, who specializes in female characters because that's what interests me, this nails my process exactly. On the other hand, unlike him I don't really think about gender roles or "women's perspective" or anything like that. I don't feel like my female characters give me a perspective on "women". I have a perspective on the INDIVIDUALS that I write. What is true for one female character isn't even true for other ones in my work, let alone all the billions of female human beings on this rock we all live on. I don't write "women", I write Samantha, or Phoebe, or Tabi or Kitty or Linn. You just can't think about how to write "women" or "black people" or whatever. I can't tell you any more about women than I could when I started this whole writing thing.
13 ways to create compelling characters 1. Make the character exceptional at something. Give your character a trait or skill that makes him or her admirable in some way. It doesn’t have to be anything over-the-top. Maybe she’s an office manager…who is an amazing cook. Maybe he’s a rebellious teenager…who is unusually perceptive. As soon as that character is really good at something, the reader perks up. 2. This is so effective that screenwriters often use a “save the cat” scene (and the better the screenwriter, the subtler the scene) near the beginning of the screenplay to make the audience like and identify with the character. As soon as you show the character genuinely caring about the world, the reader starts to care. 3. Hands-down, one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever received in my life. 4. I’m not talking about dialect or verbal tics or anything gimmicky. 5. Your characters might exist for the sake of the story…but you need to create the illusion that they don’t. 6. Passionate people are interesting. 7. 8. 9.
How To Write Empowering Female Characters A few months ago I posted an article called Project: Representation asking for people (primarily women and minorities) to provide descriptions of what they thought would be an idealized representation of their race, sex, or other status identifier. This was in response to two major things. The first was my own uncertainty about my already-established idea of "to write female characters well, just write them like men". The second issue was one of idealization. In Project: Representation I tried to get a sense of what attributes would define a good female character, or a good minority character, besides being a "good character" in a neutral sense. This article by Vivienne Chan (click this link it is the basis of the rest of the article) answers a lot of my questions more directly, at least in terms of one person's perspective: "Everyone – and I do mean EVERYONE, male or female – is going to have a different answer to “what makes a great female lead in a video game." This is empowerment.
Welcome to Fuck Yeah Character Development Writing Female Characters Please welcome our August guest, Jim C. Hines, author of the Goblin Quest books and the Princess series, "often described as a blend of Grimm's Fairy Tales with Charlie's Angels" (jimchines.com). He is an outspoken advocate of women's issues on his blog, where he addresses a variety of topics from rape awareness to depictions of women in cover art. His most recent novel, Libriomancer, debuted August 7th. First of all, my thanks to Kim for the invitation to do a little guest babbling! Ultimately, I think this is the key to learning how to write female characters, and I’m going to share it with you all. Here it is. Women are people. Shocking, right? I do think we’ve gotten better over the years. Now, I happen to like kick-ass heroines. But that can’t be all there is. But she was smart, she was cranky, and she was perfectly capable of manipulating the other goblins into getting killed instead of her. Janet Kagan wrote great female characters, because they were characters first and foremost.
Character Survey of Doom How Not To Write Female Characters There are already a lot of articles around on how to write female characters. That’s all well and good, but I think it’s a lot less restrictive to have an itemized list of things you shouldn’t do. It also might be easier to digest than lengthy essays. Also, this list is intended for people with more testosterone, but since I’ve seen young female authors screw up their own young female protagonists, estrogenites are perfectly allowed to read this too. Like all my advice, this is subjective, in no particular order, and should be taken with a small pile of grains of salt. I know very little about good writing and am not qualified in the slightest to give pointers on it, but being female I think I’m qualified to give pointers on writing characters who share my gender. I’m going to assume you’re taking your work seriously and expect your readers to do the same. Female characters should be characters first and female second. Some examples of good female characters Zukünftigen Artikel?!?!
descriptive words chart This column will change your life: how to think about writing 'An awful lot of people seem to think they know the secret to writing well.' Illustration: Chris Madden for the Guardian What's the secret to writing well? As I've said previously here, an awful lot of people seem to think they know, yet their "rules for writers" are almost always (pardon the technical linguistics jargon) bullshit. For example, "Show, don't tell" is frequently bad advice. In the right context, the passive voice is fine. The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural". Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. This isn't a "rule for writers"; it's a perspective shift. oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com