• The fairer side of life: Writing Women in CW and AARs


    The fairer side of life: Writing Women in CW and AARs
    by Lortano





    Some might say that this didn’t really speak about empathising with women, that it seemed to be more of a piece on good characters in general. I agree entirely, because the entire point of this article is to show one basic thing. Women are no harder to write than any other character. An old Greek did it and a fat old bloke did it. The simple fact is that to create an excellent female character you need to use the exact same method as any character. You need the qualities and moments that make a character memorable, dilemmas that twist a character sideways, longways, slantways and any other way you can think of, not to mention epic rage moments to show the world that, as the old saying goes ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’

    Once again, I come with advice for not only those who write Creative stuff, but those who also write the narrative driven AARs that I love so very much. Today I want to talk about something interesting, the idea of writing female characters. Once more, we shall have examples and all that fun stuff, but first, I’ll post this quote from Guy Gavriel Kay (I’ve never read his work, but apparently he’s really good, and even worked with JRR Tolkien, so I should get round to reading him)

    “As for the female psyche, I used to be flattered when people said I did convincing female characters, but lately I confess it bemuses me. The implied idea underlying the comment is that it is startling that a man can do plausible women characters. If you push this just a bit, you have to ask how any woman could do a convincing man, how any young writer could do a geriatric, how any of us could do someone not…ourselves. Creating characters is, in a large way, an act of imaginative empathy, and I’m resistant to the idea that there are absolute borders to that. In the end, I’d say that we’re really talking about good or bad writing, rather than male and female, or young and old.”


    This quote is key to this entire article. I’m hardly a ladies man, nor do I consider myself to understand the female psyche. I’m a meat headed man, what the hell would I know about it. But Kay’s quote hits the nail on the head regarding writing women. This might be slightly personal, but I’m a skinny nerd who wears glasses and has as much social experience as Dracula with hay fever. By the logic of many, therefore I should write about nerds doing nerdy things, like a British version of the Big Bang Theory.

    But that’s not true. Generally the people I write in my stories are not like me, at all. There are women, there are meat headed idiots, there are well spoken gentlemen, and there are douchebags. I don’t claim to be amazing, but I think I’ll be able to dispense some knowledge on what makes a female character tick.

    It’s always irked me how lazy characterisation can be, for both genders, but women’s stereotypes tend to fall into two broad categories, the ‘I don’t need no man and carries a sword’ and the ‘Gentle as a lamb, loyal girlfriend/wife/mother.’ You might consider it generalising massively to throw most heroines into these categories, but come on, how many times have you seen it? And how often is it so utterly boring?

    This then leads to the next question. How does one escape the archetypes? Firstly, don’t be afraid to give her imperfections. Perfect characters suck, the stupid hero with his stupid muscles and stupid magic sword with his stupid loving girlfriend who never ever cheat on each other because they’re so stupidly perfect. It sucks, no matter the gender. That’s like if George RR Martin wrote Tyrion as being right all of the time because he’s a dwarf. And that’s why he didn’t do that, because that would be stupid.

    But speaking of George RR Martin, he has a few female characters that illustrate the point of empathy. Let’s be honest, George is hardly a woman. But, he came up with Cersei, who is one of the best female characters of all time.

    See, Cersei defies the two broad categories. While she doesn’t carry a sword, she also is hardly an angelic wife/girlfriend character. If anything, she’s like an amalgamation of the Wife and the evil woman on the villain’s side who wears the revealing outfits (Anime watchers, own up, there’s one on every evil villain team). The brilliance of the character is simple, she’s universally hated for the she’s pulled, including: incest, arranging a regicide, murdering Sean Bean (Though granted this happens a lot) and other awful things. But I ask you, can anyone honestly say that they didn’t feel any shred of pity for her as she watched Joffrey die in her arms?

    The beauty of Cersei is in the contradiction. How could a woman who did terrible things to a lot of people truly shed a tear over anyone? Yet the story makes us question her absolute evilness, revealing the shred of decency within her. It’s honestly astonishing how well it is done.

    However, that’s not to say that every character is a winner. Callaigh pointed out while writing this that showing why a character is bad might help make the point clearer. I, being the douchebag I am, concur. So, step forward, Sansa Stark…

    Alright, before the death threats start, this is a personal preference. But…Sansa is really, really boring. Don’t get me wrong, her chapters were always fun to read, but that was mostly because they were the ones that had Joffrey, Tyrion and Cersei in them. Sansa is just sort of…there. Honestly, she really is just a princess who gets manipulated and screwed over by everyone in the Red Keep, with no real interesting quirk to keep me interested in her. And don’t get me started on Arya…anyway, let’s move on before this becomes an ‘I hate the Stark Girls’ rant.

    I mentioned above that Sansa (And to some extent Arya) lack the qualities that make a memorable female character. See, while ASoIaF is very realistic in terms of death and the general feudal system in Westeros, the fact remains that real life is very boring. That’s why people like Cersei and Daenerys exist, they have certain quirks that make them larger than life characters, which in turn makes them memorable and therefore awesome.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean that every character can be a larger than life, ultimately there do have to be the mundane characters in order to create a contrast. Pretty much every person that Tyrion outwits, such as Janos Slynt, is an example of two dimensional characters there in order to provide a foil to the main characters, as are the majority of the Freys. But the point still stands for Sansa, as a viewpoint character you’d expect her to be an example of a larger than life character, but she just seems so bland in comparison to those she interacts with (Tyrion, Cersei, Joffrey and Littlefinger) that I just find myself wishing for another Tyrion chapter to break the boredom. But hey, that’s just my opinion.

    Kay is right in his paragraph above that imaginative empathy is the way to write any character, but the key word here is ‘imaginative’. Imagination breeds the qualities that create memorable characters. What would Gollum be without his trademark debating with himself or his ‘Gollum, Gollum’ noises? What would Cersei be without her low cunning and complete lack of shame? Be they moments, or character traits, these quirks can help define characters and bring them up from the realm of mediocrity.

    It’s time for a very different example to illustrate how such imagination can really make a character. Medea is one of the female icons of the Greek theatre, a madwoman who killed her own children in order to spite her cheating husband. But things are a lot deeper than they appear in Greek Tragedy, as I will now explain.

    First of all, the play is not a sympathy piece for Medea’s plight. Her actions are not justified by authorial edict, nor is Jason’s reasons for leaving her at the start of the play. I think this is key for any character, as an author one should allow the story to flow naturally and not save your characters from major problems, or shield them from responsibility from their stupid actions. Not if you like them, not if your readers like them. Heck, if you did a good job building them up in the eyes of the reader, their awful moments will be even more effective.

    At the start of the play, she’s a broken woman, crying her eyes out because she’s been thoroughly betrayed by Jason, who ran off with the King of Corinth’s daughter. How could we fail to be sympathetic? Then comes a heart-breaking character change, over the play’s course the broken woman becomes a plotter and finally a murderer, killing the King’s daughter and the King himself with a dreadful poison.

    Then comes the ultimate moment, the thing that pushes her into my hall of great characters. She debates about killing her children to save them from the inevitable revenge of the King’s relatives. See, any great character can be made over the course of a terrible dilemma. Gollum against Sméagol for control of the broken body that used to be a hobbit. A duty bound guard with a choice between the life of his wife versus the life of his King.

    Those moments are freaking awesome, they can give characters a new lease on life, for example a character being tempted to fall to evil and doing so, becoming a credible threat as a villain. In Medea’s case, the choice she makes is one of the more troubling things I have ever heard and even today I question what I’d do in her situation.

    She decides to murder her children to save them from a terrible fate. It’s also implied she wept while killing them, showing the turmoil within her mind. But once the deed is done and Jason rushes in, learning of his children’s deaths, Medea appears in a flying chariot pulled by a dragon above him, carrying the children’s bodies. I appreciate that this is a plot hole resembling that of an average Steven Moffat Dr Who plot, but Greeks loved flying chariots back then so roll with it.

    Her demeanour in the last scene of the play is one of the greatest character shifts of all time. At the start of the play, she wept over Jason leaving her. At the end she gloats about how she’s taken his children and wife from him and even takes time to tell him (Out of spite) that she killed the children to ruin his life and leave him with nothing to show for his work.

    With the two examples, you see women with hideous imperfections, yet they stick in the mind like chewing gum on a shoe. Both of them are mentally unhinged, both of them have elements of the monstrous and the motherly. It’s a bizarre mix that works so incredibly well and one that I fully recommend others attempt, though obviously with your own twist.

    Some might say that this didn’t really speak about empathising with women, that it seemed to be more of a piece on good characters in general. I agree entirely, because the entire point of this article is to show one basic thing. Women are no harder to write than any other character. An old Greek did it and a fat old bloke did it. The simple fact is that to create an excellent female character you need to use the exact same method as any character. You need the qualities and moments that make a character memorable, dilemmas that twist a character sideways, longways, slantways and any other way you can think of, not to mention epic rage moments to show the world that, as the old saying goes ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’
    Comments 5 Comments
    1. snuggans's Avatar
      snuggans -
      good post, although i would differ in that sansa is undergoing a transition from royal girl doormat to political shrew. and i'm surprised that Arya did not pique your interest as she's a fighter with a vengeance, but she also explores mercy, compassion as well as patience.
    1. Merchant of Venice's Avatar
      Merchant of Venice -
      Great article, Lortano, you bring up many good points. I believe G.R.R Martin once said (paraphrasing I think) when asked how he wrote such complex female characters "Women are people to, right?". I also agree with the comment before mine in wondering why you didn't like Arya. I guess, in contrast to the characters all around her ( here in reference to their ethics and morals) she can come across as a bit righteous and well Stark but for me she has one of the best character stories and developments (or at least possibility for development).
    1. Broreale's Avatar
      Broreale -
      I would not bring up GRRM as a good rubric for competent female characterization, but it's good to see this post nonetheless.

      What's important here is to acknowledge people as a result of their environment in some way. What effects women more than men, old people more than children, parents more than bachelors, rich vs poor, and on and on. Writing good "characters" revolves a lot around realizing who and what these characters are, to themselves and to others, and the effect of this identity on their behavior and the reactions to their behavior.
    1. OnnaBushido's Avatar
      OnnaBushido -
      They are believable to male readers anyway.

      I actually think Robert Jordan did better female characters. He covered a lot of nuances that are missed by other writers, including Gurm. As to how he did it, well it's common knowledge that Harriet (his wife) was heavily involved.
      What I find most interesting is that some female writers write male characters very poorly and to me it's kind of refreshing to see the reverse; a dynamic and complex female protagonist with male love interests or sidekicks who are heterosexual female ideations of what a male should be.

      I think ultimately, one sex cannot write immaculately from the perspective of the other unless they get help. You can cover the superficial stuff, the common stuff, the unsexed stuff. But you can never get into the heads of the other sex when it comes to plumbing and navigating sex based oppression.
    1. Ichon's Avatar
      Ichon -
      Hmm... good article but I have to interject about Robert Jordan writing good female characters- WHAT? Ok there are a couple unique characters he did a good job with but most of them are the worst copy/paste young/middle/old harridans I've seen in any popular work.

      Best male writers doing female POV in fantasy- Branden Sanderson, Guy Gaverial Kay, Daniel Abraham, and maybe George Martin (he has 2 great female characters and a handful of far less compelling characters). Still quite a bit better than Jordan as at least GRM's lesser characters are individually less compelling rather than being similarly repelling.