Men, Don’t Make These 6 Mistakes When You Write Female Characters

Don’t over-sexualize them

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when men can’t write female characters.

And when they do it anyway.

It can totally ruin my reading experience, and it automatically brings the book down on my rating scale, even when all the rest is mind-bending and brilliant.

It doesn’t matter if your book is a New York Times Bestseller, if you’ve won the Nobel Prize or if you’re the new Hemingway.

If you commit some of the following mistakes, it means you can’t write characters who represent one half of the human population.

Maybe something worth looking into.

Attractive, sexy, hot

I’ve been reading The Final Minute by Simon Kernick, a British author who writes thrillers.

The book is great. It’s fast-paced, it’s plot-driven, it’s exciting — definitely something I need right now to get myself out of my reading slump.

There’s one thing that keeps bothering me, though. Why is literally every woman in this book described as attractive?

And why does the main character — who’s very morally ambiguous, to be fair, but still — want to sleep with all of them?

In literature, women are described as attractive, hot, or sexy much more often than men are, especially when the author is male. This is quite problematic because it gives every woman the impression that men always think about their attractiveness first, and other things second.

This only supports the already harmful preconception that men are pigs who only care about sex, an idea that’s undoubtfully unhealthy for both boys and girls.

Boys think they should be that way or that there’s something inherently wrong with them, and girls can be disgusted and afraid of their opposite gender.

Please, give me less description of sexy and more intelligent or sharp-witted.

Clothes

Why is it that women’s clothes are often described much more than men’s?

This is true especially in a Czech book I read this year, Kronika zániku Evropy by Vladimír Vondruška. Atop of being very hateful, anti-Islamic, and badly written — it’s also sexist.

The first thing you notice about every single woman is that she either wears a tight mini-skirt or is curvy. Interestingly, men’s clothes aren’t described anywhere. The reader doesn’t even know what the men — most of the main characters are male, by the way — look like, let alone what they wear.

I didn’t even finish the book because I couldn’t take more of Vondruška’s bullshit.

If you don’t have a specific reason why you’ve decided to describe a woman’s clothing in a scene and not mention anything about what the man is wearing, maybe think twice.

Often you just describe the female appearance to make them look hotter in your mind’s eye. This can be understandable if it’s a character your main protagonist is madly attracted to, and it serves the plot or the character development.

But when it’s every single woman in the book… that’s something you should most likely work on.

Passive listeners

In the same Czech book, male protagonists love to go on long rants about politics.

Sigh.

This would be fine if it didn’t feel like Vondruška is basically having a conversation with his own big ego in a pub. It would also improve the quality of the novel if all the women didn’t just serve as passive listeners with stupid questions.

Sadly, mansplaining is a thing in real life as well as in books. Badly written female characters keep asking questions, have short remarks that propel the guy to speak more and dominate the conversation, or are bitchy, aggressive and simply wrong.

Give your female characters some space. Let them express their own opinion without automatically making it look like they’re stupid and need to have things explained to them.

Write them with a brain.

Villain or lover

Either your main guy has sex with them, or they’re the reincarnation of evil. There’s no middle ground.

Friends? Oh, come on. They’re just pretending to be friends, you know they’ll end up having sex anyway because men and women apparently have to be attracted to every person they meet.

Whatever your sexuality is, there are people you’re attracted to and there are people you don’t fancy — so stop pretending like every single woman in your book is secretly wet for your main hero.

And if you write a villain woman, give her some depth. This is general advice for villains, anyway — they’re better if you can understand them on a more complex level and if you make them at least a little relatable.

She’s not just a bitch. Explore why she acts like this. Your female audience will thank you.

The over-sexualization of women, young girls, and children

Disturbing spoilers for the book It by Stephen King — but remember that weird underaged gang bang at the end of the book?

I remember reading this at fifteen and thinking: “Did the publisher even read this part? Did nobody question his decision to put this in? Did King himself not question it? What was he thinking?”

Having a group of underaged teens banging in a dark sewer is bad enough, but it gets even worse when King describes the act from Beverly’s point of view.

Beverly is 11 years old. Yet there’s not as much description of pain or discomfort as you’d expect. No, quite the opposite — she even orgasms when she’s shagged by like the fifth guy in a row.

Yep. That’s right.

I think this speaks for itself.

This is writing females at its worst — the over-sexualization of women, especially underaged girls, is not okay.

One-dimensional sex fantasy

When you write a female character, give her more dimensions than one.

There are already way too many women who are hot and badass but not much more than that.

You can write porn scripts for yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend like your character is a great one if you just write them to fulfill some personal fantasy or to bring an idealized version of the “perfect woman” to life.

Women are complex. They’re real. They aren’t just cold or soft, attractive or evil, badass or fragile. They’re human beings and they deserve to be written as such.

Luckily, there are male authors who do know how to write good female characters.

Take Brandon Sanderson, for example. I absolutely love how he wrote Vin in Mistborn — she’s capable, strong, intelligent, and has faults and fears. She learns to appreciate femininity, while at the same time being one of the best badass women I’ve read so far.

She’s not sexualized for some weird fantasy, and her clothes are described as much as the men’s ones, often for practical purposes.

She evolves, progresses and thinks.

She’s real.

Make your female character real too. Make her an entity of her own, not a means to an end. Give her a brain and a soul, faults and fears, joys and thoughts.

Make her human.

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