Female Characters: How to Make Them NOT Suck

People have overcomplicated writing female characters to the point of paralysis. It isn’t complicated. It’s just that a decade of forced, ham-fisted writing burned the audience, and now they arrive suspicious. You have to be aware of that without letting it change how you write.

Two examples from our books, opposite ends of the spectrum. Yaira is alien and enormously powerful, so overpowering somebody is believable in her case. What keeps her from being a Mary Sue is vulnerability: she outlives everyone, she married, she had children, and she has watched her own bloodline die. Then there’s Saoirse, a private investigator with no powers at all. In her RippaZine appearance she’s undercover, gets made, and kicks a guard in the shin with a heel. Then she runs, because that’s what someone her size actually does. When it comes down to it she pulls a gun and says out loud that it’s her equalizer, because a bullet doesn’t care whether you’re a man or a woman.

That’s the whole trick. Believable settings and honest limits. And no, audiences don’t reject female characters on sight. That claim gets used to shut down every criticism, and it isn’t true.