Fiction Guide - How to Achieve Success in Writing: How to Write Truly Feminine Heroines and the Differences Between Men & Women in Literature
And the similarities
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If there is one thing that modern cinema (and mainstream in general) can’t get right, it’s characterization. Okay, the point makes itself so essay done. Oh wait, I did have a further point for you all.
Female characters are something of a challenge to Hollywood and many other film industries. They can’t seem to get anything right with them, but what if I was to tell you that the problem goes back further than the current year. In a lot of ways the writing of women has its roots in a misunderstanding regarding Eowyn and the importance of characters like Zenobia, and Arwen.
Now the belief that female characters must be able to fight or somehow be masculine is one that has gotten twisted over the years. Once again this is not to say you shouldn’t ever write them to the contrary I like to squeeze in at least one every book. But the goal should be to remember that she is female, she has female wants and desires and thoughts, she could never be male. Just as the male character should in no way be feminine and could never be, especially since men’s natures are very much different from those of women.
We must remember that they are different.
This is why Galadriel in the Rings of Power show, did not feel true. She is a male character wearing the skin of a female one. She is fulfilling the role of Elrond, in a strange way.
This is because writing female characters has become consumed in every genre by the need for women to be ‘strong and independent’. There is a need to project masculinity into them, when this is missing out on the whole of the female experience and nature, it is forgetting that women are not men and don’t deep down wish to be. They wish to be protected, cared for and otherwise charmed, and have their own challenges.
A female hero’s journey should be markedly different from that in some ways from the male hero. The female still seeks self-actualization, but it is about in say Eowyn’s case the discovery that the female role is honourable and important. There’s no less honour, in holding men’s hands as they lay dying from war-injuries, in fact there’s a great deal of honour and glory in it because at such times she takes on the role of mother and sister for him.
At this moment she is the nearest connection between him and where he’s going. In turn though, the male character must strive for, must fight to the mountain top in order to perfect himself, so that he might transform himself from ‘brute’ to ‘saint’ as one might describe it.
In a lot of ways the story of Musashi by Yoshikawa Eiji is the perfect piece to analyse the dichotomies of male and female journeys. Otsuu is always seeking either Musashi or to return home to her adoptive grandfather Yagyu, while Musashi is always seeking to perfect himself and transform himself into the Sword-Saint he was meant to be.
Odin in Norse mythology seeks knowledge to protect humanity while Freyja it is said seeks after him to reconcile with her husband. Or she waits at home not unlike Chi-Chi why is this? Because she is home, while the male character has to seek out perfection in the world outside himself.
Male characters usually charge ahead, while female characters are carried along on the wings of the plot. This is just the way it is, and there’s no shame in it, and yet it has become a source of shame for the postmodernist who seek to make everything female somehow embarrassing.
The best example of female characters with back-bone yet who retain feminity are probably some of the heroines from How I Met Your Mother. Notably the Mother (Tracy) and Lily Aldrin. Both are extremely feminine, both are go-getters and both seek to push their men to be all they can be all while caring as best they can for themselves.
Tracy represents the ideal though, as she cooks, works hard, is cute and shares the same interests as Ted, while Lily is the reality. Imperfect, flawed and seeking always to help Marshal and Ted and not always doing a good job, but the important thing is she’s trying. She’s on her own journey. In a lot of ways she’s more integral and Marshal is much more her support character, in what is an interesting twist with Marshal being a character who struggles to balance out his desire for an ordinary life in a tumultuous world.
How do you write female characters?
Well you start off by stripping them of all the characteristics that define masculinity. You make her patient enough to await rescue, which is a special kind of patience, one that if we’re honest is hard for men. Being captured by the dragon, requires a fortitude that is different in nature to summoning up the courage as the hero of Dragonslayer must to go to certain doom to fight the dragon.
Female characters such as Eowyn may wish to fight for honour, but really it’s to protect a direct loved one, such as Theoden. This is noble, yet somehow along the way we came to resent Belle & Mulan and came to regard their sacrifices their trials as lesser.
Mulan left home in Disney’s movie, to fight to prove herself a good daughter and also to protect her father. Once this is done she goes back home, marries and forsakes the sword, while Belle seeks to sacrifice herself for her father.
This is because in a lot of ways, fathers’ are integral to humanity. The father is the one who is meant to guide and teach his son what it means to be a man. He is meant to be the one who protects his daughter’s virtue, shields her from the world and rescues her from the dangers of the world and if he cannot do that and her brothers’ can’t than her lover must.
This isn’t that she’s weak, it is only that her journey is not that of a man. A man should indeed fight for love, but there’s also vague ideals like honour, king and country, and to achieve enlightenment. Men’s desires are vaguer than those of women which lies in the concret reality of the father and brothers or lover.
In a lot of ways I used to agonize over writing women until I realized that the character motivations are always simpler. The simpler they are, the better. Whether she’s a gun-totting badass like Hawkeye or the height of femininity like Otsuu her motives are always motivated and rooted in those around her.
A female character looks around her, while a male character looks upwards. It is that simple.
It is not inferior, because the house upon which the heroes’ build their homes are to be found around them. They must set one stone upon the ground at a time, and need support and guidance in this matter. This is where female support characters are, even as the female leads will look always to the pursuit of the male hero she longs and strives for. They do this until the male lead almost becomes for them an ideal rather than a real person (such as Otsuu).
But one could also look at
’s Wingswept novel as a master-class of how to write a female lead. Her Alandis longs for first Trys then Solavier, and she goes far above and beyond the call of duty to protect them. Yes, she sacrifices for the Kingdom but what motivates her to do so is her innate love for the people around her.Yuna from FF10 seeks to purge the world of Sin because she’s been taught this is noble and she’s striving after her father’s example even as she’s also looking to Tidus for approval and wishing to give him the ‘Sin Free World’. Interestingly Tidus while he fights for love of her, he also fights to end his father Jecht and adoptive father Auron’s suffering and pain.
Tidus looks up, Yuna looks around her.
They are both beautiful.
Men will look up at the mountain and see not an impossible thing, but a scaleable mound of ten thousand stones to step over. Women don’t look at the mountain that way, they see something large that casts a shadow over them.
A female journey is differnet, the mountain is the monster in her story, while being for men the obstacle.
Sin is the monster to Yuna, while he’s the obstacle to Tidus. To Musashi those he meets on the journey to sainthood so to speak are either obstacles or friends, while Otsuu they are either villains or support.
Men need male company (which is to say ‘lads), while women long for it. Men’s journeys’ involve physical challenges while Women’s rely upon emotional ones.
This is important to remember when the time comes for you to write female journeys, as female characters can be tricky if you don’t understand this fact. The female journey is meant to be simple; father or mother’s approval is much simpler than a vague concept like ‘longing to protect King and Country’.
Certainly you have Eowyn who says she wants to defend Rohan’s honour (and she does), but deep down it is Theoden’s honour she seeks to protect. And boy howdy does she do it! She’s the greatest sword-arm in Rohan, but it isn’t in spite of her love for Theoden but BECAUSE of it.
She is powered by the greatest force any woman could ever summon forth; female love.
It is the same force that
spoke of in his flawless podcast (the best on Substack to be honest), about Belle where he talks about the motivation of Belle and how integral it is to the entire European mission in the world.It is for us Catholics a major reason we turn to the Blessed Virgin, it is not that she is a god we have no illusions about that. But her feminine love, her passion for us because she’s one of us, is believed to be so great that she will turn to her son and plead on our behalf. We pray that she intercede, the prayers are directed in the manner of Medieval Kings with their own mothers and wives; people would in desperation turn to the Queen or Queen Dowager or Princess and ask for intercession.
Because nothing softens male hostility or male passion than feminine love. It is integral to our very being, and it is why women have been propped up in Western and Eastern literature. It is what sets us apart from many other parts of the world that do not think like Europeans & Asians do; feminine love is a powerful force in our literature.
Men might be motivated by Faith, but women it is Pity and Love (more on the male motivation in another article).
I’m not asking you to not write female characters that lack complexity. Only to not forsake the feminine, as it seems to be something that challenges a lot of authors. I must admit that when writing Darkspire Conspiracy I wasn’t sure how to concreticize Sigrun’s motivations until I realized why she wants revenge and pushes the men to join her in this cause; she loves her foster-father and wishes to honour him.
It is about a father figure, and why does she reject her step-father? Because she clings to her father, even as she later comes to realize her stepfather has only ever wanted to do right by her and to take up the duty of fatherhood in honour of his deceased best friend.
It is the Mulan story just reskinned into a Nordic Saga, it was never more complicated than that, just as Chute and its sequels are reskinned Romance of the Three Kingdoms intermingled with Pillars of the Earth and Chanson de Roland.
What is more is that the noblest of women in our cultures push their men to be the best version of themselves, to be braver, more honourable and more honest with themselves. Because she needs him to be a man not a boy.
Because women protect boys, and Men protect Women. She needs him to toughen up, because she can’t always wield a sword, whereas the man is supposed to until his dying day. She needs him to be honest with himself, to find his inner balance and make his way back to her.
He must become the Sword-Saint, must heed the Call of the Wild until such time that he is worthy and able to help care for her. She in turn must become as a lighthouse, calling him home, and serving as the one who helps guide him back to where he belongs.
Special thanks also to
for his excellent article on women, which can be found here. It’s quite good, do read it (and sub to him too please, he’s massively underrated).***********
You can buy
or if you’re from the
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to whatever suits your budget (it’s only 5$ per month, 30$ for a full year’s subscription and 70$ for a founding subscription which is likewise on sale).
You can review any of our serials or anthology, it really does help.
‘Strong and independent’. Such a vague concept. Strong in what way- physical, mental, courage? And independent of what, and whom?
A lot of it comes down to how the male author views women. Did he know a lot of women in his life, family or otherwise? Did he observe them in action in the real world? Or did he grow up in an environment where they were not present, or barely present at all?
And then we have to consider what media he consumed growing up. Tolkien, for example, was extremely familiar with ancient and medieval literature, which had a tendency to portray women remotely as outlines and plot devices rather than people. (Hence Galadriel and arguably Arwen and Eowyn). Whereas the media I grew up with, and which I interact with now, portrays girls and women in a very large set of different manners, with no one model being thought of as "the best", and nobody idealized or remote from reality unless to treat them as a a joke. So my female characters take many forms and are leading characters in my story because the formats insist they be so (like Tolkien's various "men").
The point is, as Whitman put it, that female characters are large, and contain multitudes.
I agree. The entire idea that women need to be more masculine in order to be strong is absurd. No sword battle can compare to the often unforgiving trials of motherhood. (I swear I’ve said this so much in the last several years that record isn’t broken, it’s been demolished into utter ash at this point).