“How to write female characters” plus “how to avoid female characterisation stereotypes” are frequent Google searches to this blog, so when playwright Ness Lyons (@lyonsness) pitched LondonSWF an idea on this theme, we jumped at the chance! We think her exercises are insightful and easy to put into practice, so get going! Enjoy …
As writers in these hashtag equality times, we arguably have a moral duty to create female characters that empower, inspire and challenge. And we simultaneously have a dramatic duty to write ones who also enrage, repel and provoke. Basically, anything but just titillate.
So if you want to create a complex female character, forget about giving her double-Ds and remember the SIX Ds:
1) Divide (but don’t conquer!)
If your scripts tend to be light on lady roles, dividing the number of your characters equally by gender is a good place to start. It may seem eye-rollingly prescriptive, but it’s a human rights issue. Approximately 50% of the world’s population is female, but gender parity is so far from currently being a reality (and yes, that includes in the Western world) the UN has made ‘Planet 50-50 by 2030’ one of its top five global goals. And its identified that a key factor in achieving this is increasing and varying the representation of women in the media. So it’s not good enough to merely have an equal number of female characters – not if all or most of those roles are low in lines or status, or tokenistic or stereotypical whereas the majority of your male characters are not. So think outside the trope box.
Exercise One: Divide the number of your characters who are at the heart of the story or who have agency and authority by gender 50:50 (or as near as dammit). Just don’t have all your female characters end up physically conquered by the male ones.
2) Deviate (from your OWN experiences and impressions of what it’s like to be a woman!)
Not necessarily for all your female characters, but at least for some. Mix things up where possible. Make conscious and varying decisions about characters’ age, ethnicity and race, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness or disability, job status, love life, family situation, social and economic background etc.
Exercise Two: Deviate from your own worldview by creating female characters whose life experiences differ from your own.
3) Describe (your female character’s perky … personality!)
Stephen Jeffreys, an internationally acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, advises that a good character description is based mostly on personality alone, and that an interesting way of doing this is flagging up the contradictions in a character.
Exercise Three: Describe your character in terms of her personality as follows:
‘[Character] is X & Y but [also] Z’
X&Y = how the world views your character, with Z representing what your character DOES, or a trait they have, that contrasts with what she LOOKS like.
4) Doing (not being done to)
Those moments in the story when your character is simply going about her business before a plot point occurs? Why not have her doing a physical activity she enjoys during some of them? E.g. mountain climbing or knitting when receiving a pivotal phone call. It’s commonplace in TV and films to see two men having a game of squash whilst having an important conversation – why not two women?
Exercise Four: Show your audience what your character likes to do in her free time away from any job, partner and family. And make it something where she’s not passive but actively doing.
5) Dialogue (vary her voice, and not from moaning to, um, **moaning**!)
Actually giving your female characters some dialogue is a start, ho ho. No actor of *either* gender goes to drama school to learn how to be silently sexy whilst semi-clad (many have got that skill down already, thanks for asking.)
Then make that dialogue both interesting and realistic by subtly altering your character’s speech depending on who she’s talking to. e.g. more argumentative when talking to Wei-Yen, more playful with Alex, more intellectual with Deshandra etc.
Exercise Five: Experiment with shifting the tone/vocabulary/cadence of your character’s dialogue depending on which of the other characters she’s talking to.
6) Divulge (yourself!)
To ensure you’re writing about the human condition, gender irrelevant, give your character a facet of your own personality, be it primarily a strength or weakness.
Exercise Six: Divulge a part of yourself via your female character… provided it’s not the part that likes to prance about wearing nothing but pants 😉
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BIO: Ness Lyons is a playwright whose work has been performed at The Southbank Centre London as part of the WOW Festival – the largest women’s festival in the world; Hackney Showrooms as part of Wo! Show and Tell Festival; The Criterion Theatre in the West End; and various London fringe theatres. She is also a lawyer and co-founder of Unmuted Productions @unmutedprods which will shortly be releasing its first video, I Smile Politely.
Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
