How Many Women Characters Are in Your Book?

March is Women’s History Month, though I actually don’t like these types of events.  They exist because history and even present doesn’t always recognize people outside of a select group.  I remember one time, when I was in the military I was talking to one of of the NCOs.  He was African-American, and he lamented that it would be a long time before he saw an African-American President of the United States.  I told him that it would happen before a woman became President.

You know how that came out.

To look at the high levels of politics and management, and even to look at books, it doesn’t look like there’s many women out there.  I find far too many books where there’s only one woman character.  Even a book with 100 characters, and 99 are men.  How exactly is this reality?  It’s like history months.  We’ll recognize one to sell the books, and everything else will be status quo.  And by the way, we’ll put in skintight leather, too, because the men are the important readers, not the women.

Okay, that may not be accurate, but that’s the impression I keep getting.  And it’s made worse when the lone woman character tends toward masculine and immature.

I want my women characters to be smart.

I want my women characters to be savvy.

I want my women characters to be mature within range of their age.

I want my women characters not to be sex objects.

And especially, I want there to be more than one woman character in the book.

Is that too much to ask?

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My short story “A Soldier’s Magic” appears in the anthology The Darkness Within, available from Indigo Mosaic Publishing.  It features two women soldiers who have to make a tough decision to save a lot of people.  There are three women in the story.

 

Characterizing a Queen

I ran across a discussion recently (sorry, could not find it again) that mentioned how royalty is often presented in books.  The king or queen is often corrupt, arrogant, or haughty.  This was something I picked up on when I was reading fantasy books, and I wanted to steer clear of it.  I’m in Washington, DC, so it’s very easy to get exposed to a very different viewpoint on what senior leadership is like — just even by reading the daily newspaper or listening to the radio.

So when I created my character for the Queen, I wanted to do someone who didn’t fit into the traditional role of the royalty that we usually see in books.  She’s not corrupt or haughty — she’s essentially a politician and a businesswoman.  A type A personality who knows what time it is to the minute and dresses in a suit.  She probably spends most of her days in meeting after meeting after meeting.

But, being in DC, I’ve also seen what politics do to women.  There was a lot of discussion that popped up about women candidates, especially during the last election.  One of the most notable things was that men got reported on what they said (or muffed up) or did; women got reported on what they wore.  The women often couldn’t experiment much with clothes because if they went outside of Washington Black/Gray Suit, they would either not be viewed as one of the boys or get blasted in the press for wearing something different.

So my Queen has to have a hard edge because she’s essentially herding cats — the Chiefs, the press, the leaks.  That created its own problem, which was that a hard edge might make her into unlikable.   I still remember one suspense novel I read where the author tried to have a female character be “one of the boys,” and she turned into the nastiest heroines I’ve seen.  My Queen is a secondary character.  Since she likes the main character, those scenes with him are where I soften her up a bit.  He’s one of the few people she doesn’t need to project a particular image with.  But when she’s got a crisis at hand, she’s right on top of it, seeing the big picture of how it all fits together and keeping people on track.  She’s also willing to seek out experts to give her advice.  The main character in the story is unofficially her Magic Adviser (which just means she doesn’t want to advertise she has one, since the press would not be polite on this).  If something happens that looks like it might be magic-related, she consults with him for his opinion.  If there’s a magic disaster (which is, of course, the case in the story), she looks for his guidance on what she needs to do to ensure the safety of the country.

 

Competent Characters

A competent character is something I like to see when I read a book.  The character’s going to face some high stakes issues, and he can’t afford to be a pinball bouncing from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he’s doing.  Maybe this comes out of me being in the Army.  There, they train soldiers a lot so if they run into trouble they have a chance of coming up with a way out of it.

That’s been my approach with creating my main character, Keymas, for Miasma.  When I first started the book, I was having a hard time with getting subplots into the book, so I kept trying to insert different ones.  An early one, which I jettisoned quickly, involved him coming into his magic recently (3 years ago) and not knowing really how to use it.  He was trying to find someone to teach him without revealing that he had gotten this magic to someone else.  Considering what was going to happen in the story, this subplot attempt made him look like he didn’t know what he was doing, and that was far from the character I was creating.

A competent character doesn’t have to know everything, but he should be competent in what he does know so that he can deal with the unexpected.   So my approach has been to make most of his problems external — he’s limited in his knowledge because the records that would have contained information were destroyed in a war.  But, because he is competent, he knows more than anyone else because he’s taken the time to learn.  He knows if he doesn’t, it’s going to get him killed.  It puts a very different spin on the story.

 

Putting Characters in Perspective

When I did my second novel, I had four main characters, and I gave them all equal weight in the story.  They ended up jostling each other for dominance in the story.  I ended up going back to the beginning and picking the person who the story was going to focus on.  Every character has their role. I thought tying this into TV shows is a useful way to look at it:

The Star of the Show: Your main character.  He’s on the screen most of the time.  The story is about him or something he needs to do.

Special Guest Star: That’s your villian. He’s trying to thwart the main character. But the story is still going to be the main character’s.

The Costars or Supporting Cast: Important characters to the story, but the story isn’t about them resolving the problem–they help the main character resolve the problem.  They could even be people who get put into danger because something the main character or the villian does.

Guest Cast: These are the minor characters who come into the story. They may come in for two or three scenes for a specific purpose, then disappear. Like coroner in a police show who explains how the victim died to the main character.   Her role is done after that because she’s not needed any more.

 

5 Resources for Naming Your Characters

Baby Names.com: The site displays names in lists that are easy to scan, plus you can sort by orgin of name.  Handy if you’re writing fantasy, and you want to stay in the same name family for continuity.  The mouseover popups are a bit annoying though.

Baby Name Box: This has a fairly extensive list of name orgins you can sort by.  The site has an annoying popup, and the search by letter feature is not working.

Social Security’s Popular Baby Names:   Search by decade for the most popular name.  This was great for picking an older character’s name when I wanted him to sound a little out of date.

Common Nicknames:  This is a genealogy guide to figuring out what a person’s real name was if everyone only knew them by a nickname.

World Family Names:  See where a last name pops up across the globe.  Very handy if you want geographical references.

 

Invincible Characters in Urban Fantasy

Have you noticed the trend of invincible women characters in urban fantasy?  In the last book I read, the character was beaten up, thrown off a cliff, and fatally stabbed (some details changed to protect the guilty).  Yet, each time, no matter how bad the injuries, she survived because she had a miraculous–and very convenient–form of healing magic.  And each time I pick up a new book, it seems like the author tries to outdo everyone else by coming up with new forms of bodily harm, from which the character easily recovers to go merrily onto the next beating.

I think I get why the healing magic is there in the first place.  When I did a Civil War thriller, one of the problems I ran into was that women are simply not as physically strong as men.  There may be some exceptions–I certainly saw some men do very poorly on the physical training test in the army.  But from the story-telling perspective, it can be very challenging to come up with action scenes that are realistic to the gender.  I remember trying to figure out how this woman was going to escape from a locked room that was guarded by two bad guys.  Given the frigid setting and things to come, she couldn’t get hurt, so I had to really think through how the scene could be worked.

It would have been easier giving her healing magic and letting her blow through the scene.  Except.

No risk.

No suspense.

No actual danger.

Characters shouldn’t be invincible.  It really takes the fun out of the story.

 

Manage Character Names

When I wrote short stories, I used to laboriously go through baby name books for just the “right” name.  I’d search the entire alphabet for that gender, writing down names I liked until I had a list of about seven.  Then I’d go down the list and start crossing off names until I had the one I wanted.  But with the realties of writing a novel with a large cast, that method went quickly by the wayside.  It’d take too long!  And some of the characters just weren’t that important to spend that amount of time.  But coming up with so many names had its own minuses, and I had to learn how to manage all of them:

1. Keep a list of the names.  Especially during the first draft, I have a hard time remembering some of the names, or remembering how to spell some of them.  But I don’t work well with complex systems like character worksheets, notebooks, etc.  So I keep a very simple list–a spreadsheet with columns for last name, first name, and role.  The spreadsheet does double duty with another tab for place names and everything is color coded.

Why not just put all the names in one column instead of dividing them up by last name?  Splitting up the names allows me to sort the names different ways and makes it easier to catch similar names.

2. The main character doesn’t share. I always end up with some characters in the same letter family–it’s unavoidable with a cast of 30, given there are only 26 letters in the alphabet.  So I have a basic guideline that none of the characters will be in the same letter family as the main character.

3. Minor characters share. Since they don’t have a major role, minor characters can share the same letter family.  Though I try not to have them interact–and I stay away from anything that sounds alike, no matter the letter family.  Barry and Jerry–nope, one of them has got to change.

4. Never get too attached. I try not to get too attached to any of the names, except the main characters.  It’s likely I’ll discover I goofed in the naming and have to change it. Right now I’m having to change 99 percent of the names to create a consistent naming scheme.

One thing I don’t agree with is to avoid names ending in S, as Anne Marble on Writing World notes:

This tip sounds trivial, but it can save you a lot of trouble later. If you give a character a name that ends in the letter S, you will have an awkward time of it when you write the possessive form of that name.

I’ve spent my whole life dealing with a last name that ends in S, so this just isn’t that big of a deal.  Besides, it would eliminate a lot of perfectly good names!

What are some of your tips to managing character names?

 

Describing Characters?

A hot topic among writers is whether to describe characters or not.  A lot of writers say not to describe the characters, to let the reader imagine them.

I’m always a little disappointed when a writer doesn’t bother to describe the characters.  Mind you, I’m not looking for a detailed vital statistic description of everything possible in the character’s appearance.  One or two sentences might be enough if they’re the right sentences.

And I don’t think it necessarily needs to an actual visual description–hair and eye color and whatnot.  I was in a description workshop, and I think I drove them crazy because I wasn’t describing things visually.   I actually wanted to expand beyond that because there are so many interesting things that can be done.  Here’s a few:

Description by dialogue:  I’ve seen this done a couple of times.  In one of Sue Grafton’s books, a hairdresser gives Kinsey a hard time for hair that looks like rear end of a dog.  In a J.A. Konrath book, the description was, well, quite shocking.  Well written, but it made me go “Eew!”

Through story development:  In a lot of urban fantasies, the character’s appearance comes into play as part of the story.  In the Riley Jensen series, she’s part of the rare red werewolves; in Darkfever, the main character ends up having to dye her hair because the bad guys can identify her.

Through impression:  This is what I’ve been using from MAGIC STUD.  It comes from some of the thrillers I’ve read, and it’s not a vital description statistic, but an impression of the person.  It’s great with an omniscient narrator because I can have a lot of fun with it.  I have a character who gives the outer impression of being a fluffball (see title of book), and he’s actually an extremely dangerous assassin.

What are some other non-traditional ways of describing characters?

 

Juggling Multiple Characters in a Scene

When I wrote short stories, the most characters I might have in a story were three, and it was usually two.  Not a lot.  So when I wrote a  book and ended up needing 4-6  characters in scene, it was pretty scary.   I was trying to figure out what to do with them all.

And it’s tough doing in third person.  The scene perspective is through the viewpoint character’s eyes, and he’s not necessarily paying attention to everyone else.  It’s very easy to engage in a series of lines of dialogue between two characters and forget that there are more standing in the room.  Omniscient gives me a overall viewpoint that can see all the characters (omniscient is not multiple viewpoints).

But I have seen large numbers of characters done in first person–of all places.  Laurell K. Hamilton’s early books (first three) were very good at juggling large numbers of characters.  Not a lot of writers deal with large numbers of characters in a scene.  I’m reading a book now where there might might three characters in a scene, but the writer works hard to keep the three characters from being in the scene all at once.  Rather, the main character travels in the scene from character to character.  Three intersect together occasionally, but the writer quickly finds something else for the third character to go work on.  When more than two interact, the writer doesn’t let them interact for more than a few paragraphs.

Me?  Four characters have a discussion and all of them participate in the discussion for several pages.  Some things I do to help with the scenes:

Make sure all the characters should have a purpose in the scene.  They shouldn’t just be lawn ornaments.  When I did my last project, the first chapter had 11 characters.  Since the story had a military unit in it, I had all these characters because it was a military unit, and these characters came with the unit.  Otherwise, it didn’t matter all that much whether they were in the scene or not.  At the same time, I needed to not just remove the characters, but restructure the scene (it’s still a major part of the scene, even if the characters don’t have a purpose; simply removing them may have impacts on other things that happen).

The content should involve ALL the characters.  If the characters are having a discussion, they should all have something to contribute.   Of course, if they have a purpose in the scene, then they should have something to contribute.

Keep an eye on the pronouns.  This was a comment I got in my crits that it wasn’t always obvious who the “he” or “she” was.  With multiple characters tossing dialogue back and forth, it can even be more challenging because it does need to be very clear to the reader who “he” or “she” is.  And it’s all too easy to not get this one right because I know who’s talking in my head, so it makes sense to me.  This is one that I have to pay attention to, and in some cases, revise the sentences to make them more clear.

Build the scene structure to encompass all the characters.   When I first start writing multiple character scenes, I often thought of the exchanges as being two-shots.  I didn’t really envision the scene outside of the two-shot, so I had to pull back my mental camera to imagine something like five characters all sitting on the porch, talking.

 

Number of Characters

There’s this message board where they ask “Where are your characters?”  Everyone always lists two or three.  Maybe five.  I have 21 in MAGIC STUD.

I always end up with a large cast.  In my last project, I had over 30 in the first draft.  Many of those came out though in revision, and it dropped to probably around 20.   In dealing with such large numbers of characters, these are some things I’ve learned along the way:

Don’t introduce too many characters at once.  When I got the first chapter critted, the one comment across the board was “Too many characters.”  People were having trouble keeping track of who was who.  Character count in the first chapter: 11.  The chapter was revised to have only three by name.  I remember being very careful about it because there was a fourth character, I didn’t name him until the next chapter.

Don’t introduce characters in the middle of a fight scene.  That first chapter was also a fight scene.   The last thing in the middle of a fight scene should be trying to get the character’s names in!  In that case, I started in a different place so the reader could get grounded into the character first, then have a fight scene.

Don’t introduce characters who aren’t in the scene.  This one comes from a person in my critique group who did it.  He’d had probably three or four actual characters on the scene.  And then he starts throwing in all these other names at the read through dialogue.   One of the benefits of critiquing is seeing sometimes how confusing something can be for a reader from the reader’s perspective.

Use the character more than once.  If your character stops to talk to a waitress, think about a way to bring the waitress back.  Waste not, want not.  I find that if I don’t do anything with the character later on, I don’t need the character earlier either.  An auction bidder went zap because he didn’t turn up anywhere else, and on review, I could do the scene without him.

And the biggie:

There’s only one primary main character.  I tend to have four or five main characters.  In the previous project, they all shared equal weight.  That was fine during the writing, but turned into a major problem when it came time to write the synopsis and the query.  I remember when the critique group said there were too many characters in the synopsis (seven in a five page synopsis).  There were parts in the synopsis where a character couldn’t be removed without lying about the story.  And a query is just plain too short to spend it introducing so many characters. The other characters still carry their weight in the story, but the arc of the story following just the one primary main character.

Next up: How to deal with four, five, or six characters in a scene.