My point is, it’s not exactly news that badly-written women are an unfortunate feature in our media. While men often write the most egregiously poorly-written women, it’s not just men at fault here—people across the gender spectrum seem to struggle with writing compelling, three-dimensional women.

If you don’t want your novel to end up screenshotted and added to the next article compiling grave, mildly-to-severely sexist authorial mistakes for the purpose of public shaming (which I do, in case it’s unclear, support), you’ll want to learn how to write women well. And luckily for you, that’s what we’re here to do today.

In this article, we’ll talk about how to write compelling women, we’ll take a look at some common mistakes authors make when writing women, and we’ll look at some examples of well-written and not-so-well written women in movies, T.V., and books.

How to write compelling women

First things first, let’s talk about how to write female characters well.

1. Women are people

I’m going to get into detail about specific problems I see, but the bottom line and main takeaway is this: women are people, and female characters are characters. Writing a good female character means writing a good character.

Female characters should be just as deep, interesting, and complex as male characters, and they shouldn’t be defined solely by being a woman (much in the way you wouldn’t define a male character by their identification as male).

2. Give them complex motives

What does your female character want, and why?

You want to avoid ‘because she’s a woman, and women want that/behave like that/expect that’ as an answer. 

Consider their upbringing and perspective. If this is a fantasy world, consider whether sexism plays a role in the way they interact with the world and how that character deals with it. How does this character see things? Once you have a solid idea of this, you can more accurately get at what this character wants and how they, as a person, will react to any given situation.

3. Flesh out their interests and hobbies

What’s your female character’s favorite movie, and why? What kind of food does she like? Where does she work, and does she like her job? Let her be a real person, and let her be a little weird. She should have anxieties, fears, dreams, and interests, and they should not all have to do with what men think of them.

4. Honestly consider their relationships to other characters

When writing relationships between any two characters, you’re looking at character A through the eyes of character B (and vice versa). You’re the author, so you already know what’s going to happen, and sometimes this makes it tricky to really piece out what information is literally there, in the text, and what you’ve got in your head.

If you flesh out your female character like we talked about earlier, this is easier to do. You can tell, based on what kind of person she is, how she’s going to respond to other people. For example, if most people are at work, they won’t be flattered by strangers approaching them and hitting on them—they’ll feel uncomfortable, maybe even frightened.

5. If the anatomy isn’t your own, research it

This isn’t advice for female characters, strictly speaking, but it does often come up with specifically cis men writing cis women. If you’re writing about an anatomy that isn’t your own, research it a bit. It’ll be very silly if your book comes out and you let the whole world know that you have no idea what a tampon is or how it works—Google could have saved you.

6. If the experience isn’t your own, get a second opinion

Similarly, if you’re writing a perspective that isn’t your own, get a second opinion from that perspective. If you’re writing a trans woman, you’ll want to have trans women beta read your story and critique it so you can be sure that you’re offering a realistic, appropriate representation of a character in that demographic.

Common mistakes when writing women

So, what are some things to avoid when you’re writing women? I’ve compiled a list of tips, as well as some tropes to look out for as signs that you might need to rehash your approach to female characters.

1. The lamp trope

If you could replace the woman (or women) in your story with a lamp or sack of jewels without the story changing much, this suggests that the woman serves no purpose except to be rescued by the protagonist. This is objectification, and this woman is probably exceedingly one-dimensional. 

2. One-dimensional women

Writing women as vapid, vain harpies who care only about men and who hate every other woman is pretty overdone and generally insulting. Some women are vain, just like some men are vain, and some women are overly fixated on the opinions of men, just as men can fixate on the opinions of women, but as a character type, it’s often shallow, mean, and does more to point to the author’s internal sexism than to that specific character’s flaws.

3. Fridging

‘Fridging’ is when a female character is introduced only to serve as a tragic backstory for the male protagonist. It’s usually his wife, and she almost always dies in some horribly brutal way which fuels his need for revenge. We get no sense of what the wife was like as a person, or she’s just vaguely perfectly feminine and lovely.

Yes, people’s wives do die, and sure, I get that you want your male protagonist to have a compelling reason to be so brooding and tough. But inventing a woman to brutalize solely to enhance a male character’s Edge Factor isn’t the way to do it.

4. Needless sexualization

When men are described, we rarely get passages about how their jeans stretch over their butts or how their nipples show through their shirts. The purpose of introducing them isn’t to tell us how hot they are—it’s to tell us what they look like. However, it’s very normalized to introduce women in a way that clearly intends to show off how sexy the author wants us to think she is.

Sometimes people argue that this is done because the male protagonist sees her that way. But the thing is, if the male protagonist is seeing her primarily as a sex object, that’s a serious character flaw which needs to be addressed, challenged, or otherwise explored unless you want your readers to think he’s deeply sexist. And it never is addressed! Weird.

Examples of great (and not so great) women in fiction

The Good

1. Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Katniss is a wonderfully written teenager, at least in my opinion. Her relationships with her family are hugely important, her role as her family’s provider is instrumental to her character, and her motives are strong, complex, and not at all male-centric—she volunteers for the Hunger Games in the first place to save her sister, Prue.

When it comes to romance, at least in the books, we never shake the lens of the Capitol. This is extremely deliberate, and it means that Katniss isn’t just a lovestruck teenager helplessly torn between two boys. She’s a kid fighting for her life while also being pressured to perform love for her family’s survival. Her feelings are being messed with, and this is incredibly compelling as a conflict.

2. Shiv from Succession

Women do not have to be good people to be good characters! Shiv from Succession is a solid example. She’s seriously abusive to her partner, Tom, she’s incredibly calculating, and she’s willing to throw anyone and anything under the bus in the name of getting in her father’s good graces.

But this doesn’t come from her womanhood—it comes from her upbringing. All of the Roy siblings are impacted by their father’s abuse in their own way, and while hers is definitely influenced by her womanhood and by navigating the intense sexism of an ultra-conservative environment, they’re not just ‘because she’s a girl.’

3. Amy from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Even if you haven’t read Gone Girl, you’ve probably heard of the ‘Cool Girl’ monologue. In Gone Girl, Amy’s playing with everyone’s expectations of who she is because of her womanhood—she’s able to deceive her husband, for example, because she knows how he perceives her based on his sexism and she knows how to use that against him. This makes her incredibly complicated as a character, and her manipulation adds a ton of nuance to her very strong choices.

Again, not a perfect character—she’s not the pinnacle of feminism or divine femininity or anything. But she’s a woman written holistically, and that makes her interesting.

The Not-So-Great

1. Mikaela Banes in Transformers (dir. Michael Bay)

This is maybe a tired example, but Mikaela Banes as played by Megan Fox is an example of the ‘Cool Girl’ ideal Amy rails against in Gone Girl. Mikaela’s versed in mechanics, a male-approved skill, but she owes all of her knowledge to her father. Thanks to a man, she knows about boy stuff. And she isn’t exactly presented by the camera as a respected auto mechanics expert—instead, we get leering shots of her bent over the hood of a car, encouraging the audience to stare at her body instead of listen to what she’s saying. She’s a character with the potential to be interesting—the bones are there—but the writing isn’t interested in exploring her character beyond how she serves as a love interest for our male protagonist.

2. Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James

Anastasia Steele is the protagonist of Fifty Shades, and she’s written by a woman, but neither fact makes her a well-written female character. She’s incredibly naive—even by the end of the Fifty Shades trilogy, after she’s been exposed to tons of kink-related stuff (badly represented and explained kink, but still), she reacts like she’s never heard of sex before. It’s not a problem that she starts the series insecure, cloying, and naive, but it is a problem that she never grows, develops, or gains any agency in her relationship with Christian Grey.

3. Christina from The Book of Henry

In his essay “The Art of Storytelling and the Book of Henry,” Dan Olson explains how Christina functions as an example of the lamp trope. Christina is the step-daughter of the police commissioner Glenn, and they’re neighbors to the film’s protagonist, Henry. Henry sees Christina being abused by Glenn, and this is the impetus for his plan (and the film’s central plot) to kill Glenn. Olson explains that the film is, in concept, about a plan to save Christina, but in fact, Christina is really just an excuse—because the film isn’t interested with Christina as a character, she’s just a flat, one-dimensional excuse for Henry to make a plan to kill Glenn.

Writing with sensory language falls into the “show don’t tell” realm of writing advice, where painting a vivid picture of what you want your reader to see is much more impactful than just listing the facts of that scene.

Mastering writing with sensory language can elevate your prose, help your audience empathize with your characters, and create an overall more engaging story.

Let’s look at some examples and tips for how to use sensory language in your writing.

Why is sensory language important?

Using sensory language is important in creative writing for lots of reasons, including the ones listed above. Here are a few more areas of improvement you can achieve by writing with the senses.

Make your writing more engaging.

Using sensory language can plug your reader into the scene. Impactful description can make them feel like they’re actually experiencing the story. Writing with a robust range of senses helps with reader immersion.

When the reader is immersed, they’ll read for longer, and they’ll become more engaged with your story. An engaged reader is a loyal reader.

*Here are tips to write clearly.

Help your audience connect with the characters.

Sensory description can help your reader feel closer to your characters. In a way, effective description should help your audience empathize with your characters, because they have a better grasp of exactly what the character is feeling through the tangible description.

Reveal things about your characters and their perspectives.

Not only can sensory language help your audience connect with the characters, but it can also reveal things about your characters. What you choose to describe and which senses you choose to include can reveal their personalities, goals, and perspectives.

Set the scene.

Setting up a scene with sensory language as opposed to straight listing of facts just makes a scene more fun to read. Your description sets the atmosphere of the scene, which can strongly affect your reader’s emotions!

Here’s a video that talks more in-depth about atmosphere and how to create it with sensory language:

Sensory language brings your story to life and lets your readers walk in the character’s shoes to really experience the story.

Examples of Sensory Language

Here are the general categories of sensory language, plus examples of how they might be employed.

1. Sight

Sight covers anything your character sees, obviously. It describes objects in view, visual textures, colors, lighting, dimension, perspective.

Visual description is the most frequently used and most important sense to write with. The other senses build a more complex and immersive atmosphere, but sight is the absolute minimum for a scene to be understandable.

2. Smell

Smell can convey a lot of different things! A bad smell can make a room really uncomfortable. It can be distracting, it can give you a headache. If you’re dropping a character in an uneasy scene, using an off-putting smell is a great way to get your readers to connect with that emotion.

Olfactory memory is one of the most powerful emotional triggers, but it becomes tricky to write about because you can’t actually trigger an olfactory memory with words, obviously. But you can try to emulate that emotional trigger by writing about common scents that your target demographic will most likely be familiar with.

3. Taste

You’ll typically see taste employed when a character is eating, but don’t overlook environmental tastes! Some smells sit on the tongue or the back of the throat, which make taste and smell related. If you’re writing with one, you’re likely writing with the other.

4. Sound

Sound is anything the character hears. Trees rustling in the wind, squirrels chittering, a child singing, a car honking. To enhance a sound, consider the effects that auditory sensation would have on your character.

A character blasts the stereo in their car—can they feel it rattling up their spine? Maybe their speakers peak and the additional screech pulls goosebumps to their skin. Is it vibrating the floor of the car?

Your character hears a loud and close scream that jolts them from sleep—how did that sound affect their body? Are they startled, shaking, heart pounding? Or are they groggy and confused?

After you describe the sound, ask yourself how that sound is affecting your character.

5. Touch

Touch involves anything your character can feel. Pain, pleasure, and everything in between.

Physical feeling can also include internal reactions. Things like nervous energy, nausea, fear and other strong emotions, dizziness, and hunger also count as touch sensory descriptions.

6. Kinesthesia

Kinesthesia is the general feeling of movement. These descriptions might fall into touch as well, but it specifically refers to the sensation of motion. Like a heart pounding, wind beating against your clothes, blinking rapidly.

7. Combo moves!

It’s great to twist more than one sense together to enhance a description.

Smell and taste are very closely related—if you’re describing one, it’s easy to mesh them together for a more rounded description. It’s so natural for these to come in a pair that writers often do this by accident.

Similarly, many of the same words can be used for touch and sight—you can say something feels or looks like something. Like a bunny can look fluffy and feel fluffy. A cockburr can look and feel spiky. The way you describe visual elements often comes with the implication of a physical feeling.

Smell can affect touch as well! Something can smell warm and comforting, which would reflect in how your character feels physically. It could sting their throat or their eyes. It could make them anxious and their chest tight.

Sight can affect touch—think of a bright light suddenly shone on you.

Taste can affect touch—think spicy food. Or something like a description of ice cream, where your character will taste it and significantly feel the cold.

A quick trick to combine senses is to ask yourself how the sensory input would physically affect your character.

How to write sensory language

So we know why sensory language is important, and we know what is included in sensory language—now how do we write with it?

Check out this video about writing strong scene descriptions.

1. Develop the idea of the thing you’re describing.

In order to effectively describe something, we need to know exactly what it is. Picture the thing in your mind. Imagine the smell, tastes, feeling of it. What does it look like where it is? How is it lit? What context does it hold in the scene?

Once you clearly know the thing you’re describing, you can convey that idea to your readers. If you can’t “picture” it in your head, it likely won’t translate to words effectively.

2. Be clear on what it is.

“Show don’t tell” is often a helpful bit of advice to make us write with concrete imagery, but also make sure that you state what the object/thing is that you’re describing. It’s great to state the facts of the scene in plain language, then get into the weeds of your character’s sensual experience.

3. Consider which senses are relevant.

Not all sensory descriptions will enhance a scene. If you try to hit all five every time, you’ll likely overdo it. Think of which senses are important to convey the tone, mood, and character perspective. Which senses would be the most overwhelming in that setting? What would the character notice first?

For example, if your character has been dropped in a sewer, it’s probably too dark to see much right away, but they’d definitely smell it! That scene should likely be written olfactory-first, because that sense would be the most overwhelming.

After that, they might notice the sounds—water dripping, rats scurrying, maybe the sound of pumps depending on where in the sewer they are.

With smell and sound covered, enough time has probably passed for your character’s eyes to adjust to the dark. Now what do they see?

Describing the scene in that order puts the reader in the character’s shoes, experiencing the environment at the same pace.

4. Connect the description and senses to the character or story.

Make sure the senses you chose to include are relevant to the character, scene, and story.

Remember: In a POV character’s scene, we should see (and hear and smell and taste and feel) what they’re noticing. Think about what your character would be noticing and why, then incorporate that into your sensory language choices.

5. Don’t overdo it.

Many new writers tend to “checklist” things like their sensory language—they’ll think of how the scene looks, sounds, tastes, smells, and feels, and they’ll describe all of those things in sequence.

That method could be a fine way to get your first draft out! But with revisions, try to nail down which descriptions are relevant for the character and/or scene. Trim back the descriptions that aren’t serving your story in any way.

Another way to avoid the “checklist” feeling is to combine your senses. Like we covered earlier, there are many situations where senses overlap. Combining them can make it seem less formulaic, plus add uniqueness to your description.

6. Let it sit, then read it over.

As with any effective prose, the real writing happens in the revisions. Don’t rush it!

Let your scene sit for a while, then look it over again and see how you like it. That might mean taking a break over the weekend, or it might mean setting your project aside for a month or two. Every writer and project is different, but make sure you take some amount of space from your book before you come back to polish up your sensory language.

Writing with sensory language

is always worth the time and consideration. Think of your description as the container you’re presenting the gift of your story in—if your container is lackluster, boring, or confusing, your recipient is less likely to open the box.

Clean prose with intentional sensory language is like a good book cover. If the presentation is sloppy, you might lose readers before they can give you a chance. So invest time and effort in your language, and happy writing!

Strong prose often reads like poetry. The term “purple prose” refers to writing that might be a bit too flowery. That’s not always a bad thing—lots of readers and writers love flowery prose. It’s up to the author to decide the balance between beauty and readability in their own work.

So how do we balance beautiful writing with intentional, purposeful writing?

If you want your writing to be more beautiful, artistic, or unique, here are 7 ways to write beautiful prose.

• Avoid or reimagine cliché phrases
• Get specific
• Unexpected turns of phrase
• Be accurate and concise
• Rhythm
• Ending words/sentences
• Consider perspective

1. Avoid or reimagine cliché phrases

Clichés aren’t always bad. In fact, they can be poignant, impactful phrases with slight reimagining.

There’s a reason new writers default to using clichés—they’re easy! Clichés are phrases and terms that have been in general public use for so long that they’re easily understandable for most people.

Examples of cliché phrases:

• Gilded cage
• Head over heels
• Only time will tell
• The calm before the storm
• Kiss and makeup 
• Low-hanging fruit
• I stopped dead in my tracks
• Put out feelers
• Rain on my parade
• Stabbed him in the back
• Fire in my blood
• Blood ran cold
• Digging yourself into a hole
• Get your toes wet
• Stealing candy from a baby
• Right up your alley
• Play your cards right
• All bets are off
• All in due time
• Batten down the hatches
• Pot calling the kettle black
• On thin ice

Clichés are a shortcut to slice right to the meaning of something without having to come up with your own words for it. That’s why using clichés can make a writer look lazy. They’re just reusing something that someone else wrote.

But that doesn’t mean you should never use them! Intentional writers can take a cliché and turn it on its head to bring new life to an old adage.

Look at this advice from Self-Editing for Fiction Writers:

“…before going with the cliché, give some thought to the possibility of “turning” it, altering it slightly to render the phrasing less familiar. In a celebrated novel we edited, the writer used the phrase “they vanished into thin air” to avoid a lengthy, complicated explanation. We suggested a change to “they vanished into thick air,” which fit the poetic, steamy atmosphere of the European city in which the scene was set.”

The swap-up doesn’t have to be big! The tiny edit of switching “thick” for “thin” was enough to doctor up that cliché and make it fresh.

Changing a word, the order of words, or adding words to a cliché are easy ways to give them a new spin.

“She’s opening a can of worms,” could become, “she’s opening a can of worms and eating them.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” can be combined with, “burning bridges,” to become, “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

“Time flies,” could become, “time flies until the engine burns out.”

“Diamond in the rough” can be changed with just one additional word: “Blood diamond in the rough.”

Don’t be afraid of using clichés—just be cool about it.

2. Get specific

When tapping into the emotional side of prose, specificity is often a writer’s best friend. Anyone can make vague, sweeping statements to try and convince a reader they’re feeling something, but a skilled writer can zoom into emotional details to tap into those emotions naturally.

Like Richard Price said— “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”

Focusing on the small details is often where you’ll find the emotion of a scene, which will give you more room to write it beautifully.

3. Unexpected turns of phrase

Don’t always go for the most obvious thing! Diverting the expectations of how a sentence will end can really wake up your reader.

This obviously counts for repurposing clichés, like we talked about earlier, but it can also apply to any sentence that might be more predictable than you’d like it to be.

As an extreme example: “I woke up that morning, got dressed, ate breakfast, walked the dog, and tripped over the severed arm of my next door neighbor.”

This concept can also be as simple as swapping a single expected word for something else. I try to do this in my own writing—for example, this sentence from Mother:

“A child was raised on stories of crows—dark creatures with black intentions.”

The expected phrasing would be “black creatures with dark intentions,” but a slight reshuffling of those two words makes it a fresher sentence.

Using unexpected phrasing can shake your reader’s attention and keep them engaged with the story and prose.

4. Be accurate and concise

Heavy-handed prose isn’t going to make your imagery more effective. Often, less is more.

Use however many words you need to convey your point, but try to trim back on superfluous prose and really nail down the meat of the sentence.

Writing beautiful prose is similar to writing poetry. You want every word and image to carry its weight.

Many poets will write a first draft of a poem, then pick one or two very strong lines from that draft to write a new poem around. Repeat until every word and line of the poem is as strong as it can be.

Authors who write beautiful prose consider every word and image, weigh their effect, and make adjustments.

5. Rhythm

Writing beautiful prose isn’t just about word usage and imagery—the rhythm of a piece is just as important.

Several factors can influence the rhythm of a bit of writing, including sentence length, syllable balance, internal rhymes, assonance, alliteration…

Sentence length and syllables

The sentence length and syllable count can affect the way a reader paces the scene in their head. Long, flowy sentences can give a feeling of calmness. Long, choppy sentences can make a reader fly through it, giving a sense of speed and urgency.

Shorter sentences might give a feeling of hesitation or confusion.

Lots of medium-length sentences can make it seem like time is moving slower.

Within different sentence lengths, your word choice and length can determine how the pacing and mood come across.

Reading your work out loud is very helpful in gauging how the pacing is affected.

Example:

“I inhaled. The concrete pricked my bare feet. I grabbed the ladder rung and steeled myself. Swallowed. The crowd quieted as I took my spot on the diving board.”

“I inhaled and focused on the concrete picking at my bare feet before gripping the ladder rung and hoisting myself onto the diving board.”

The same event is happening in both of those examples, but they have drastically different pacing. What do you feel is the mood of each sentence?

Rhymes, assonance, alliteration

While outright rhyming in regular fiction prose would probably stand out as odd and distracting, utilizing literary elements like internal rhymes, assonance, and alliteration in certain bits of prose can make it musical and poetic.

So depending on your goals and vibe, doing a little bit of poetry in your prose might be nice! Don’t be afraid to play around with sounds in your writing.

6. Ending words/sentences

The last word of a sentence carries a lot of weight. It’s the last thing a reader sees of the sentence, image, or thought, so writers should consider the clause and/or word their sentence leaves on.

Similarly, the last sentence or image of a paragraph, chapter, etc., is important for the same reason.

Excuse me for using my own writing as another example (it’s the only book on my desk right now), but here’s a sentence from Sliced that describes a character covered in blood: “His shirt is crusted brown, layered beneath fresh red.”

That sentence could have been something like: “Fresh red and crusted brown layer his shirt.”

“Shirt” isn’t a very scary or interesting word. Ending the sentence with “fresh red” makes the overall image of that sentence the blood, rather than focusing on his shirt.

Give careful consideration to how you end sentences and paragraphs, because the ending is often what sits with your reader.

7. Consider perspective

Anyone can describe a scene. The things you choose to describe and the way you frame them can lead your readers to feeling the way you’d like them to feel.

One of my favorite quotes on writing is from Kait Rokowski:

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”

Writing is more than just a description of a thing. It’s the way the thing is described. When choosing details and framing to focus on in a bit of prose, consider what you want your reader to feel with that description. If you’re writing through a character’s POV, consider how they feel about the thing they’re looking at.

Audience and character perspectives can shift the meaning of anything, so ask yourself what your goal is with each image.

How to write beautiful prose

Writing strong, beautiful prose likely isn’t something that will come easy or quick. It takes practice, intentionality, and staying present with your work.

Intentionally using cliché phrases, specificity, surprises, conciseness, rhythm, endings, and perspective will give you a strong start to creating beautiful writing.

The real writing happens in the edit, so keep hacking at those revisions!

Happy writing.