One of the biggest problems I’ve had with my WIP since the beginning was not liking my Female Main Character (FMC) very much.

I LOVE my Male Main Character (MMC), he’s a deviant and a sarcastic ass and I love him. I love my FMC in theory, but as soon as I start to set her down on the page, the story I’ve set for her turns her into a sort of weak-willed, stereotypical two-dimensional female character who has things happen to her and around her and is the plot point for the hero’s character arc, and I hate that. But, I do still want the story to revolve around her time as a captive of the main baddie, so, how to make this work?

I think it was while I was driving yesterday that it came to me — what would make her more interesting?

Funny how massive lightning strikes of like, basic common sense, come to us out of nowhere and seem so deep and profound. 😉

What I crave in my female characters, what I love about the ones I love, is their strength and their agency over their own stories regardless of whether they’re queens or slaves. And what I hated in my FMC was that she didn’t have any. She was sassy and snarky to match my MMC, but she had no agency. She was making no decisions about her own story. She was being told what to do and having the story happen around her and not because of her.

The flash of inspiration in the car showed me how to fix that. Up to now, she has been the human consort of our MMC vampire. She’s a hedonistic party girl, just like him, and she also functions as the lure for the humans the vampire feeds on every night. She does this willingly. But at the end of the day she’s also just a kept pet, a mistress in a gilded cage who in many ways lives at his mercy. And I wanted her to have more strength.

How to make her more interesting? What if, instead of just being a party girl who gets other women to party with her, she was overtly a madame. A freelance sexual coordinator. It would be quite a change from what she had been, but also totally in line with her character all along. It gives her agency over what she’s doing and more power to make choices over her own story.

In theory I liked the idea of her living as his kept mistress but in practice I realized it was making her a weak character, at least under my pen, and I think exploring this new idea will help me flesh her out into the character I want and need her to be.

questions

What are your favorite things about female characters in stories you’ve read? What are things that you hate? Does your character have any of the traits you can’t stand? If so, how can you shake things up?