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How to Write a Strong Female Character

Thank you very much! you're perfectly right in your insight and I agree with the comment you made about superficial acceptance. Ironically "blanket acceptance" harms not only the people it claims to support, but it also undermines the seriousness of an issue, making it so that it's less likely to be perceived as relevant by people who are outside the spectrum. Tropes can help create a reliable story or character, but should be used in a way that is sarcastic, or ironic, or with a backdrop of a world so absurd that the trope in comparison brings to the audience a semblance of reality and reliability. Thank you for your comment and for reading!

L.L. Maurizi
How to Write a Strong Female Character

You know I never thought of it that way, as a writer you have the impossible task of creating a living breathing person who’s thoughts and experiences are fundamentally different from your own, and do so convincingly. While Lucio the person might scoff at someone who believes in ghosts, Lucio the author needs to understand the experience of being terrified of something which does not exist, and all the associated premises and implications that come along with that. I imagine that the exercise of writing a character can make someone a more compassionate person. One of my coworkers whom I’ve worked with for several years came out as trans. Like you I am cis-gendered so I will never understand the experience of gender dysphoria, but I am able to listen and observe. I got to witness all the awkward interactions of them being accidentally misgendered (by myself even). I got to witness the physical and emotional transformation that they went through, and all the months they spent absent from work whole doing so. I also had the privilege of realizing that even through all the changes and transformations, at the end of the day they were still the same human being that I had shared experiences with. One thing you see often on the internet is superficial acceptance of a disadvantaged class. I’m talking about the people who accept that horse is a gender and minorities can do no wrong. I believe this kind of superficial understanding ultimately does harm to the people it claims to support, and the literary analogue of this is what you would call writing a weak character. Its like stripping the humanity away from someone in the name of unconditional tolerance. One point I could argue against is that tropes necessarily lead to weak characters. The movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is riddled with character tropes. An Asian-American family struggling to make ends meet, the parents clinging to a failing marriage, the daughter afraid to come out as lesbian. Yet when placed against the backdrop of an inter-dimensional existential crisis, the humanity of these characters is exposed. The fate of the entire universe was the line and yet the most gut-wrenching scene of the film for me was when the father handed divorce papers to the wife. The reason a lot of tropes exist is probably because they are fairly common experiences, the challenge is implementing them in a way that is engaging and insightful. Really love these kind of articles, I’m looking forward to the next one!

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New work in progress on my patreon!

Short Story: A Good Guy with a Gun

The Eight Lights cover design

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