Your fill-in girls, your soft metal foxes, your white receipts, your big, black boxes.

[intertribal]

Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting everyone needs to pass the Bechdel Test.  Some of my favorite writers don't - there are no female characters in Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away, and I totally loved it.  But, not all books are The Violent Bear It Away or Blood Meridian, and I think the problem I describe below (incorporating only a few token women) is relatively common.

I noticed about a year back that my ensemble-cast novel was really devoid of female voices.  It was so bad that a reader could fairly assume that the handful of female characters I did have (in a sea of men) represented my entire conception of women - mainly because there are women in this world (it is not set on a battlefield in WWII, for example), I just wasn't giving them any roles or responsibilities, as far as the story was concerned.  And yes, a really juvenile part of me was indeed writing Heroine, Bitch, Villainess (I kid you not).  While that sort of characterization can satisfy the Mean Girls/Revenge of the Nerds urge, it's also shallow and devoid of reality, and pretty useless given that I want to discuss gender issues. 

Besides 3D-ing my existing female characters, I needed to add a wider scope of women.  When it comes down to it, they do have ways to exert themselves on the goings-on of the plot, even though they exist in a patriarchal society.  After all, I'm all about depicting the ways people endure/negotiate within a power structure.  So I started the below process of rethinking my cast.  The ratio of male to female characters in the novel is still about 2:1, but it's a lot better than it was - more to the point, my cast is richer and my social system more complete.  Plus I actually made quite a few characters that I enjoy writing.  So, I offer my input/advice/tips. 

1. Obviously, what you're "supposed" to do is write, simply, about people, and not worry about how it all shakes out, because the characters will sprout organically from the story.  I find, however, that this advice is often used to justify terrible, terrible things, and I don't think it's actually all that helpful if you're working with a novel and trying to fix the problem of token women.  It usually just makes you want to go "well, that's what I'm doing, this is how I roll, lalalala I can't hear you" and give up on the problem, period.  So, while this is always a fine place to start when shaping a cast of characters, it's not enough.  Also, writers make casting mistakes.  I know I do.
2. If possible, pull a genderswitch.  This didn't work for me in the patriarchal human village.  But it did work outside this village.  For example: originally, I had a main character meet a long-lost father.  But I was stalling out on this idea - it just wasn't provoking anything interesting - so I turned the long-lost father into a long-lost mother.  Hey, presto.  There was nothing essential about this parent being male, and the genderswitch opened up an opportunity to explore new dynamics and show that this other society doesn't function like my patriarchal human village.  I also genderswitched the leader of yet another society, male to female.  And that decision really infused that character with personality and life and distinction.  Almost like she was meant to be female all along.
3. Existing male characters: do they have women in their lives?  Mothers, sisters, wives, daughters?  Example 1: I got great characters out of developing the wives of my patriarchal village's male leaders - pointing out the various ways they influenced (or did not influence!) their husbands, and the female network of power and communication that they built with each other.  Winter's Bone is a great example of what I mean - the female characters in that movie are all some man's wife/daughter, but they've got this parallel system of power that is absolutely critical to getting things done in their clan (i.e., they're the only ones that can beat up a woman, because that would break the men's honor code.  That's what I mean.  Develop that stuff.).  Example 2: One of my antagonists loses his father as an older teenager, and is an only child.  So I built up his relationship with his mother, the only surviving relative he cares for. That in turn forced me to develop his mother's character - what kind of mother would encourage that type of behavior from her son? - which, in turn, fleshed out my antagonist even more.  Win win.
4. Existing female characters: do they have women in their lives?  This is what lets you pass the last step of the Bechdel Test.  Often times, the main female character is the only girl in a boy's club, like Beverly in It.  There's nothing wrong with writing a Beverly, but this type of character often precludes other female characters from becoming three-dimensional (c.f. Audra) or existing at all, and also leads to the question: are women only worth talking about when they can be "one of the guys"?  Is there only room for one woman in a story with ten men?  I mean, it leads to questions.  Or the female heroine's mother is dead, so she is surrounded by men and becomes the only female voice in the story.  Clarice from Silence of the Lambs and Ellie from Contact are both female characters raised by their now-dead fathers, working in very male environments.  But Clarice has her female roommate and clearly displays empathy toward Buffalo Bill's female victims.  Contact, however, essentially has Ellie as the only woman in a male universe.  Or, the female heroine has a clique of female friends/followers who are all tokens of some kind and are usually there only to show that the heroine has a social life and is superior to other women.  It's not that any of these scenarios are inherently bad.  But switching then up does let more women into a story.  Example: I gave some of my important female characters female best friends.  It's only appropriate, really, because I've had important female friendships for many years, and the Whispering Corridors series made me realize how important it is to me that I depict strong female relationships in my fiction.  
5. Develop the extras.  This doesn't mean elevating the female secretary who appears once every six chapters to a major character - it just means make her more than just "the female secretary."  I like to make this harder by making these extras carry some kind of societal implication - ex., my "female secretary" character and her husband are an ideal-type of the young upwardly mobile couple in my human village.  So when they break off from the old church and join the new one, it says something about the changing social dynamics in the village. 

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I like your no. 3 point because it gets at what makes women whole, complete, and interesting characters in societies where they don't have [as much] overt power as men--which is most societies.

My positive takeaway from the Bechdel test, which is worth applying to characters of any sex and gender, is that no character should exist purely as a pros, scenery, or highlighting for some other character. Even a character who just has a minor role in the story--you should believe that, if you were to turn the camera on that character and follow them around for a day, they'd have a life and purpose and motivations.

I've read novels in which all but one or two characters seemed to be pop-ups who appeared in the story merely to eventuate the next necessary circumstance for the main characters. I hate that.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I was reading the discussion at the link I posted for the Bechdel Test, and Kate Elliott made a good point - "Women matter to men." Which women and in what way varies, but in general that's true, even though the reverse is more obvious.

Yep, that's what it comes down to, and that gets to my overall characterization philosophy, which is from Synecdoche, New York: "None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due."

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

(and "pros" is a typo for "prop")

gonna go read Kate Elliott's comment next--I like the things she posts (in my very brief experience reading her blog)