Writing Characters

Up front disclaimer - I don't read Greg Rucka, but after an article he wrote about writing characters, I just might have to check out his work.

I think he's mostly known as a comic book writer for Marvel and DC. One of the questions he's most frequently asked in interviews is:

How Do You Write Such Strong Female Characters?

In this article,  he explains just how sad that question really is. It's a long article, and I know how most people feel about reading something lengthy on the interwebs, so here are a few excerpts I found extremely interesting.

I have two answers I tend to give, the Quick Answer and the Long Answer. Both are entirely true, for the record.
The Quick Answer goes like this:
Q: How do you write such strong/well-realized/positively portrayed women?
A: I don't. I write characters. Some of those characters are women.

I like this excerpt because no one has ever asked a male writer how he writes strong/well-realized male characters. For some reason, it's assumed men cannot write believable female characters, and when it does happen, it's such a shock.

And really, that's just sad. That's not doing the work of a proper author.

Writers write characters, and at our best, if we do it well and with care and with thought, we invest in those characters a spark of life, a realism and nuance that makes them believable and relatable. We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy, characters our audience will care for, and as a result, will care about what happens to them, and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

Asking "how do you write strong women?" is the equivalent of saying "we generally accept other authors don't bother to put the work into a female character, so it's surprising that you do."

...for many others, I think, it's not simply that they're asking How Did You Do This Thing? What they're really asking, I think, is this:
Why aren't more men doing it?
Why is it that so many male writers, when trying to write strong female characters, fail?
Why do they default to a shorthand, lazy equation, where strong equals bitch?

If other writers put a little more effort into understanding what makes their character tick, Rucka wouldn't need to answer this question very much.


...this is a matter of respect, for both the story itself and for the audience receiving it. The reader is smarter than you. The reader is always smarter than you. And the reader knows when you've taken a shortcut, or phoned it in, or are trying to pull a fast one. And the reader don't like it one bit.

Okay I've already taken more excerpts than I wanted to, but I've read this article three times and I keep finding more and more gems. I really recommend you read it, in it's entirety, and bookmark it. Hold it as the standard to which all characters should be placed against.

Alright, one more! Just as a conclusion.


World building is what writers do. The good ones, the really awesome kick-ass take-no-prisoners crafters of fiction, they're able to invest such honesty into their tales that you believe in them....That's world building. There's no secret to it. If a writer -– any writer -– wants to make their story worthwhile, then the characters deserve as much consistency and attention as the world they inhabit.