Bechdel Versus Truby on Strong Female Characters

If you’re interested in female representation in popular narratives, you’re probably already familiar with The Bechdel Test. For the uninitiated, the Bechdel Test—named after the cartoonist and author, Alison Bechdel—delineates three minimum requirements for writing strong female characters: the story must have at least two female characters, these two characters must speak to each other, and they must speak to each other about something other than a man. I find this is an excellent place to start if you want to put some strong female characters in your story. However, I should mention that I don’t think the problem of weak female characterization is as rampant as many feminist critics and authors claim. The lack of strong female characters is no more remarkable or telling than the lack of good characterization in general. The skill of characterization—female or otherwise—creates the same spectrum of quality that any other skill does, with a few extraordinarily talented people on one end, a few hilariously incompetent people on the other, and most falling into the sea of mediocrity between.

While outdated and prejudicial worldviews contribute to this spectrum of quality, they are by no means the only factor, and no matter how much we may wish that there were only strongly-written female characters, there will always be at least nine misfires for every success, just like most people who pick up a basketball can’t play in the NBA. Blaming the alleged lack of moral awareness in authors, critics and audience members for the lack of strong female characters only gets us so far. A more helpful exercise is to revisit what makes strong characters, and then talk about what this means for female characters specifically. I’d like to take Bechdel’s three criteria, and build off of them with some of the best advice I’ve gotten on characterization from another source: John Truby’s Anatomy of Story.

Let’s start with Bechdel’s first criterion: there has to be more than one woman in the story. When it comes to the importance of creating more than one character, The Anatomy of Story has this to say: “Most writers come at character all wrong. They start by listing all the traits of the hero, tell a story about him, and then somehow make him change at the end. That won’t work, no matter how hard you try.” I like this passage from Anatomy quite a bit because it points not only to a mistake that writers make when creating their characters, but one that critics and social commentators make when analyzing those characters. Often, I’ll read a review or an opinion piece that talks about what job a female character has, how good-looking they are, or about what race they are: “Why couldn’t she have been a CEO instead of a housewife?” “Does she really have to play into conventional beauty standards?” “Why was the hero white instead of a racial minority?” While writing female characters with these traits is admirable, unless the writer nails the fundamentals, their characters will just be a list of traits, empowering though those traits may be. A character could be a black, female CEO who doesn’t look like a Victoria’s Secret model and still be a flat, uncompelling bore.

Truby goes on to say that “the single biggest mistake writers make when creating characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate individuals. Their hero is alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others. The result is not only a weak hero but also cardboard opponents and minor characters who are even weaker." Truby further advises writers that the secret to creating a multidimensional character—especially a multidimensional protagonist—lies in the counter-intuitive strategy of fleshing out the supporting characters around them and making sure that they contrast. This is a much more comprehensive and dynamic way of looking at female characters than the minimum demands of the Bechdel test and it places us at the cusp of how Truby’s ideas for character can help us surpass the two remaining criteria of the Bechdel Test: have the two women talk to one another and have them talk to one another about something other than men.

To start, I would actually argue that the third criterion in the Bechdel test is actually its weakest. Love and romance are a huge part of life, and making our characters talk about something other than the opposite sex can limit us far more than it frees us. With that said, it is good to open up the possibilities for dialogue between two characters to more topics than romance. But what the Bechdel test doesn’t say about dialogue and character interaction in general is what makes those interactions meaningful. Truby’s next piece of advice for creating your cast of characters can help fill in that blank. Truby advises that every character needs to be a variation on the story’s central theme. In other words, each character has to have a different perspective on some pressing moral issue about what it means to live a meaningful life. It isn’t just that the characters have to talk about something both specific and novel, they have to actually disagree about it, because each one is going to have a unique perspective about the story’s central moral issue.

To illustrate this point, let’s return to the example of our black, female CEO. For simplicity’s sake, let’s also say that this character is our protagonist. If our protagonist is a CEO, then the theme of our story could be that power corrupts. In order to pass the Bechdel Test, we only need one other female character to appear in the story, and she has to talk to our CEO about something other than men; we could meet our CEO before she gets promoted to that position and have her talking in the break room with one of her female coworkers. They could talk about a huge client that our future CEO landed for her firm, and about whether or not she will get a promotion for it. However, if we’re going to build off of this minimal standard with Truby’s advice, we need more female characters and we need each of them to have a differing opinion on the theme of power. Our future CEO could be hell-bent on success, but very idealistic and think that all she has to do is prove herself. Our female coworker could be an older, more jaded member of the corporate world who tells our young CEO that she needs to be ruthless if she wants to get ahead. We could then add an old college friend of our CEO’s, who started off as a young professional but scaled back her professional life so that she could get married and have children. Then we could throw in another old college friend, who works as an activist and thinks that the whole corporate world is inherently corrupt. As the story progresses and our CEO pursues her goal over the course of the story, she will clash with all of these other female characters over what right action to take in various situations.

Finally, if we are going to do real justice to our female characters, we have to now stray completely outside the boundaries of the Bechdel test, and we have to give all of our characters, but especially our protagonist a weakness. Most writers are savvy to the necessity of character flaws, but they often do so in a way that is not particularly effective. They make the character a condescending know-it-all, but they constantly make them right. They make them an emotionless killing machine but they don’t show how the consequences of the character’s actions have any effect on them. In order for a weakness to do the work that it’s meant to do in the world of the story, it has to actually stand between the character and their goal. They have to pursue a goal that the audience clearly sees the hero gain or lose. When the character first attempts to reach their goal, something unexpected happens and they fail. They rationalize why this is, blame circumstances or other people, they make a half-assed attempt at change, or try to simply appear as though they have changed without having actually done the work. Finally, by the time the story reaches its climax, the character will have to look back on all the hard knocks that they’ve taken, and make the painful but mature step towards actually changing who they are and overcoming this weakness.

Writers who write in order to put a message out into the world often write a hero that has no weakness. They face off against a villain who is completely wrong, and manages to stand between the hero and their goal simply because they are powerful, not because they actually have a compelling and believable worldview. By the end, either the hero kills the villain, or persuades the villain over to their side. A handy little trick you can pull as a writer is, if you are trying to persuade a person who holds a particular point of view that they are wrong, don’t make that person your villain. Make them your hero! This is actually the most convincing way to make a compelling moral argument through story, and it’s the best way to win an audience over and get them to empathize with your characters.

If you’re a crusader that’s out to win hearts and minds over to a fresh perspective, then you need to add a little sugar to make the medicine go down. When a writer spends the majority of their time looking through the eyes of the character whose heart and mind they would like to expand, it shows the audience that you understand that everyone has to start from somewhere. If you think that women are pathologically career-oriented at the expense of family, you can make our CEO from earlier in this essay, start by pursuing her goal at work, only to find a man that gradually changes her mind. If you think that career-orientation is all well and good, but that it can fall prey to an inherently corrupt system, have your CEO begin by trying to play by the system’s rules, gradually come to realize what the price of cutthroat corporate politics really is, and finally decide to stand up for what’s right. If you think that a career really is what a modern woman should pursue and that you have to toughen up in order to achieve that, then you have to start your CEO naïve and overly trusting, and gradually thicken her skin and sharpen her political instincts so that she can finally make it big. Surround this arc with characters who all have sharply differing opinions on this arc, and you will create a multilayered web of female characters that will show your audience what life as a woman is like from many different angles, rather than preaching to them about the struggles of womanhood. This approach only makes people smile and nod like lemmings just to get you to shut up, or completely shuts them down because they know their intelligence has just been insulted.

If you’re a writer who cares deeply about increasing the quality of female characters in contemporary stories, don’t take the easy way out by blaming others for not already seeing the world in the way you would like them to see it. Instead, show that you have mastered a particular moral issue by using the craft of characterization to attack that moral issue from every possible angle. Then, emphasize what that issue looks like through the eyes of the person you would like to see change their mind. If you do that, you won’t have to wag your finger in people’s faces. You will reveal to them how they can change by having looked at the world through their eyes first.