: Re: How to write female characters with agency? I'm attempting to write a novel, an historical fiction with a small fantasy component (time travel through a portal). The travelers (main characters)

@Moriarity138

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While I'm not qualified to advise you on this specific question, I do have some good general advice. Start by doing some research in the form of interviews with someone who resembles your character (it doesn't need to be a writer).

Obviously you won't (probably!) find a time traveler, but you can talk to young women in male-dominated fields. You can also talk to older women about what it was like to be young in the (presumably more sexist) past, or women who have lived or traveled in more "traditional" parts of the world. You can also read work with strong female characters by women writers and see what choices they make. Doing the research is a good general strategy for writing characters with demographics that don't match your own.

A really good resource for you would be the book Kindred by the science fiction writer Octavia Butler. It is written from the POV of a modern young woman transported through time, against her will, into the life of a slave woman in the pre-Civil War American South.

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