I grew up in a family with a lot of strong women: my mother, my grandmother, and my two sisters. Perhaps inevitably, I married a strong woman too. I often work with strong women, and get on very well with them. I have a number of women friends whose strength impresses me every time I talk to them. I’ll talk about what I mean by “strong” in a minute.

I’ve recently completed the fourth, and second-to-last, draft of Realmgolds, as the first Gryphon Clerks novel is now known. Most of what I did in that draft involved incorporating beta feedback, and the biggest changes had to do with strengthening the protagonist.

Determined (that’s his name) is a bookish young man who wanted to be an historian, but ended up in a position to make history instead. In my earlier drafts, he leaned a lot on Victory, his female counterpart. She made the decisions and solved the problems.

My betas didn’t like it. Now, I should point out that the beta who particularly didn’t like it is another strong woman, a self-described Jewish mother, so this isn’t about unevolved males reading it and saying “The dude needs to not listen to the girl so much, that’s weak.” Not at all. This is about who the protagonist is.

The word “protagonist” means “someone who struggles for something”. If you have a main character who’s mostly observing the action, who’s yielding to other people to make the decisions, or who’s relying on someone else to solve the problems, that’s not a protagonist in the true sense of the word.

Unfortunately, that’s a type of main character I often see in genre fiction. Actually, what I commonly see is this: the “protagonist” is a young woman who says “I’m strong and independent, I can make my own decisions”, makes incredibly poor decisions that get her in trouble, and has to be rescued by a man.

I see that most often in urban fantasy, but urban-fantasy tropes are appearing more and more in steampunk and secondary-world fantasy these days too. Including, unfortunately, that one.

Sorry, but that’s not what I think of when I say “strong woman”. Or “good story”, either. The protagonist needs to solve their own problems, at least once they get past the early part of the book where they’re mainly reacting to what’s thrown at them. To refer to Dan Wells’ seven-point structure, the “midpoint” is where the protagonist makes a decision that they need to do something active to solve the problems, and in my mind, that so-called midpoint needs to come within the first 30% of the book if it’s to keep my interest in the character. Even before the midpoint, when they’re reacting, they have to be trying to do something. Even if it’s only “stay alive”.

They don’t have to succeed at what they’re trying to do all the time, of course – that’s what a try-fail cycle is all about. But the point of a try-fail cycle is that it’s a cycle. They keep trying, even when they fail. This makes them a protagonist. They’re trying to solve the problem.

I’ve messed up a couple of short stories by having a viewpoint character who isn’t the protagonist, so when my beta reader pointed out the issue, I jumped on it. It turned out not to be that hard to rewrite the scenes so that Determined, who’s very intelligent, was the one solving the problems.

My worry was that, in making Determined a more active character, I would take away from Victory. She’s a very powerful and capable woman, respected, if not necessarily liked, even by her opponents. I tell the reader this early on through the mouth of a minor character. I was concerned that she would be one of those awful woman who the author tells us are strong, but who don’t do anything to show it. I didn’t want to be guilty of strong-woman tokenism.

I needn’t have worried, as I discovered when I did my complete read-through on a printout. As soon as Victory walked, elegantly and confidently, into a scene and started ordering people around just by looking at them, my concerns evaporated.

I read a quote from Joss Whedon recently to the effect that strong men are those who are comfortable around strong women. I like that. It makes my protagonist Determined a very strong man, because he can respect Victory without wanting to take away her power, and at the same time call her out when she becomes imperious and high-handed.

So when will the book be out? Currently, I’m waiting for my cover guy, who’s heavily booked because he’s good. I’m also talking with a heavily-booked editor about whether I should work with her or someone else. So the answer at the moment seems to be “March-ish”. I’ll keep you posted.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.