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@karthmin

I think (hope?) that I write woman realistically, being one myself. I think there have only been a couple of times where I thought “A woman didn’t write this female character”.

The Bendel Test is a bit of a tricky question, because I’ve been writing a lot of short stories lately, and since there isn’t a lot of room for a lot of characters I generally go with a male/female pair providing most of the dialogue with maybe one or two lines from a passing side character.

Within my larger works, absolutely. In my novel The Key to Everywhere, most of the conversations between female characters are not about other guys. My 4500ish word story, The Dead Barn, opens with two sisters talking about butchering a rabbit before it turns into a zombie. (I wrote a zombie story, okay guys? I think it is pretty good.) My other 4500ish word story, The Color of Hope, only has three characters who interact, the MC Sunshine, her father, and her new friend James. So there isn’t another female Sunshine could talk to.

I’ve also heard of The Lampshade test, asking if you could replace the female character with a lampshade in a bathing suit and have the same plot. I think the Bechdel Test is a good thing to think about, but it is more useful for movies. If you have a male MC with first person or deep third, you aren’t going to know what two female characters are having a conversation about because my definition the male MC isn’t there. (Okay I can think of a few situations where he could find out, but they are exceptions.)

I was recently reading a book that had no named woman for the first third of the book, but EVERYBODY, the MC, the misled good-guy antagonist, the minion evil-doer, and the overlord evildoer, would pause what they were doing to admire a gaggle of pretty slim women who were giggling as they walked by. EVERY girl they passed was pretty and willing to flirt with the MC. Out of curiosity, I flipped to the end of the book to find that a female character had joined the gang, but the biggest thing about her was that she was pretty. That was her defining trait. I think even when we were in her POV she was described as pretty. (And remember, at this point, we should already be familiar with her appearance. It wasn’t like it was describing her for the first time.) NO woman thinks about herself like that. That book was just bad on so many levels.