Let me ask you something.

When you picture a strong female character in a novel, what do you actually see?

If the first image that arrives is a woman who never flinches, never breaks down, never needs anyone, who walks through explosions and betrayal and loss and somehow comes out the other side without a tremor in her voice or a crack in her composure… I want to gently challenge that image. Because that woman? She’s not strong. She’s a wall. And walls are not the same as people.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. As a writer, as a reader, and as a woman who wore the uniform. Because the conversation about strong female characters in fiction has been going on for decades, and in a lot of ways, I think we’ve been asking the wrong question. The question was never should she be strong? Of course she should. The question was always: what does strength in a woman actually looks like? And where did we get the template, we’ve been using?

I don’t think we built that template. I think it was handed to us. And I think it’s past time we questioned it.

• The Problem With “Tough”

There is a specific kind of female character who shows up in fiction with remarkable regularity. She doesn’t cry. She fights better than the men around her. She has a complicated, frequently painful backstory that she references approximately once, usually to explain why she doesn’t need anyone. She is emotionally closed off in ways the narrative seems to celebrate. And somewhere along the line, someone decided that this woman was the feminist corrective to the damsel in distress.

I want to be direct about something: she isn’t.

What the “strong and tough” archetype actually did was trade one limited template for another. Instead of a woman who exists purely to be rescued, we got a woman who exists to prove she doesn’t need rescuing. Both of them are defined by the same male-centric axis. Both of them are missing the thing that makes a character actually resonates interiority and Complexity. The messy, nonlinear, deeply human experience of someone trying to figure out who they are after something has tried to take that from them.

Sophia McDougall, writing in the New Statesman, put it in words I have not been able to stop thinking about. She pointed out that Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, artistic, courteous, rude. (“Sophia McDougall on “Why I hate Strong Female Characters””) She added: “Female characters get to be Strong.” Just strong. One word. One dimension. One very narrow, very exhausting, very unrealistic box.

Be honest: have you ever met a real woman who acts like that? Who took every blow, survived every betrayal, kept every wound on the inside, and never once needed to fall apart, ask for help, or change?

No. You haven’t. Because that woman doesn’t exist.

But I’ll tell you who does exist. The woman who shows up to work with her game face on while something in her chest is quietly collapsing. The woman who holds everyone else together until 2 AM when the house is quiet and she finally lets herself feel what the day cost her. The woman who is legitimately, measurably, documentable strong, and also needs help sometimes. And seeks it. And gets it. And keeps going.

That’s not weakness. That’s the full picture. And fiction owes it to women to start drawing that picture more honestly.

• The Female Veteran Lens: Writing from the Inside

I served in the Army. I came home carrying things that didn’t show up on any imaging, the kind of weight that rewires you quietly and surfaces in the middle of ordinary moments when you least expect it. And I have spent years, not years of toughness, but years of actual, honest, difficult, nonlinear healing, learning the difference between being strong and performing strength.

I am here to tell you those two things are not the same.

Performing strength means acting like you’re okay because that’s what people expect. You keep your face calm and your voice steady. You say, “I’m fine,” even when you’re not—especially if you’ve served in the military, where everyone knows that “I’m fine” often means the exact opposite.

Actual strength is what happens in the gaps. It’s that 3 AM choice to reach out and call someone, rather than toughing out a difficult night by yourself.  It’s the therapist appointment you almost cancelled because canceling felt easier, and you went anyway. It’s telling your children, I’m having a hard moment right now, but it’s not because of you, and watching the specific way their faces relax when they realize the house is still safe, that you’re still here, that you came back from wherever you just went.

When I created Violet Falcone, I wanted a character who carried both. She is genuinely, formidably capable. She does not wait to be rescued. She has an iron will that very little has been able to crack. But she is also someone who was broken in a specific way, who carries that break in her body and her choices and her relationships, and who is in the ongoing, imperfect, costly process of rebuilding herself from the inside out.

What I wasn’t interested in writing was a woman who simply decided to be cold and stayed there. The Ice Queen is not the character. The woman underneath the Ice Queen, and what it cost her to become that, and what it might cost her to become something else? That’s the character. The armor is the surface. The story lives underneath it.

I think the most important question a writer can ask about a female character who has been through trauma is not how does she fight? It’s what does she still believe about herself? And what did the trauma tell her about herself, that isn’t true? And is she, over the course of this story, going to have that lie challenged? Is she going to have to choose between the armor and the life the armor was built to protect?

Because that is the question. That is where the story lives. Not in whether she can take a punch. In whether she can take in the truth.

• Questions Worth Asking on the Page

I want to shed light on some questions that I use when I’m writing female characters, especially those who have survived something. I offer them not as a checklist, but as a way of getting underneath the surface to where the actual character lives.

• What does she believe she is not allowed to feel?
  • Trauma, especially for women who have been in military environments, is often paired with a learned suppression of emotional response. You don’t cry in front of the unit. You don’t show vulnerability in a space that treats vulnerability as a liability. That suppression doesn’t disappear when she comes home. It goes internal. It becomes the operating system. Writing a character who has had that training means understanding what it costs her, and what happens when something finally breaks through.
• Where does her strength actually come from?
  • This is the one I push hardest on. If the answer is that she’s strong because she’s closed off, controlled, and doesn’t need anyone, that’s not a strength source. That’s a defense mechanism. I want to know what she loves. What she’s fighting for. What she would burn the whole thing down to protect. That’s where the real power lives. Love as motivation, particularly the fierce, protective kind, is not a weakness that undermines female characters. It is one of the most honest engines of human action that exists.
• What does she need that she doesn’t know how to ask for?
  • This is the question that separates a character from a symbol. Symbols don’t have unmet needs. People do. A woman who has been taught, either by trauma or by culture or by years inside an institution that valued stoicism, that asking for help is weakness, will carry that lesson long after she’s left the environment that taught it to her. Writing the gap between what she needs and what she allows herself to want creates tension that is genuinely, specifically human.
• What version of herself did she lose, and does she know it’s gone?
  • Research on women veterans who experienced MST and significant PTSD reveals a consistent theme: a sense of lost identity following trauma. A feeling that the person they were before is not the person they are now, and uncertainty about who the person they are now is allowed to be. This is not a small thing. This is the wound beneath the wound. And it is the most fertile soil for character growth that I know, because the arc of reclaiming a lost self, or of choosing to become something new on purpose rather than by default, is one of the most deeply satisfying stories a human being can witness.
• Pushing Through the Stereotypes

Let me be direct about the tropes I am actively pushing against when I write.

The woman who has no softness. Not because she’s naturally private or reserved, but because softness has been written as weakness and no one challenged that equation. A woman can be competent and formidable and also gentle with the people she loves. These things are not in conflict. Writing them as incompatible is lazy, and it tells women that the price of being taken seriously is the surrender of everything tender in them.

The woman whose trauma explains her but never develops her. She was broken by something, the story tells us. And then she’s just… broken. In a useful way. In a way that makes her dangerous and compelling. But the breaking itself is never interrogated. She never has to face what happened to her. She never has to decide what to do with it. The wound is set dressing, not story. That is not honoring the experience of women who have survived something real. That is using their suffering as aesthetics.

The woman who heals by falling in love and nothing else. The counterpart to the trope above, and equally frustrating. Yes, love and connection are genuine forces in healing. Research tells us that social support is one of the most powerful resilience factors available to trauma survivors, and that is real and worth honoring. But love as the singular cure, love as the thing that unlocks her and makes her whole, erases the actual, costly, ongoing work of recovery and attributes it to the presence of the right person. That is not a love story. That is a rescue story with better lighting.

The woman who never asks for help and is praised for it. This one I find particularly insidious because it dresses up isolation as independence and calls it a virtue. Female veterans are already fighting a cultural narrative that says asking for help is weakness. The suicide rate for female veterans is 250% higher than that of the civilian female population. The data is clear: the women who are not connecting, who are not asking, who are white-knuckling it alone inside their toughness, are the ones most at risk. Writing characters who model that isolation approvingly is not edgy. It is dangerous. And we can do better.

• What Realistic Resilience Actually Looks Like on the Page

Resilience doesn’t look like invulnerability. It looks like returning.

It looks like a woman who falls apart and then, not immediately, not smoothly, not without cost, finds her way back to herself. It looks like the choice to go to therapy even when therapy is hard. It looks like telling the truth to someone when the lie would have been easier and safer. It looks like waking up with the ghost of the old trauma sitting on your chest and getting up anyway, not because you’ve defeated it, but because you have children who need breakfast and a story that isn’t finished yet.

Resilience in women, the research tells us, is deeply relational. It grows in the spaces between people. It is nourished by the women veterans who described, in qualitative interviews, wanting therapy groups that would let them connect with others who had similar experiences. Not to toughen up alone. To be witnessed. To be known. To be less alone inside something that had been making them feel very alone for a very long time.

That is the story worth telling. A woman who learns, slowly and imperfectly, that she does not have to carry everything alone. Not because she isn’t strong enough to do it. But because she is strong enough to know the difference between carrying and holding, and wise enough to choose the latter.

The most powerful female characters I have encountered in fiction are not the ones who never break. They are the ones who break and decide, consciously, deliberately, at some cost, to continue. Katniss Everdeen’s breakdown at the end of Mockingjay is more moving than any victory she achieves with a bow. The moments when Violet Falcone, my own Ice Queen, is confronted with the specific shape of her grief and has to choose who she is going to be on the other side of that confrontation, those are the moments that matter. Not the moments when she wins. The moments when winning isn’t the question.

• A Note to Writers: You Have a Responsibility Here

I don’t say this lightly, because I know how personal the act of writing is and how much of yourself goes into every page. But I do believe it: the stories we tell about women shape how women are seen. How they are treated. What they allow themselves to expect from their own lives.

When we write women who never need anything, we tell real women that needing things is shameful. When we write women whose trauma is decoration rather than history, we tell survivors that their pain is only valuable when it makes them more dangerous. When we write women who cannot access softness or vulnerability without losing our respect as readers, we are participating in the same lie the military culture told too many women who served: that the price of being taken seriously is the surrender of everything that makes you human.

I carried that lie for a long time. My therapist helped me find the seam in it and pull.

That’s why I write what I write. Not to create a character who is flawless or untouchable. But to create a character who is fully alive on the page. Who carries real damage and real love and real fear and real power simultaneously. Who is complicated and costly to know, even fictionally, because the truth is complicated and knowing it costs something.

The female veteran’s lens is this: strength is not the absence of damage. Strength is what you build in full knowledge of the damage and choose anyway.

Violet knows that. I know it. And somewhere out there, a reader who needed to see that on a page is about to find out they know it too.

That is why the story matters. That is why telling it honestly matters. That is everything.

— Leigh Nightshade

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