Let me explain.

I’ve wanted for a while to write something about creating “strong female characters”, but — as I have recently very definitively found out — when you start trying to label a character as “strong” or “weak””, you open up a big ol’ can of controversy (note: first link is really long, second is almost as long and very gif-heavy, third is…actually really interesting: go read it). So then I wanted to write about “good” female characters, but that implies some sort of ethical binary; then I tried “likeable” female characters, then “interesting”, then “three-dimensional”, then “compelling”, then “nuanced”….then finally I realised that the issue of women in media has been discussed for so long that there really isn’t a descriptor out there that isn’t burdened with some sort of connotation. So today’s arbitrary adjective is “purple”. Let’s talk about purple women.

What is purpleness?

To start with a disclaimer, there’s a lot — and I mean a lot — of subjectivity when it comes to what makes a female character purple. One viewer’s purple woman might easily be another viewer’s whiny bitch or Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The reason there are so many possible varieties of purple woman is that there are so many different types of people watching, listening to or reading about them.

Having said that, there are definitely things that make a female character feel more purple than not. In no particular order, here’s a very brief list:

1. A purple woman has an independent emotional and narrative arc. That arc may intertwine with the arcs of other characters, but it does not exist just to support those other arcs.
2. A purple woman has weight and presence within the story. If she weren’t there, the story would feel trivial or incomplete without her.
3. A purple woman affects the narrative in a fundamental way. If she weren’t there, the story wouldn’t work.

Female characters’ places in their narratives are far too often trivialised. Remove Megan Fox from Transformers, and the story really doesn’t change at all. Take Mary Jane out of Spiderman, and the only difference is that Spidey needs someone else to rescue. If you can take your female characters out of the story and nothing of any import really changes, then they certainly aren’t purple.

But beyond the importance of her place in the story, on the more microcosmic level of character, there are a number of other characteristics that help determine whether a woman is purple or not. Most of them can be viewed with at least some subjectivity, and there is any number of ways they can be creatively interpreted, but I’ve put together a list of attributes that can be drawn upon to help give a female character that much-needed purple hue.

A purple woman isn’t perfect.

Of course, your mileage may vary on what makes the perfect woman, but I think we can all agree that if a female character is supermodel attractive, genius-level intelligent, athletic, funny, always ready with the perfect one-liner yet never more interesting than the hero, and can ride shotgun on a motorcycle without so much as a kink in her hairdo afterwards, she probably isn’t purple.

The funny thing is, I’m not actually saying women like that don’t exist. I had a friend like that in high school: beautiful, intelligent, articulate, a prodigiously talented musician, and of course the envy of all the boys. I would have loved to have hated her, but of course she was so sweet and friendly that she and I ended up close friends through most of high school despite that she was dating the guy I’d had a crush on for years. Where was I?

Oh yeah. In the real world, women like my high school friend either breeze in and out of our lives superficially enough that we never really know them, or we become close enough to them to realise that they aren’t that perfect after all: that they have eccentricities, foibles and vulnerabilities just like the rest of us. But in fiction, the Perfect Woman is a very thinly-drawn character indeed. She exists as something that the male characters want to claim (by marrying her, going out with her or just sleeping with her), but no one really cares about who she is or where she’s going. She doesn’t need to be going anywhere: she’s already perfect. And a character that isn’t going anywhere certainly isn’t purple.

A purple woman’s flaws are genuinely detrimental to her…

So we’ve established that a purple character has to have flaws of some kind, because perfection is pretty much the antithesis of purpleness. I’m not the first person to say that — not by a very long shot indeed — but it isn’t quite that simple. See, saying “a character must have flaws” and leaving at that for so many years has left us with a laundry list of acceptable eccentricities that writers seem quite happy to insert into their character description like a Madlib, without too much regard for whether those flaws actually affect the character at all.

Flaws that are there for no reason other than to make the character more relatable are what get us into Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s funny, she likes the right music, she dances to the beat of her own drum…quick, better make her clumsy too so that the women in the audience can relate to her instead of scoffing about how unrealistic she is! It’s a sound idea — I can’t think of a single woman I know, no matter how graceful, who hasn’t tripped over her own feet or walked into a doorframe at some point — but it’s very superficial.

The problem with the Madlib flaws is that they don’t actually affect the character at all. The Madlib Woman may crack an egg over the kitchen floor rather than over the frying pan; she may even slip on the fallen egg in an adorable bit of physical comedy. But her clumsiness doesn’t affect her ability to hold down a job, or to interact with her friends, or to get a date or to take care of her children or to do anything, really. And she might whine at some point about how she can’t open a door without conking herself on the head with it, but aside from that it’s doubtful she really cares about her clumsiness. We never see the clumsy Madlib Woman taking a dance class — unless it’s to provide another opportunity for clumsiness-based hilarity — or buying safety scissors. She doesn’t worry about hitting someone with her bicycle, or dropping the baby, or the money she’s spending on replacing coffee-soaked laptops. Her clumsiness isn’t really part of her: it’s an accessory, and, like an accessory, it can be removed when the plot demands it.

Clumsiness isn’t the only flaw a Madlib Woman can have, but it’s certainly one of the more common ones. Others include social awkwardness, a tendency to say inappropriate things, a lack of self-awareness and so on. Overplayed as most of them are, any one of these could be a trait that actually helps make a character purple. The key difference is that in a purple woman, her flaws inform her character: they are deficits she must overcome, or that affect how she approaches the conflicts in the story. In a Madlib Woman, her flaws are just personality bling.

…and are not just a vehicle to introduce her to the man of the story

A caveat to “a character must have flaws” that’s thrown around a lot is: “…that move the plot forward”. And it’s a good caveat: since story is basically characters interacting with each other and their environment, their flaws should inform the narrative just as much as their virtues do.

Just like the Madlib laundry list of flaws, though, taking this advice at face value has a way of turning out female characters that are subject to exremely lazy writing. Especially in genres like romantic comedy, in which people meeting is typically what catalyses the story, there’s a tendency to introduce a character’s pick-a-flaw at the perfect time to throw her into an interaction with someone else, and then never to mention it again. Like a groundhog, this character’s flaw sticks its head out of the ground, sees its own shadow, and then disappears for the rest of the movie.

A perfect example of the Groundhog Woman would be Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s altruistic, and her one flaw is that she has a greatly inflated estimation of her own sense of humour…for one scene. When she gives the toast at her sister’s wedding, she embarrasses herself in front of the assembled crowd by starting a speech filled with cringe-worthy, borderline-offensive jokes — jokes that Owen Wilson has already warned her will likely fall flat. Luckily, before she can commit complete social suicide, she catches Wilson’s eye in the crowd, and changes track from the awful jokes to something more heartfelt.

The problem is, McAdams’ lack of a sense of humour seems only to afflict her for that one scene. She may not crack wise nearly as much as Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughan, but she still has her witty moments, including a perfectly serviceable joke about a waffle-maker in the previous scene. The quirk moves the plot forward by allowing McAdams to establish a connection with Wilson, but once it has served its purpose it’s gone forever. She doesn’t have any other flaws: she has an asshole boyfriend in their stead.

Just like the Madlib Woman, there are plenty of types of Groundhog Woman. There’s the one who is clumsy just long enough to bump into the man of her dreams, the one who is shy at just the right moment for someone important to bring her out of her shell, or — my least favourite — the one whose flaw is a history of dating bad guys, which of course lasts right up until she meets the hero. And perhaps the Groundhog Woman has other flaws that hang around longer — but what I’ve found, at least in the majority of cases, is that if the Groundhog Woman does have more pervasive issues, they are something that by the end of the story is “fixed”, and usually by whoever her groundhog flaw introduced her to.

A character flaw that causes two people to meet is not, of itself, a bad thing, but to make a woman purple that flaw has to be something more than just a plot device. A purple woman’s flaws are systemic and pervasive: they are part of her, and if they aren’t something that the person they lead her to can deal with, then either she bumped into the wrong person or we’re not working with a romantic comedy any more. Maybe she’s oblivious to her flaws; maybe they cause her shame, but they exist independent of how useful they are to the plot.

A purple woman has something she wants, and something she needs

It’s over-used advice, I admit, and just like “a character must have flaws”, it isn’t the whole story. But it is true that part of a character’s purpleness comes from her having desires and goals. A character who doesn’t want anything has very little room for growth: her story is already finished. The only way to write a story that starts with a Finished Woman is to tear down what she has and force her to rebuild, but honestly: if you’re doing that in a compelling way, you probably didn’t really start with a Finished Woman anyway.

Real people are constantly in motion, driven by what they desire, and by what they require. A person might want a better job, more money, excitement, adventure, to fall in love, to be successful, and so on. A person might need stability, or forgiveness, or self-actualisation or friendship. Real people and fictional characters need less in common than you might think, but one of the qualities they should share is being driven by their wants and needs.

If you’ve done a good job figuring out who your character is — her virtues, flaws, tics and eccentricities — then assessing her wants and needs is an organic next step. But it’s very easy to fall into the trap of deciding on her wants and needs first, based on the direction you want the plot to go, and then shoehorning them into her character afterwards. It’s natural and even desirable to want a character’s needs to fit with the direction you want your story to go: in fact, they should inform the plot as much as possible. But if the story is imposing those needs on your character externally, then her wants and needs do not have weight or substance, and so the character loses substance as well.

Just like her flaws, a purple woman’s wants and needs inform how she makes choices, and that is the most important way in which they affect the plot. Because they come from an internal place of character, they feel organic and natural, and help ground the character within the story. If her wants and needs are in line with the direction of the plot, they move the story forward; if not, they provide a source of conflict. Either way, purpleness comes from those desires being integral parts of who the character really is, not from their being convenient to the direction of the story.

A purple woman changes over the course of the story…

A purple character is never static. Real people may not usually change on particularly fundamental levels, but fictional characters certainly should. Their process of change is what keeps us invested in their story; a story in which the characters end up emotionally exactly where they started is a waste of time.

When we write characters — particularly characters we love — it is hard to want to change them. Change that is compelling comes at a cost: trauma, heartbreak, disappointment and tragedy are all vehicles by which our characters transform. It’s very difficult to write well without at least a degree of empathy for your characters, and that can make putting them through what they need in order to change a tough proposition.

The good news is: if you’ve started writing a character with a good foundation, setting her on the road to change isn’t as hard as it seems. We’ve already established that a purple character has flaws, wants, and needs, and those provide a pretty good roadmap for how she might develop over the course of the story. For example, a woman who wants to be an actress but suffers a terrible fear of speaking in front of people will probably go one of two ways: either she conquers her fear and gets a speaking role on a TV show, or she learns to accept her shortcoming and finds fulfillment working in the writers’ room instead (or she lands a role, her fear consumes her, she loses her job, she sinks into despair and dies of a drug overdose — it really depends on the genre). It’s a pretty simplistic roadmap, but because it’s a character whose flaws and desires inform the way she makes choices, it’s a good step on the road to purpleness.

If you’ve figured out what your character wants, then whether or not she gets it informs how she changes. If you know what your character needs, then whether you grant it informs her changes too. Perhaps she overcomes her flaws; perhaps she is overwhelmed by them. She could go from innocence to understanding, or from fear to acceptance, or from timidity to strength. If she’s the protagonist, especially in a fantasy or sci-fi setting, accepting her hero role might lead to a clearer understanding of her personal values, like Katniss realising that to truly win the Hunger Games she has to lead the revolution and end them forever. Having a character realise a fundamental truth about herself and use it to grow is a great way to give her shades of purple.

…but she has to earn her emotional arc

So we know that a compelling character should change during the story. She begins in one state, and by the end of the story has changed in some fundamental way; usually for the better, but it does depend on the story. That change is one of the more fundamental ideas behind a purple character, so as long as she’s different at the end of the story than she was at the beginning, the work is halfway done, right?

Not quite. It’s very easy to give a character a sudden epiphany at the end of the story and call that a change, but that’s a cheap trick and it seriously weakens both the end of the story and the growth you’re trying to achieve for your character. There are certainly ways — and very effective ones — to play the “the answer was right in front of me the whole time” ending, but even that has to be earned: the character must learn crucial lessons along the way in order to be able to see what may have been right in front of her all along. Running away from her problems and then circling back just in time to have the answer given to her is not nearly enough to qualify for purpleness.

We want our characters to learn lessons, but we want to learn those lessons along with them. The process of change is what drives the story, not the change itself; and by watching a character experience the moments of small change the lead to her greater transformation, we feel a sense of direction that is easy to invest in emotionally.

Take a character like Buffy Summers, for example. Despite her Chosen One status, she begins the series essentially wanting to be a normal teenage girl. By the end of the show’s seven seasons on TV, she has not only embraced her role as the Slayer, but she has transcended that role to become a leader of other young women, and a force resolved to cut out the evil that plagues her world at its source. She goes from working mostly alone to relying on a group of friends and supporters; from being flighty and immature to being a teacher and surrogate mother; from taking her fights one demon at a time to wanting to save the whole world in one fell swoop. It’s a series of profound and intense changes, but not a single one happens in the course of one epiphany. Instead, we watch her fight, win, lose, make discoveries, suffer the deaths of those she loves, make good choices and bad, fall in and out of love…it is a gradual series of believable moments of transition, and by the end of the show the Buffy we see fight the ultimate evil is almost completely different to the Buffy we once saw battle one vampire at a time.

There’s far less time to achieve that kind of character growth in a film or a novel, but it can still be done. Plenty of the qualities I’ve mentioned are useful building blocks for layering a character with shades of purple, but if your character undergoes real, gradual, earned emotional change over the course of her story, it’s actually pretty hard for her not to be purple.

A purple woman has — or wants — agency

A compelling story is, more than anything, about the choices its characters make: do I avenge my father’s death, or do I carry on his legacy? Do I live at the office so I can get that promotion, or spend more time at home with my children? Do I save my love interest or the schoolbus full of kids?

So if a good story is all about choice, it makes sense that our characters have to be able to actually make choices. If she can’t make choices, it’s usually because she’s in the kind of story where she’s fighting for her right to choose. It seems like an obvious and fundamental thing, but you’d be surprised how many female characters spend their stories being buffeted back and forth by the choices of other characters.

Purple women can certainly be told what to do by others, even men — especially if they aren’t the protagonist. In a high-stress situation another character might have more expertise or skill and be perfectly justified in handing out instructions. I’m not saying for a second that, in order to be purple, a female character must answer “NO!” to every suggestion, instruction or even outright command.

But if a character does nothing but follow the instructions of others, she does not help drive the story, and loses her purpleness. If a purple character is following instructions or orders, she isn’t doing so because that’s what the plot demands. Perhaps she knows the person giving the orders is better-qualified to handle a situation than she is. Perhaps she trusts him, whether justified or not. Maybe disobeying would jeopardise her job; perhaps it would put herself or someone she cares about at risk. But even if she doesn’t state her reasons, we should know that for a purple character, the answer to “why did you do that” is more complex than just “because he said so”.

There are many ways to rob a character of her agency, and having other characters boss her around is one of the least egregious. You could deprive her of information she needs to have certain choices available to her, using plot to railroad her in a particular direction. Say a notorious mass murderer is on the run and seeking to finish the botched execution of his last victim. His escape from prison would be all over the news, and knowing this the victim would have to make the choice between fighting, calling for help or going on the run. But if you want her to stay and fight, you can’t do so by conveniently keeping her away from every working television, radio or internet browser, because depriving her of information to which she would normally have easy access robs her of her agency and cheapens her choice.

As audience members, there is little that is more frustrating than watching characters fail to make choices that seem obvious to us, because the writers have conveniently left them in the dark about key information, or used the plot to railroad them into certain decisions. A purple woman uses the information around her to make choices that move her along in the story. They don’t have to be good choices, but they do have to be hers.

A purple woman is active, not reactive

I don’t mean that a purple woman necessarily jumps straight into action at the slightest provocation, nor that she goes looking for trouble. And there is an unfortunate conflation — mostly, I’m afraid, among male writers — between purple women and “women of action” (or “women who kick ass”, if you prefer), which is specifically why I’ve spent this whole article trying to avoid the word strong.

A woman can certainly be active and kick ass. But the difference between action and reaction has very little to do with combat, and everything to do with the interaction between character and plot. The Reactive Woman is moved by the events of the story: plot happens to her, and what she does is a response to the events occurring around her. This happens in a lot of Chosen One-type stories (or, since Twilight became a thing, super-speshul-snowflake stories). Something unique is discovered about our character, and the rest of the story is other people defending her, ferrying her from A to B or otherwise trying to ensure she fulfils her manifest destiny. No matter how interesting or unique her particular gift, a character cannot be purple if she does not, at some point, take ownership of her story.

A purple character can certainly begin a story being reactive. If you’re writing a traditional, Hero’s Journey kind of story, then having your heroine refuse the call to action in the beginning is a common part of the journey. Even in less formula-driven narratives, it isn’t unusual or even a bad thing to begin by having a character react to an event or another person. Rarely does a person strap on a backpack and a pair of hiking boots, declare “I’m off to find adventure!” and leave for the Himalayas without some sort of catalysing event. In Divergent, Tris has to react to the unexpected results of her aptitude test; in The Kids Are Alright, the daughter’s turning eighteen allows her to seek out her sperm donor father.

But when the events of the story have been set in motion, what differentiates the purple woman from the Reactive Woman is that she chooses to take action instead, and begins making decisions that affect the course of the narrative. She tries to anticipate what may happen next, and to take appropriate action to prevent or encourage it. She may begin her story by running away from her problems, but a purple woman always returns to face them in the end. The actions she takes may not always pan out — they may not even be that smart — but the fact that she is active makes the audience far more invested in what happens to her.

A purple woman has something — anything — to which we aspire

An unfortunate blowback from generations of writers portraying the Perfect Woman — and very little else — on page and screen is that writers determined to write really, truly purple women often swing wildly in the opposite direction. When talking about characters on page and screen today, it’s alarmingly easy to start right in with a laundry list of their flaws. She’s an emotionally damaged, highly neurotic detective; or a socially awkward, sexually repressed doctor; or some other combination of flaw, flaw career, as though the more flaws, the purpler the woman.

I’m certainly not saying that every fictional woman should be one you’d actually want to spend time with. A large number of them aren’t, and that’s one of the great things about fiction: getting to spend a couple of hours or a few hundred pages with people we wouldn’t want to or couldn’t meet in reality. But flaw after flaw does not equate to purpleness; the Damaged Woman is simply the obverse of the Perfect Woman. As damaged, or flawed, or even as simply obnoxious as a character might be, if she doesn’t have some attribute to which we connect — or better, to which we aspire — then she’s still thinly drawn, and not at all purple.

A character can be damaged; she can be miserable; she can be a righteous pain in the ass: but to really connect with an audience and give them any reason to keep watching or reading about her, she has to have something else as well. It doesn’t neccesarily have to be a virtue, but something an audience can recognise and think, “yeah, that’s pretty cool”. Perhaps she’s courageous in the face of adversity; perhaps she’s unwaveringly loyal or perhaps she has a self-confidence that means you can’t take your eyes off her. Whatever that quality happens to be, it’s what keeps us watching, and it’s what persuades us to care. Purple women aren’t just flawed: they’re aspirational too.