The Bad Girls
Sometimes hard to write, especially to not devolve into stereotypes.
Not that I have anything against stereotypes, they’re very useful, especially when they are just background, barely secondary characters. But when they come to the fore, you’ve got to add in whole lot of individual traits to make them realistic.
But thinking about it, what are the stereotypical female types?
You’ve got everything from the Girl Next Door to the newly named Karens. The Mean Girl Clique at high school, to that person in charge of the HR department at work. The Trophy Wife. The Queen Bee. Then the Tom Boy, the Smart Girl who can’t get a date . . .
Too little caffeine to list them all.
The Femme Fatale is, I think, one of the hardest to write. Because she has to be irresistible to the Hero, while underneath, cold, calculating, with her loyalty elsewhere, ready to slip the knife in when ordered to do so.
Now I have to cut this short, because I have six or seven hours driving to do today, and I’m already late . . .
So list your favorite stereotypical female characters, in your writing and reading, and of course, the worst!
Oh, the picture above? The bad girl who writes in books, and because I just had to do something about Miss Six Fingers. Even worse than Those Who Dog Ear!
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “The Bad Girls”
I have a slight emendation for this list. The Mean Girls clique can now start in 2nd grade. Yes, it can. And I have no idea how to write that but I almost need to.
The couple of females I have written have been “Action Girl Who Wasn’t As Tough As She Thought When Her Plan Went Sideways” in a Sword & Sorcery story, and “Reluctant Femme Fatale Who Had Fallen Into Bad Company And Turned On Her Blackmailer In The End” in a retro-noir thriller story.
Sounds interesting. Name of books?
The first one is my story “The Brides of Bmapth” in the anthology “Warlords, Warlocks and Witches from DMR Books. The second one is my novelette “Fire in the Andes” (Bert Henderson Adventures). (If you click my name above, will go to my blog where there is a link to my Amazon page.)
I had several fun bad girls that I wrote about in my own books – one was a cloying, clingy and manipulative southern belle; Scarlett O’Hara as seen by characters who disliked her and saw straight through her every machination. The other was an obsessed stalker with a mad crush on the main character, but who eventually fixed on another character who returned the devotion…
My story “This Green And Pleasant Sky” is about a man who is sent to a farming asteroid that is inhabited by ten women from a prison on Earth. (The asteroid colonies being basically Space Australia). It was fun making up ten different “bad girls” with their own personalities. I like to think I made them all interesting variations on the basic Girls Behind Bars template.
My main trouble with Bad Girl is not rehabilitating them. And my current area of interest is so male-dominated, the worst women can do is be nags, bitches, and status snobs. Or murder their husbands.
The Wicked Stepmother
The Devouring Mother
My female leads are mostly “Just Trying To Be A Responsibly Adult Here,” although Chloe Fortebat (current female lead) is more Spoiled Tomboy Ranch Princess, and one of the Ancestors of Jaiya heroines (Anora from Scapegoating a Hero) has to LARP as a femme fatale.
Supporting characters include:
Gruff Older Woman: most of the Jaiya metaseries has one; there’s also a less sympathetic one in Wolf’s Trail
Femme Fatale Towards Men, Mean Girl Towards Women:supporting character in Marrying a Monster, arguably also the Star Master villainess
Gender-flipped Garak: supporting character in Star Master duology; also a supporting character in the WIP is a somewhat weaker riff on the type
Gender-flipped School Shooter: she doesn’t actually shoot up any schools but that’s the psychological basis for a supporting villainess in Wolf’s Trail.
Middle-aged Bimbo: supporting characters in the WIP and the second Star Master book; the former being more benign than the latter
Hey, it’s my book. If I want to highlight sentences with yellow dayglow markers and fill the pages with marginalia then I will. (Mostly because I’ve got this neat proof of P=NP, but I couldn’t fit it in the margins.) But I think most such types nowadays find kibitzing on social media much more alluring. ❤️🔥