The standard female character

Lately there has been this overused standard for a female character. The witty, ordinary girl who wears jeans and reads her books and doesnt follow fad's but ends up with the hot guy in the end who turns out to have a kind heart, or some sort of cliched storyline like that.

And so I pondered this idea and came up with an accurate assumption. The standard female character is a character that, no matter how cliched your storyline is, there is always an alright character developement because the female is realistic.

But, in keeping with the standards, does that not make your characters seem less effective then they could be if you were to give them something else? It's become hard to take the standard and change it because it was so popular before, so, if you were to successfully change the standard, your character could be a lot more interesting.

Basically, what I'm trying to get across is people need to start breaking away from this standard in their writing. The Bella Swan's of literature must be changed because the more and more they are created, the less interesting they become.

So, give you female a random hobby like embroidery, an interesting fact like maybe she is really quiet. Change it up because the standard is just that, a standard.

~The.Dreamwalker.

One thing you have to be careful is that that is only the recent standard. All characters are the same, either they are like jesters, arrogant, quiet, or depressive. Characters created always fall under ceratin categories, like that female character standard. Those different characterizations are all used repeatively in writing. You always find the characters nearly the same unless it is an amazing and experienced writier. Thats why classics are so good, the characters seem so realistic and different.

What I would suggest to make your character different is to take on one of the cliche characterizations, and just change it up a bit. Maybe make a a quiet person who is just plain quiet. There is no reason or sob story in their history that made them that way. Maybe the quiet character is ashamed of their voice because it sounds like a redneck?

Just make you characters different people, go make them deep, not shallow, or just knee-deep. Make a different history, and just bascially try to be unique. Don't always have those gorgeous lead males, and tomboy girls as my dearest sister has stated.

The standard isn't necessarily the standard, because the standard goes deeper then just those kind of characters. You always make the cliche characters, you can't get rid of it, but make them a different kind of cliche, the kind of characters that people will want to read about.
~Incognito

Dreamwalker wrote:The standard female character is a character that, no matter how cliched your storyline is, there is always an alright character developement because the female is realistic.

I don't quite understand this part?

I'd like to think that my girls are original. I have a wet blanket, a weird thing and a lesbotic, nice, mean person. ^^

It was supposed to mean that a lot of females can connect with the specific character because the character is flawless. I know things like being a tomboy and hating dresses or things like that is known sometimes as a bad thing but you just can't hate the character because of it. There is no originality, but there is a safe net because the character is unoriginal.

And Incog, I was going specificly on the female standard and not so much the other standards. This was one that was just bugging me lately and I thought I would get my opinion out on the subject.