Novel Progress: Bechdel Test

A year ago this month, as I reflected on International Women's Day, I confronted the uncomfortable fact that the novel I'm writing didn't pass the Bechdel test. I decided to fix it.

How did a novel written by a woman fail to have a scene where two women discuss something other than men?

My two main characters were Zach and his father, Mitch. The vast majority of scenes were from the point of view of one of these two men. In addition, I had unfortunately included the trope of the dead mom and/or dead wife, where some of the story elements hinge on the grief of the men.

I decided that one of these lead characters needed to be a woman. Bouncing the idea around with Silbrith, she agreed. It sounds easy, but I agonized over it. I loved both of these characters, and didn't want to lose either voice. Still, I made the decision to swap about Mitch and Zinnia. That gave me Zinnia as the living parent, who's a rising star in the police department, and Mitch as the mysterious, deceased parent who had been a professor from another planet.

Along the way, I combined two minor female characters -- Mitch's sister and his assistant -- into a more important character, giving me Wryn. She's now Zinnia's older sister and colleague, a trusted friend and someone not afraid to call Zinnia out on her faults. In many ways, Zinnia and Wryn now mirror best friends Zach and Henry.

Turning my male cop character into a female made me rethink my assumptions about what a woman would say or do. In the end, I found that I didn't change a lot of Mitch's original dialogue. However, digging deeper so that Zinnia had conversations about topics other than her son made her a more well-rounded character. I love her now as much as I loved Mitch. Maybe even more.

That change seemed to open the floodgates for other changes. I'd been considering a romance between Mitch and a male character. Now that it was Zinnia heading into the romance with a male doctor, did I have any LGBTQIA+ rep?

That's a question I'll address in another post...