Writing Older Woman Character: stereotypes and tropes

As a species, we humans love to typecast. It helps us make sense of people, situations and life events.

We have an instinctive love of the label and labelling, as this era of the brand demonstrates only too well!

When we read books and watch shows, we carry assumptions and expectations of characters based on a whole range of factors, such as the genre we are watching, the sex, gender, age, race, and other characteristics of the protagonist.

Sometime it’s the name of the writer or director that helps us know what’s coming.

In comedy, we can laugh at recognizable traits and tendencies of genders, in characters that are riddled with blind spots about their toxic or extreme behaviour.

Consider some toxic stereotypes of older women: (I’m sure you can think of a few more!)

The over controlling mother/mother-in-law; the sadistic woman boss; the rivalrous evil queen; the nasty first wife or jilted, vengeful lover; the lonely, bitter neighbour: the cougar whose desire is repellent to the male protagonist; the desperate-to-be-young old woman; the bitter divorcee; the nagging wife; the super sweet granny with no interest in anything but nurturing others: the sadistic man-hater.

Of course, we have come a very long way since older women characters were routinely stereotyped like this. They reflect eras of misogynistic gaze storytelling that collectively shunned the older woman, until women ‘flipped the script’ in the storytelling business!

Today, we expect to see women of all ages being rounded, complex, human beings, who love, live, achieve, make a huge impact, go on amazing stories of courage, hope, and danger, and so much more in wildly diverse ways.

Sometimes dramatic impact is sought by having a toxic older woman as the evil genius – like sadistic scientists or female gang bosses, as the era of the anti-hero (male or female) has long dispelled the myth of older women as nurturers or vulnerable.

If we live in such progressive (yet arguably cynical and ironic) times, why are stereotypes and tropes useful to my process, you might be thinking?

Read on!

First off, some definitions.

A stereotype – a ‘stock’ character which lacks originality and has cliched and recognisable ways of behaving.

A trope – a recognisable pattern at the most basic level. In stories, we find tropes in themes, character types, and images, symbols and narrative elements connected to a genre.

Tip 1: Flipping the genre with your older woman character

Stereotypical characters can be ‘positive’, if we are flipping a pre-existing stereotype, inverting one, or aiming to create new ones for a genre.

I flipped the 1940s noir genre by applying a female gaze in my book series by creating Elvira Slate, an outsider private eye.

Book 1 in my crime series!

By flipping, we give our characters’ point of view, agency and far more psychological dimension and motivation. While they might still have recognisable traits appropriate for a genre, now we focus on revealing their psychological motivations.

Can your character flip or subvert audience expectations for your genre? Let’s find out.

Exercise 1

1. Take your Woman Over Fifty (WOF) character, the one you developed in the first blog.
2. Now choose some genres. Eg. Romance, sci-fic, fantasy, thriller, drama…or choose some genre mashups.
3. Jot down what could be conventional protagonist types for each genre.
4. Choose a time and place for each story.
5. Imagine your older woman character is leading a story in each of these genres.
6. Ask, how would you change her, except her age? How would she relate to her world?
7. How could she be changed to reflect a negative stereotype of an older woman in this genre? How could she be a positive stereotype
8. How could she be completely original – ie. an older woman character you have never seen before in this genre?

Tip 2: To Trope or not to Trope?

Any writer and/or filmmaker with an agent (film or publishing) will have heard that a company is looking for such and such a genre, such and such a type of character, and now, such and such a writer (from underrepresented groups).

All of these are tropes! Tropes function as hallmarks of the zeitgeist, the preoccupations of our culture at any given moment. Media and storytelling all create and reinforce tropes all of the time.

Audiences might delight in familiar tropes too. Tropes can reflect the times we live in, and can help push representation. For instance. there’s currently a spate of female POTUS in shows and films.

In terms of our writing, tropes can be found in our character types, character experiences, genres, themes, settings. As writers, we can have a preferred range of tropes to explore connected to our preferred type of characters, a bit like a painter and their colour palette.

You might have a preference for creating middle-class women (character type trope) in suburbia (place trope) and their complex family relationships (genre narrative trope), in dramas.

Or you might like to write about witchy heroines (character type trope) in the fantasy genre, and how they use magic (genre narrative trope) to further their agenda to live on their terms (feminist genre trope).

You get the idea.

Tropes found in the experiences of older women characters can, on one hand reflect our shared and common experiences of ageing, and also our changing expectations and realities. Audiences can delight in their experiences finally being portrayed; experiences that are recognisable are things like being a grandmother, being ill or caring for others; or romances and sex in the 50-plus woman. On the other hand, overuse of ‘tropified’ character experiences can risk a sense of over-familiarity in her situation, if not feel downright cliché.

Let’s think about some tropes connected to the older woman character that we may see today:

As a character type:
Familiar: wife, the mother, the grandmother, the sister, the lover, the teacher, the therapist, the woman returner, etc.

Less familiar but becoming more frequent: The entrepreneur, the astronaut, the president/prime minister, the spy boss, the politician, mob boss, the biopic subject (woman of achievement, known or unknown); the older woman lesbian protagonist;

As a character experience:
Familiar: Bereavement and widowhood; cancer/illness; caring for others; dementia and ageing: feeling invisible; feeling lonely; sexual re/awakening; female friendship; reuniting with a long lost loved one;

Less familiar but becoming more frequent – the untold story of the older lover/wife behind the famous man (in biopics); the older woman coming to terms with very specific early traumas and finally dealing with it; the road trip; the older woman heist/caper; inter-generational friendship; the grandmother who has lost touch or didn’t know she had grandchildren; an older woman transitioning to the male gender; the activist community; the little-known older woman sorority;

Character types as tropes are used often to show us what can be possible, for example, a woman POTUS, a middle-aged mom going to space. Characteristics such as class, age, race, sexuality, and disability widen the scope of representation further.

Exercise 2:

1. Refine the unique psychological profile for your character, the one you created in my earlier blog. (If you didn’t do the exercise, you may wish to do it now but choose an older woman character during the exercise.
2. Brainstorm three familiar character experiences that we see with older women characters. 
3. Write down three familiar or ‘cliché’ ways she could react to these experiences. 
4. Now write down three unexpected ways of relating to these experiences.
5. Which feel true to her? Why? Write a list of character traits that define her ways of responding to experiences.

Tip 3: Keeping your character original

Remember that every single human being reacts differently to situations and challenges because we are as unique as our DNA. And our reactions are not even consistent, changing due to myriad factors affecting our lives at any given point. Our moods, our health, our economic situation, and any life events that we are reeling from can trigger reactions that

It’s exactly the same for your older woman character. The difference being, in story we expect a certain amount of consistency in a characters’ key traits at the start of the story, and we manipulate the evolution of these through the arc; the emotional journey through the story. Real life doesn’t have these rules!

So the challenge is to make a stand-out character who faces a situation and responds uniquely, borne out a set of consistent yet complex characteristics and unique traits.

The key issue is therefore not to be lazy in writing by applying familiar tropes to your character which we might expect of an older woman, but which may not be appropriate for her personality.

It’s not about making her different for the sake of it, but avoiding cliché overfamiliarity in your character by injecting any type you choose with her unique truth.

Always know your character’s backstory and unique traits!

In my book The Woman in the Story: Writing Memorable Female Characters I provide numerous exercises to help you define who your character is psychologically.

So, to trope or not to trope? Only you know the answer to that. Hopefully through these exercises, you’ve at least got to know your character more which can only be a good thing!

My ever-popular guide to creating characters!