As writers we’re often provided with a variety of tests designed to help us craft our work and clarify the elements of writing. Modern writing has done its level best to deconstruct our ideas of heroes and often the female hero. Some tests have focused on trying to tell us about a female protagonist, and others that try to help us write one.
Those are two different focuses.
From the popular 1985 comic strip The Rule, Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace famously created their simple test to measure female representation in fiction: the Bechdel Test. Which included the following:
- A story contains at least two named women.
- They talk to each other.
- They talk about something other than a man.
As a writer, and lover of great heroic characters, whether they are male or female, I’ve had a problem with the Bechdel-Wallace test because of one thing only:
None of the three requirements actually tells me how to write a good female character.
A brilliantly written female protagonist could fail the Bechdel Test. A terribly written one could pass it within five minutes. The Bikini Car Wash Company movie is hardly known for its strong, independent, female characters, but it passes the three requirements with flying (and soaked) colours.
That’s because the Bechdel Test isn’t really a character-writing test. It’s a representation test, and to be fair to the writers, it was made for a comic strip to be a kind of punchline joke more than a definitive test in the first place. Yet, it became some kind of standard for over a decade in writing circles, and it drove me a little mad watching people defend the three points and applying it to classic movies. I have always wanted a more functional test that went under the “hood” of character development to understand you need to create them- men or women- as believable, distinctive, compelling, and filled with all-too-human flaws.
Enter the YouTuber and commentator Emily Butler (@iembutler). And I fell a little in love with what she calls, appropriately enough, The Butler Test.
What Is the Butler Test?
Emily Butler introduces this while discussing the failure of modern Hollywood to write compelling female characters. Like me, she found The Bechdel Test wanting and worked in her discussions to deliberately position an alternative. Here are the initial rules she provides, so take notes!
1. SPECIFICITY: Does this character possess a worldview, attribute, opinion, psychology, or skill that is specifically theirs?
Butler uses characters such as Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games to demonstrate the difference between identifying something specifically true about a character.
Asking whether your character is strong, or intelligent, or sarcastic aren’t key elements for good characterization. They aren’t specific enough. Those simple descriptors could be plastered along any number of faceless protagonists. Make your heroes distinct.
Katniss isn’t simply “strong.”. She’s a hunter. She’s observant and suspicious of people. She’s fiercely protective of her family and uncomfortable with attention. She’s naive about politics, and forced into the role of family provider. Survival in this post-apocalyptic world has been key in her psychology and everything centres around surviving.
If you place all those puzzle pieces of Katniss Everdeen together, you’re not describing a strong female character. You’re describing a fully-detailed person!
Writer’s Key: If you removed your character’s name from your character notes, could you identify your character from your description? Could they be unique from other characters in your story? Is your description unique enough to be different from fifty characters you’ve seen on television?
Writer’s Challenge: What could I write on my character sheet that couldn’t be transferred to somebody else in my story?
2. GROUNDING : Does the story explain why this character became this person?
It isn’t enough to just be specific with your character. You need to understand the why.
If your character is an extraordinary swordswoman, why? If he’s terrified of intimacy, why? If she’s deeply religious, why? If he distrusts authority, why? If she’s fluent in six languages, WHY?
You don’t need a flashback to provide a detailed explanation. A line of dialogue. A response in a scene. Even a reference to something in the setting. All of which draws intrigue and your job as a writer is to continually intrigue your audience, as surely as a lure on a fishing line intrigues a fish!
Life can happen without context. But writing shouldn’t occur without causality. As a reader/viewer/listener you need to know that the person we’re reading/watching/hearing should feel like the product of the life they have lived.
Backstory ceases to be trivia and becomes critical characterization only when it intersects with the plot and through the plot the growth and transformation of the character.
Katniss knows how to hunt because hunting kept her family alive. Her father died. Her mother collapsed emotionally. Katniss became the provider.
Her skill isn’t something the writer gave her because the plot eventually required someone to fire an arrow.
Her skill grew from her circumstances.
And her circumstances helped produce her psychology.
The Butler Test tasks the author to do something with characterization. Don’t merely justify an ability. Integrate it into the character.
Writer’s Key: Ask: What happened to this person that made them this way? Can the reader actually see that connection in the story?
3. FALLIBILITY: Does the character have a meaningful flaw—or are they meaningfully wrong about something?
The key word here is: meaningful.
A hero being bad at cooking isn’t necessarily a meaningful flaw. Neither is being adorably clumsy. Neither is caring too much.
Without context and causality, those are simply cosmetic imperfections masquerading as character flaws.
A meaningful flaw costs something. What has your character sacrificed? What did they give up? What wound can’t be healed? Did It hurt someone? Did it prevent them from realizing something in their life?
Writers can create external conflict easily. “If your story is boring, throw in some ninjas” was the joke making the rounds in NANOWRIMO years ago. The goal then was word count. But experienced writers realize that external conflict must match with internal conflict of your character. In fact, internal conflicts are key as they make character decisions that lure readers in, long after the latest threat has dropped their sword and fallen into the dirt.
Internal conflicts always raise the stakes. They always make a situation worse.
One of the great bonus points is when a character has a worldview that ultimately is proven wrong. Alternatively—and this is an important part of Butler’s formulation—the character can have a worldview that the story eventually proves wrong.
That gives us something extraordinarily useful:A strong character needs the capacity to be mistaken.
Not merely defeated.
Not merely inconvenienced.
Dead Wrong.
Katniss repeatedly misjudges people and political situations. Her trauma affects her judgement. She needs other people to understand things that she cannot. Sometimes she crashes spectacularly. That’s not weak writing. That’s the heart of character development. A character that already possesses the correct moral, political, emotional, and strategic judgements, then there’s no tension, no growth and no value to that character. They don’t even belong in the story. Fallibility creates forward motion in your story.
Writer’s Key: Ask: What is my character wrong about? How does being wrong cost them? Who or what circumstances force a character to confront their errors?
4. AGENCY: Does the character possess a distinct objective arising from their particular psychology?
This aspect moves beyond Butler’s original three initial rules, but she considers these principles in later videos. Distinction is a continued theme, and Butler considers how great character needs a distinct objective. While this is more of a clarification of rule #1, it is worth noting that this ends up being the difference between: Who are you? and What do you want? Or better still: Given who you are, what do you want?
That answer provides a solid understanding of your protagonist’s agency. Don’t make your character simply show up in a story. There’s a reason why they are there. Your protagonist wants something.
Let’s check in with Katniss again as an example. She doesn’t begin The Hunger Games wanting to overthrow the government. She wants to protect Prim. Then she wants to survive. Those objectives flow naturally from the person we’ve already met. The desires of your character emerge from and collide with your plot!
Writer’s Key: Ask: What does this person specifically want? Why does this particular person want it? What choices do they make because of that desire? Would someone else have made different choices?
That final question matters enormously because if everyone would make the same decisions, those decisions aren’t revealing character.
5. INTERDEPENDENCE: Can other characters possess something the protagonist lacks?
This addition is perhaps one of the most intriguing additions to Butler’s original idea.
While discussing Katniss, Butler began talking about the people around her. Peeta has emotional intelligence Katniss lacks. Haymitch understands strategy and political manipulation better than she does. Katniss has to listen to them. Trust them and learn from them.
Here’s what readers are desperate to get from a book, and it goes back to Sir Philip Sidney’s assertion that poetry needs to “teach and delight”. My formula for good writing includes two other pieces and each one of them grows outwards like a tree.
Your story will become proportionately more important to your readers if it follows these in order:
1. Entertain: Hold my attention.
2. Teach: Help me understand something.
3. Inspire: Make me want to respond to that understanding.
4. Transform: Change the way I understand something thereafter.
And how are you able to touch the reader with this list? Through characters, especially your protagonist. Your protagonist must value the other characters around them as having gifts, ideas, beliefs, and skills that they don’t have. If your protagonist is practically perfect at everything they do, they aren’t someone you can connect with. (Perhaps that’s why Mary Poppins as a character is so impenetrable. We connect with the Banks family. Not with her)
Butler explores the idea that fallibility and interdependence aren’t the same concepts. My father always challenged the idea that people needed to be independent in their relationships, just as he challenged the idea of them being dependent. The goal in a healthy loving relationship, according to my father is- Interdependence. After all, there are times we will be able to stand on our own two feet and times when we need to work with someone to be successful. Neither is a judgement against the protagonist on its own. So consider: Does your hero need anybody?
Luke Skywalker needs Obi-Wan. Frodo needs Sam. Harry needs Ron and Hermione. Katniss needs Peeta and Haymitch.
Needing people doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. It makes you relatable to the reader.
Think of how off-putting your story would be if every warrior lost so that your hero wins, every leader is a coward so your hero demonstrated courage, and every friend gives terrible advice so your hero provides the solution. Genuinely strong characters stand side by side with others.
Interdependence.
Writer’s Key: Ask: What can the supporting characters do better than my protagonist? Whose advice does my protagonist actually need? Who can legitimately tell them they’re wrong? Would my protagonist still look strong if everyone around them were competent?
The Butler Test measures different criteria from The Bechdel Test. That doesn’t make Bechdel useless. Applied across a large body of stories, The Bechdel Test may expose interesting patterns about how often women are allowed narrative lives independent of men. But it is an analytical tool—not a character-development tool. Conversely, The Butler Test measures key criteria to help you better define your protagonist, and most importantly your heroic female protagonist. Ask the questions from each of these points and get deeper buy-in from readers who want to care about your characters, believe in them, and see them grow into characters worthy of their stories.
Credit: The Butler Test was created by YouTube commentator Emily Butler (@iembutler). Butler’s originally stated test consists of the first three criteria above. The final two points presented here—agency and interdependence—are an expanded writer’s formulation based on themes in Butler’s subsequent discussions. In particular, Butler herself raised the possibility of adding the principle behind interdependence while applying her test to Katniss Everdeen. This article expands upon her framework for practical use by fiction writers; it does not claim authorship of the Butler Test.