A small lesson in craft regarding character arc development and agency vs checking off a trope list someone might think is a genre requirement.

When a heroine goes from hiding from a threat to her life, to displaying intelligence and strength, taking control to help take down a bad guy, and then choosing to go back to her own apartment when the danger is over instead of permanently moving in with the hero while still maintaining a relationship with him—that’s agency and character development = craft.

Asking that the heroine become a damsel in distress and needing to be kidnapped and rescued, then having the hero immediately propose so they can neatly slam the door on the romance is not understanding genre, plus spending too much time focused ticking of a list of tropes and must have beats is not craft. It’s basically stringing together a checklist with a bunch of words in between.

Stop thinking that a “strong female character” has to be a badass who instead comes across as a bitch while having a chest beating alpha hero who subverts her strength because she ultimately needs to be rescued. And if she does need to be rescued make it make sense and don’t paint her as useless without the hero while pretending to be strong. Genuine, discerning readers will know.

Stop writing snarky-bitch plus alpha-hero-secret-cinnamon-roll thinking it’s character development. It’s not. That’s just a bunch of bullet points. Be better than a generic tropified-list-book-knock-off masquerading as craft.

It doesn’t matter what genre any author writes, they need to understand how that genre informs the writing and the craft. It’s okay to push boundaries or subvert. It is not okay to conflate.