Testing the Bechdel Waters

So, I recently heard about the Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, which... really makes me view my writing in a different light. The test is a fairly simple one: In Movie X, are there two female characters (with names)? Do the two women talk to each other? Do they talk to each other about something other than a man (not necessarily romantically, but just about a man, be it their father, their boss, their boyfriend, or their son)? That's it. And yet barely any of my stories pass because I suffer under this delusion that women are hard to write.

I need to get past this. I am a woman, I am a feminist, and I am a writer. I should be able to write a female character, and I should be able to write more than one female character in the same story. My excuse used to be that I didn't have any female friends, I always connected better with men, and therefore it was difficult for me to write girls like how they really were. Most of the time, when an idea for a female character popped into my brain, it would be some trope I picked up from TV or a movie or a book, and I would say, "Well, I guess I'll just write some guys. I know how they really are."

Except for the part where that's all a lie now. I'm friends with more women than men now, and I still write primarily male characters. The women and men I'm friends with are by no means typical, and none of the male characters I write are not like any of my friends. So, my mission is to write more females. My next piece of fiction needs to pass the Bechdel Test, because the last time I wrote a story with a female main character in it, the main character was originally a male and the genders were switched as something of a writing experiment.

In fact, right now, I'm rewriting one of my NaNoWriMos from years past, and I think I'm going to attempt to expand the roles of my female characters, and swap a couple of the men out for girls. The main character is still going to be male because the character is so built up in my mind that I couldn't change him to female any more than I could change his hair or eye color or nationality. That bitch is stuck. Wish me luck!