On Writing Women Who Are Not Waiting to Be Rescued

The first version of Naomi — the woman who inherits Clara’s house in The House on Dunehaven Lane — was polite. She asked questions carefully. She waited to see what other people would do before deciding what she thought. She was, on paper, a reasonable person. She was also, on the page, someone you would not particularly want to spend three hundred pages with.

I rewrote her from scratch.

The problem was not that Naomi was passive in the narrative sense — she did things, the plot moved. The problem was that she had no clear relationship with her own desires. She wanted things in a vague, theoretical way. She had not yet done the work of knowing herself, and as a result neither had I.

Agency is not the same as action

This is the confusion I see most often in early-draft fiction. Writers put their female characters in motion — they travel, investigate, confront, escape — and mistake that motion for agency. But a character who responds to events, however energetically, is not the same as a character who initiates them.

Agency is the capacity to act from genuine desire or conviction, even when that action is costly. It requires that the character know what they want, be willing to pursue it despite resistance, and bear the consequences. It requires interiority — a felt sense of what matters to this particular person — not just behaviour.

Clara, the woman whose secrets Naomi uncovers, is in many ways more present in the novel than her living counterpart in the opening chapters, despite the fact that Clara is dead before the story begins. That is because Clara made a choice that was genuinely dangerous, for a reason she was entirely clear about, and she lived with the weight of it. She had agency in the truest sense. Naomi has to learn it.

The specific pull toward accommodation

Writing women who accommodate less is harder than it sounds, because accommodation is so deeply embedded in what we are trained to read as sympathetic. A woman who is considerate of others, careful about her impact, attentive to the needs of the people around her — these are qualities we recognise and respond to. They become a problem only when they mean the character has no interior life that is entirely her own.

The fiction I find most compelling features women who are fully both things: capable of real care and connection, and in possession of a self that exists independently of that care. The tension between those two things — the pull toward others and the pull toward a self — is where most of the interesting human drama lives, regardless of gender.

What this looks like in practice

For me it comes down to one question I ask about every significant female character before a draft is finished: what does she want that nobody is giving her? If I cannot answer that question in a specific, felt way — not “she wants love” but something more particular and more costly — the character is not yet real.

The women in my fiction, when they are working, want things that put them at odds with the expectations of the people around them. Clara wanted to protect something she believed in, at significant personal risk, in a time and place where that decision had serious consequences. Mireya wants to name something about herself that the world she grew up in has no language for. Naomi wants to understand a woman she never met, and in doing so understand herself.

None of them are waiting to be rescued. They are all, in different ways, doing the rescuing themselves.

How I learned to write women with real desire

The shift happened when I stopped asking what my female characters should do and started asking what they actually wanted. The two are rarely the same. A character who does what she should do is following someone else’s script. A character who does what she wants — even when that want is inconvenient, contradictory, or costly — is following her own.

Mireya, in The Lantern in the Valley, wants something she cannot name. That is a harder kind of desire to write than a clear goal, because the character herself does not fully understand it. But it is also more true to life. Most of us spend years wanting things we do not have words for. The job of fiction is to give those things language. I wrote about how Mireya came to me in How Mireya Found Me — the process of discovering a character through an image rather than a plan.

Naomi, in The House on Dunehaven Lane, wants to understand a woman she never met. That desire is specific, personal, and costly. It takes her into places that are uncomfortable. It forces her to confront things about her own life that she had avoided. The desire itself is the engine of the novel, and it belongs entirely to her.

Why this matters for South African fiction

South African women’s stories have often been told through the lens of suffering and survival. Those stories matter, and they need to be told. But they are not the only stories. I am interested in writing South African women who are not defined by what happens to them, but by what they choose. Clara, Mireya, Naomi — they all live in a world that is difficult, and that difficulty is real. But they are not passive in it. They act. They decide. They carry the consequences.

That is the kind of fiction I want to write, and the kind I want to read. Women who are not waiting to be rescued. Women who are holding the lantern, building the hidden room, asking the hard questions. Women who are doing the work of their own lives.

The House on Dunehaven Lane is available at Reader’s Shack as a DRM-free ebook — and on Amazon Kindle for those who prefer it. If the questions in this post interest you, the novel is where I work them out at length.