Delicate Flower in a China Shop

If you want to give a female character an endearing flaw, you make her fall down a lot. This prevents her from having a flaw that makes her a bad person in any way, but it keeps her from being perfect. A lot of Mary Sue characters are clumsy, but it’s depressingly common in mass media as well. It’s not even limited to things like teenage girls. There are women who should be masters of physical ability, yet somehow they’re tripping over random air molecules and dropping the hat at which they will break something. It is supremely frustrating and lazy character creation.

I’ve only read the first Twilight and never seen any of the movies, but even I know that one of Bella Swan’s defining characteristics is that she’s clumsy. She takes some pretty serious injury over the course of the books and is able to pass it off to her own actual father as “whoops, I fell down!” Yes, all right, that’s at least partially bad writing. It’s still only a slight exaggeration of better things. In another “but also bad writing” example, a search for “clumsy woman in movie” brings back mostly results for Good Luck Chuck, which features a woman who has suffered multiple physical injuries to the extent of broken bones from her clumsiness.

But the most iconic scene from Miss Congeniality is Sandra Bullock tripping. Anne Hathaway was allegedly cast in The Princess Diaries not because of her considerable charisma and talent alone but because she was as clumsy in her audition as Mia is supposed to be. Evy in The Mummy gets better, but she does begin the series with one of those catastrophic acts of clumsiness of which movies are so fond. These are beloved characters, and they are dangers to themselves and others.

I can feel someone out there in the comments section getting their fingers limber to lecture me about Inspector Clouseau or someone. You know, someone for whom the clumsiness is the point of the character. That’s not the case for, say, Evy. She’s supposed to be smart and capable, but also imagine how much work it would have taken to fix that library. Which the plot does not leave her time to help with, even though she would be intellectually capable of doing it.

Men are allowed a wider range of flaws. Yes, there are clumsy male characters, but there are fewer of them for whom the clumsiness is incidental. The lazy male trait is Daddy Issues, and we can write about that, too, and doubtless we will. But while I wouldn’t say Daddy Issues never hurt anyone—hello, Tony Stark—they’re less immediately dangerous. What’s more, you get Daddy Issues, Mommy Issues, and the ever-popular Dead Wife. Anger Issues. Badly portrayed autism. Hyperfixations. Addictions. They can be lousy parents, which relatable female characters dare not.

There are some characters who are allowed to have more depth than that. I’ve been doing a rewatch of Crossing Jordan, and Jordan is not clumsy. She’s one of my favourite types of character, actually, a hyper-competent hot mess. Like Dr. House, or most incarnations of Sherlock Holmes. She’s got Mommy Issues and a whole character suite of flaws, and she’s a lot more interesting for it. There are ways to write the flaws and keep the character interesting and likable. They exist.

The secret is to write a female character the way you’d write a male one. Hell, male characters aren’t even seen as being required to be likable, just interesting. They can actually manage to be both, if done right. It’s a matter of skill. Imagine how much more complex you could make a female character by thinking about who she is as a person. And if you still think she needs to be clumsy, at least make her believably clumsy instead of someone who’s lucky to be alive and have the job she’s going to have.