I have a conundrum.

Oddly enough the choice of words for referring to a group of three or four young women in my story didn’t bother me the first time round. The group would be referred to as either:

• they
• the girls or
• the four of them.

None of which feel very professional or correct as I read through this time. In speech it gets worse, the group being referred to loosely as ‘you guys’ when really they aren’t guys at all, but the term feels more natural to me. Even though I can’t help feeling like it shouldn’t.

The obvious alternative phrase (which I definitely haven’t used as yet) is ‘the women’. But I can’t help noticing that I have avoided using that phrase for a number of reasons.

Firstly is that ‘the women’ sounded old, particularly compared to ‘the girls’. When I started writing this story I was 13, and that was the average age of the characters. The characters ages as I did, and while ‘the women’ would not have been an appropriate term the first time this book was written, it could be now. Female humans go through this vague grey area where we are women, but still are often referred to as girls. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s to make us seem cuter, younger or more vulnerable. If that’s so, then I probably should be using ‘the women’ to refer to my characters. early 20’s is old enough to stop being called girls.

I think I also shied away from the term because I feel like it draws attention to their gender. Perhaps it’s because so much of the fantasy genre has male heroes, it makes the word look a bit odd.

Or perhaps it’s because I haven’t used it very often. Even in my everyday communications ‘women’ is not a word that I use much at all. Maybe it will seem more normal to me with more use.

That’s the nice part about editing. you can give a word a try, then change it if it really is unsuitable.