McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Writing from a different gender perspective
belial.1980:
I've heard of some very successful male authors criticized (some admitably) for not writing well from the female POV. I'm a male and I haven't written a lot from a female POV in the past but I've been doing it a lot lately. Just looking for pointers.
I don't know if this is right or wrong but I tend to construct my female characters just like my male characters: generally I start off with another literary/movie character or a person that I know in real life as inspiration. Then I think of a couple defining character traits or quirks and write from there to see what happens.
For example one of my favorite characters I'm writing now, Hailey, was inspired by Drew Barrymore's character from Donnie Darko. Drew's character was a high stern school teacher with a quirky dramatic flair about her. I sort of kept her in mind when writing Hailey, but didn't write ::her:: specifically.
To the guys and gals out there, any ideas/suggestions/things to watch out for?
Starbeam:
About the only advice I can think of is to have a female friend/girlfriend/relative who's willing to read and let you know if there's anything that doesn't sound right. When I write a male character, I do pretty much the same, start off like I do with any other character, and then just write what feels right. And according to my b/f, I do pretty well. But I think a bit of that is also that I lean more toward tomboy than girly girl.
meg_evonne:
I think if you want to get into a woman's head and write her, then you will. And you'll get better at it with practice. I notice that i sit differently when I'm typing a male vs female character. I think it's a kind of physical reminder to keep me focused on the view point of the male. I'll be interested to see what other people say.
Cool question beliel
Gritti:
Writing men, women, dogs, aliens, or whatevers successfully all depends on motivation to me. Men and women have fundamental differences at this level.
Now to be clear, I personally have no idea what motivates most women. I've been with the same one for nine years now and I still have trouble figuring out why she does things the way she does.
But when constructing my characters I tend to try to think of them from birth to whatever age they are when the reader will meet them. Did they have a good, honorable, loving father? This fact alone would affect a boy differently than a girl. For a boy his father would be one of his first role models (possibly, of course a good writer could make the kid a psycho killer, but that's beside the point). For a girl a good dad is her first idea of what a man is suppose to be like, and it will most likely affect who she chooses to date or befriend. The same is true in the opposite for good mothers. Now how about abusive parents, or neglectful, or depressed?
I'm not a psychiatrist or anything. This is just how I think parentage affects kids.
I don't write a lot of this first stuff down. I'd be writing for hours without getting any real writing done. Instead I day dream as if I'm sculpting someone. Did she have siblings? Did he get to go to his prom? Is he overweight? and so on
all of these things will affect personality and more importantly MOTIVATION.
Lastly keep in mind I'm an unpublished beginner too, so I'm certainly no expert.
LizW65:
I think of it as being somewhat like method acting. Instead of focusing on gender, what are the character's motivations? What is his history/backstory, and how does it color his reactions? Is he bright, naive, socially inept, a control freak? Does he act impulsively, or think every situation through first? What is his "voice"? How does his physicality determine his actions? What props does he habitiually use? Also, I try not to base my primary characters on specific actors, as I feel it will be too limiting (though I did it with a supporting player who's only in two scenes; he's modelled after Jack Black.)
(BTW, I've used "he" here as I'm female, in case anyone's wondering.)
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