On March 13, 2010, Mya wrote, One more question: Though I don’t know why, most of my characters are boys. The only problem with this is that sometimes, I can’t tell how TO write—think—like a boy to portray him correctly. Do you have any advice on writing from a different gender’s perspective?<\/p>\n
And on April 21, 2010, Silver the Wanderer wrote, I’m a girl, but my whole novel is written from the point of view of a guy. Sometimes, I’m afraid of making his thoughts and dialogue sound too girly and\/or out of character. Do you have any suggestions pertaining to this?<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re a boy or man reading the blog, please post your ideas on this subject.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written from male points of view several times. In my historical novel Dave at Night<\/i>, the POV character is an eleven-year-old boy. My loosely historical fantasy Ever<\/i> alternates chapter by chapter between a male and a female character. And my Princess Tales<\/i>, while told in third person, shift back and forth in each book from the male and female leads.<\/p>\n
Each of these male characters is different from the others, just as every real boy is different from every other boy. Obviously same for girls. As I wrote in my post about writing characters older than you, one sixty-year-old will not be like another, and certainly not just because both are sixty.<\/p>\n
This gives you a lot of freedom.<\/p>\n
In Dave at Night<\/i>, the main character, Dave of course, is based on my father, whose name was also Dave. I imagined my father as a boy, and as I wrote I had him firmly in mind. Because I knew what kind of man he was – spunky, smart, kindhearted, stubborn, diffident – I was able to intuit the boy he would have been. My father didn\u2019t express his masculinity in bluster. In the novel he defeats a bully, but not by fighting, by his wits.<\/p>\n
So it may help you to have a particular boy or man in mind when you write your male character. Or you can combine people you know. Write down the qualities that make them themselves. How might these characteristics mark them as male on the page? Think of the way particular boys and girls or men and women in your life behave when they\u2019re angry or arguing or when something lovely has happened. Compare your male teachers with your female teachers or your male colleagues with your female ones. Or the male and female members of your family. Think not only of their inner selves, but also their outer. Watch the way people stand, sit, walk, run. Girls are sometimes accused of running or throwing \u201clike a girl.\u201d Go beyond the stereotype to what you actually see. Listen to conversations. Obviously most males, once their voices change, speak in a lower register. Listen to what\u2019s said, what\u2019s emphasized, which topics are chosen.<\/p>\n
In my mystery, A Tale of Two Castles<\/i>, coming out in 2011, the dragon Meenore keeps ITs gender secret, but, without intending to, I\u2019ve made IT read more masculine than feminine. In revision I\u2019ve added a few touches to muddy matters. IT bows to Count Jonty Um, the ogre, and then follows the bow with a curtsy. I make IT like to play knucklebones (like jacks), a girl\u2019s game.<\/p>\n
These two examples are shortcuts rather than deeply rooted character traits. We need shortcuts because we don\u2019t have an eternity to establish our characters. But shortcuts can tend toward stereotype, so use them with care. Here are a few that come to my mind. You can think of more of your own. Many boys and men, even in our enlightened twenty-first century, are more restrained about crying and more embarrassed when they do cry than girls and women are. In dialogue a male character may be less expansive about his feelings. He may make them known, but maybe not in long paragraphs with many explanations. He may use bigger gestures or have more explosive pent-up energy. I once read that women laugh more in the presence of men, and that men are less likely to laugh at a woman\u2019s jokes. See if you find this to be true. Along the same lines, I read that women want their men to be funny, and men don\u2019t say they care if their women can make them laugh. But of course these are generalizations.<\/p>\n
It will help if you establish your character as male clearly at the start of your story. Don\u2019t give him a name that could belong either to a boy or to a girl, for example. Find a way to describe him early on. Say that he\u2019s the shortest or tallest boy in his class, for instance. Have somebody say something to him that demonstrates we have a guy here. The reader will help you once she\u2019s clued in. Unless you go far off gender, whatever he says, she\u2019ll hear your boy saying it. Whatever he does, she\u2019ll see your man doing it.<\/p>\n
If your main character is male, you may have an easier time by writing in third person. You\u2019ll still have to reveal his thoughts and feelings, but you won\u2019t be living inside his head and giving him your feminine ideas and responses. If you\u2019ve been writing in first, try switching to third and see what happens.<\/p>\n
When you write a scene or when you go back to revise it, picture your character. Does he read as male for you? If not, what can you do? Change his dialogue? He may need to say whatever he was saying, but he can say it in different words. Or maybe the setting is wrong, and simply by moving him, he will be changed. Or you can give him something to do while the scene is moving forward that will feel masculine, assembling a model airplane, raking leaves, digging for buried treasure (not that girls can\u2019t do any of these things).<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re ready, ask a guy to look at what you\u2019ve written and point out to you where the character feels female. If you\u2019re never going to be ready to do this, you can be more subtle: Ask a few people of both sexes how they think a male character would act and think and feel in the situation you\u2019ve set up in your story.<\/p>\n
This has been a touchy topic, because for every characteristic I suggest as masculine there are a lot of women who have it. But it is the sum of the person that you\u2019re going for, not one trait or another. Blog readers, please chime in if you have more ideas for Mya and Silver the Wanderer. If you are an actual man or boy, what do you think?<\/p>\n
Here are prompts:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Your male main character is assigned to work on a project with another male character he dislikes. Make up the project. Write what happens.<\/p>\n
\u2022 A male character is trying to release his male friend from the clutches of a possessive female centaur. Invent the circumstances: where they are, what the centaur\u2019s powers are, how the friend is trapped. Write the scene in first person from his point of view. Now write the same scene, making the male characters female and the female character male..<\/p>\n
\u2022 Write a male Cinderella story: two mean stepbrothers, a mean stepfather, a wizard godfather. See where you take the story.<\/p>\n
Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On March 13, 2010, Mya wrote, One more question: Though I don’t know why, most of my characters are boys. The only problem with this is that sometimes, I can’t tell how TO write—think—like a boy to portray him correctly. Do you have any advice on writing from a different gender’s perspective? And on April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[262,244],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":503,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}