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.)

[Aludra]

Honestly...  From what I've read, there are more male writers than female writers who can write females well.

Getting a reader of both genders to check the perspective makes sense, regardless of the writer-character gender combination.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Honestly...  From what I've read, there are more male writers than female writers who can write females well.

Define "write females well".

Gender is largely a social construct.  When I bounce my work of my betas, I've never had complaints about doing male or female characters less plausibly - there are directions, like writing people with social confidence (I am a recovering pathologically shy person), that I find a great deal harder to get into than gender-related stuff.  That said, I mostly don't write contemporary settings, because I have equally little sympathy for female or male contemporary gender roles (princesses and "guys" irritate me equally; my own gender identification is "geek"); I'm interested in writing about people who are themselves first, not their gender first.

I suspect a lot of what I write might not work for people who have deeply held notions about gender being essential and fundamental difference much larger than any difference between individuals, but, well, those people are wrong, so I'm not inclined to give them much time, and furthermore, writing for them is a no-win double-bind; write a gender that's not yours like you, they say your male characters feel like women or vice versa; write a gender that's not yours not like you, it comes across as made up out of whole cloth rather than anything real.

Fortunately, writing in genre gives me aliens, angels and AIs to play with.

[Aludra]

"writes females well" defined as: How Jim writes in Codex Alera. (LOVE IT)
does not "write females well" defined as: LKH. Seriously.  Ick.  I love her monsters and some of her male characters.  I want to kill Anita.  Which would display immense talent if that were her goal.  I don't think it is, though.

I'll further say that it's not so much a "HEY your lady isn't lady-like" as a "Hey! Just because your character is a woman doesn't mean she's obsessed with her nails! Really!" thing.

[lt_murgen]

Writing well for the opposite gender is difficult at times.  But the other posters are correct- a well defined history and motivation is key to any well written character.  This is particularly true when the motivations may be related to a gender that you are not familiar with. 

Let me explain by way of my epiphany, some years ago.

I was watching the movie "Aliens" when it first was released on DVD.  It was with a group of chatty friends, including my arch nemesis (and wife's best friend) who I shall call Dr. Feminist.  I made the comment that in the original script for the first movie, Ripley was supposed to be a man.  Her reply opened my eyes:

"That wouldn't make sense.  The whole reason Ripley was the hero was because she was the groups mother- protecting them from the big bad monsters that they didn't know were lurking out there."

She was right!  Viewed in the light of the mother-protector concept, the movie Aliens becomes the story of two matriarchs defending their brood against the other.  Not heroism, not sacrifice, but the preservation of their species.  I watched it again later, and saw a whole new depth to the movie I had missed before.

[Shecky]

*shrug* For my money, it was just because it made the "win" all the more dramatic.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

"writes females well" defined as: How Jim writes in Codex Alera. (LOVE IT)

Codex Alera has just never come together for me, nor does it stick well in my head, socan;t really comment there.

does not "write females well" defined as: LKH. Seriously.  Ick.  I love her monsters and some of her male characters.  I want to kill Anita.  Which would display immense talent if that were her goal.  I don't think it is, though.
I'll further say that it's not so much a "HEY your lady isn't lady-like" as a "Hey! Just because your character is a woman doesn't mean she's obsessed with her nails! Really!" thing.

Well, one would think that that combination of examples serves rather well against any gender-essentialist notion that men can't write women in some ineffable way that only women can, fwiw.

I'd also offer Daniel Abraham's Long Price books for a really good example of a man writing female characters; one of the viewpoint characters in the first is a middle-aged female manager with a bad leg that is a permanent chronic source of pain, which is a kind of character I can't recall ever seeing in an epic fantasy before, and she is just wonderful.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

"That wouldn't make sense.  The whole reason Ripley was the hero was because she was the groups mother- protecting them from the big bad monsters that they didn't know were lurking out there."
She was right!  Viewed in the light of the mother-protector concept, the movie Aliens becomes the story of two matriarchs defending their brood against the other.  Not heroism, not sacrifice, but the preservation of their species.  I watched it again later, and saw a whole new depth to the movie I had missed before.

Myself, I hate Aliens on something pretty close to these grounds; I think it's profoundly anti-feminist.  Take a strong independent female professional, contrive a means to assemble a nuclear family around her, and present that as her core motivation.  Kinder, kueche, kirche.  And that's before we get into the subtext of the enemy female being fecund, parasitic, and black.

I think I am one of a very small number who dound the opening to Alien^3 profoundly satisfying on these grounds.

[Kali]

Jim writes women well in all his books.  Murphy, Charity, Molly... All feminine, all complete characters with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Male author who writes women VERY poorly?  Robert Jordan.  Snivelling, sniffing, bitchy, snotty, conniving, whiny, and horrible.  There isn't a woman in the entire series (or at least as far as I read, which was the first four or maybe five, I think) I could either identify with, or could ever imagine wanting to know.  I'd smack them all senseless.  Hated the lot of them, and the female characterizations are one of the biggest reasons I stopped reading the books.  I can only conclude that Robert Jordan has never met a strong, competent, kind, loving woman in his entire life.  They're all mean and sly and hateful, judging by the women in his books.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I can only conclude that Robert Jordan has never met a strong, competent, kind, loving woman in his entire life.

Having met his wife, this is not in fact true.

[Shecky]

Having met his wife, this is not in fact true.

I'm most curious as to what Harriet thought of her husband's female characters, given all the great things I've heard about her. It's a shame, too, as I otherwise thoroughly enjoy the Wheel of Time (yes, despite all the cries of "boring!" around the world-building/stage-setting in later books; I don't think that's a bad thing).