Same. Although I've written male characters I prefer to write female leads. I feel like its hard to find a good strong female protagonist in western literature so I want to make some.
The world mine's set in is sexist, so I look at the role they need to play and see who I can fit where. I do try to make some exceptions however.
Same here too. I have unearthed a well-known minor character from centuries ago to correct and empower. Writing it from her point of view. Treading carefully to do her justice. Heavily influenced by Joss Whedon on female characters. The other main character in the story is male, which felt right. We can fill the strong female characters quota!
Cool! My character has been influenced from historical warrior queens from pre-Christian Europe as well as some in anime. (I'm a total weeb its horrible).
I am new at writing and maybe shouldn't give critique but I seem to already do what most people are saying here, I make sure they are one female and one male if there are two non-spacific characters, I also like making characters (male or female) seem out of place, ie I have a part of my school based around its beauty and the head teacher is a man, why can't a man be beautiful?
Same here. Ensuring a quota or balance is not a thought process I engage. I have two mature WIP's at the moment. In one of them the two MC's are guys, and there a couple of alien sentient ships, and some other aliens. But the two guys are pretty much the only two main humans in the story, so that story could be regarded as male-centric, which is fine. There is a fetish edge to that story that I want to maintain, so I'm not going to change the balance. It's where I want it for the tone and color. My other WIP is decidedly girl-heavy. Again, my to MC's are guys, but other than them I've had a hard time populating the story with other men. All the characters that come to me for that story who are interesting and feel like they have their own story arcs to develop within the main arch of the story are women.
When it comes to me, I don't really have a process of how I decide whether one character is a male or female. Sometimes I'll see tidbits of a character and immediately snap and go "it's a girl or a guy." It's all down to preference and/or need. Does this character have to be a female? Why? Such questions pop up occasionally and I'll decide quickly what gender I want.
"I'm guessing his point was about socialization? Men and women, boys and girls, are socialized differently. In this sense a pure pronoun swap might result in the so-called "man with boobs" trope, which, again, is a no-no. To some women, feminists, and social activists anyway." I challenge anyone to describe why the "man with boobs" is a "no-no" without being sexist. I'll even go one simpler: Define the man with boobs trope period without being sexist.
Personally I have a lot easier time creating female characters than male characters. So my default is always to assume the character is female when I start. I create male characters when I know I need them.
The other trick with minor characters would be to purposefully ensure you have a mix of genders (and ethnicities) if you're creating more than one (your cops, for instance, are going to likely show up in pairs - if I have a pair of people and I'm worried about balancing characters, and it doesn't actually matter to the narrative who they are - they're going to be Officer Smith and Officer Gonzalez, and they're going to be a mixed-gender team. And yes, I did that on purpose to ensure that the story-world is multi-ethic. I'm not a terribly politically correct or liberal person, but diversity helps build realism - with main characters, diversity is hard and has to be researched and done well. With "spear carriers", it's easy, just assume that roughly half of the extras are going to be female, and that a good number of them are going to be ethnic minorities - and honestly with people like the cops, you're not going to get to dwell on them for very long, so the only thing that really even marks their ethnicity or gender is their name and the pronouns. So every third cop gets a name that's obviously non-white (whether that's Gonzalez, Shah, Washington, or Li - and yes, sadly we live in a world where you can communicate that a background character is African-American by giving them the surname Washington or Jefferson.), and just assume that one of the officers is female. That's just how the real world looks. And yes, these are all cheap tricks. But with background characters you don't actually get TIME to do anything besides cheap tricks.
It's hard to explain. For pretty much all of my characters, it's like they sort of show up and introduce themselves to me. Very rarely do I have to alter anything about a character in regards to age, race, sex, etc, or have to figure it out. With more minor characters, I mostly sort of make a snap decision, based on requirements for the role. Police desk sergeant? Middle-aged, egg-shaped white guy with a greying goatee. Quilt shop manager? Matronly woman with a bob cut and polka dot sweater. FBI agent? Stern-faced Latina with a sensible pantsuit and a cast-iron handshake. If you aren't that great at pulling characters out of thin air, turn on the TV and imagine the actors you see playing the characters. You don't necessarily have to describe the actor to a T, just hace an image to keep in mind as you write.
