Hello Internet People, I've been thinking about writing a novel for a long time about a homeless girl who gets taken in and turned into a teenage desensitised assassin. The main problem that I'm thinking about is that I'm a boy and the main character is going to be a girl. Has this been done lots before successfully? (It's gonna be in third person, not from inside the girl's head.) In my (limited) experience male authors make their protagonists male and women make theirs female. I have seen female authors do male protagonists like in Harry Potter but I haven't heard of a male author making a girl his main character. So the big question is, do you think a male author can write about a female protagonist well, or should I change the assassin to a boy? Thanks in advance HLF
Yes, they can and they do. If the character in your head is a girl, then write her that way. (Also, just because your protagonist is a girl doesn't automatically mean it should be in third person. There are many valid reasons to write it that way, and if that is how it comes to you, then that is the way you should do it. But if it happens to come to you in first, that's okay, too.) Actually, most of my characters are male and most frequently I write in first person. The few times I've written in third are the times when my character has been female.
Yeah, if you feel like a girl, then your protagonist should be definitively one. Or you're pervert who want to let the girl talk the way you want, that might be kind of cool
J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, on the flip side. Just write them as people. Naturally there will be differences -- obvious ones, I hope -- that you will need to take into account, but we're not that different from one another.
