Struggling with Female Characters

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by faustian90, Apr 25, 2020.

  1. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    you mean she can't boob breastily to the stairs... :D

    i wrote a book a while ago where one of the antagonists was a really bad writer... i had fun with that, writing the excerpts from 'his' book meant inverting all the usual practice and actually forcing myself to write stereotypical male gaze bullshit
     
  2. J.D. Ray

    J.D. Ray Member Supporter Contributor

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    I couldn’t tell you.
     
  3. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    To a large extent it’s true, there’s no clear cutoff point between male and female behavior. But this can be broken down a lot better than just “They’re the same”. I suspect there have been many similar discussions in the past and the seasoned members are tired of explaining it so they’ve boiled it down to that. But I’m fresh enough around here to roll my sleeves up and attempt this.

    I’d say even in more traditional times you couldn’t clearly define the differences between women and men, because as soon as you try people can point out countless examples who don’t fit the parameters. However, you can break it down into masculine and feminine traits, with the caveat always in mind that not all women are completely feminine and not all men are completely masculine.

    Example—one dichotomy could be confrontational styles. In general (imagine this statement at the beginning of everything I say from here on) you can say that direct confrontation is a masculine trait and emotional manipulation a feminine one when it comes to confrontation. However, pay attention to people you know and you’ll see that quite a few men will use emotional manipulation, and quite a few women are fiercely direct in their confrontations.

    Another one—in general you could say nurturing and comforting are feminine traits, while trying to toughen someone up by making them deal with the consequences of their actions is a masculine trait. But again, it doesn’t break down that neatly.

    And this continues across the entire spectrum of behavior or traits. Just when you think you've come up with one that clearly separates the men from the women, NOPE! Many males are quite feminine and many females are very masculine. In different ways even.

    So it’s much better to concentrate on what kind of character you want to create. If it’s a young girl for instance, is she a tomboy who likes to challenge the boys, or maybe she’s a girly-girl, afraid to break a nail or get her clothes dirty, who would scream and run away on seeing a spider. They’re both very common types of girls.

    The same applies to boys—there are rough and tumble kids who like to fight and are always pushing to get what they want even after they get in trouble for it, and there are gentle quiet boys who are too shy to talk most of the time and always behave exactly like they’re told to.

    So yeah, concentrate more on character traits that might be considered masculine or feminine, but realize they’re distributed in unexpected ways, and that’s a big part of what makes life and people so fascinating and so cool.

    Ultimately creating characters depends on observation of the people around you. Dedicate yourself to paying attention. Think about people, write about them in your journal every day with the intent to solve what you can of this endless riddle of the ages. The better you get at that, the better characters you'll be able to create.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2020
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  4. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Typical female, gives a mysterious non-answer and doesn't elaborate. They expect you to read their minds and if you don't they get mad at you.

    *Runs and hides*
     
  5. Some Guy

    Some Guy Manguage Langler Supporter Contributor

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    Here we go.
    I had to make a decision after making a decision. o_O My MC is the stereotypical lout that likes females that 'boob boobily' even without stairs. That's his character. But is he really stereotypical?
    So my decision was to tackle the whole issue of sexual identity head-on, right down to the wiring. What if the males with the biggest dick-and-balls were terrified of females? What if even the girly-girls were seemingly dominant? What if the male was stereotypically attractive to females, and massively intimidated by it? What if the tits-and-asseses weren't so attractive in bed? Okay, okay, but he still looks. He's still going to talk about it with the guys.
    Wiring. Let me share something I recall from a psych-class long ago. Gather a group of nude males and females, all shapes and sizes. No matter the circumstances, the first thing the men will look at are each other dicks. Where is their place in the peckering order? That's the order of priority. Sorry girls, you didn't even make the top two. But! You will be looked over, frequently, thoroughly, whether you are dressed or not. That's the wiring. So what.
    The point?
    The point is we write fiction to express drama. The conflict between a man's wiring and the societal soup-of-the-day is drama. Embrace it! There is, for now, a conflict between how we feel as sexual humans and societal perception. That's drama. Embrace it. In order for males to find whatever it may be that is attractive on females for them, they first have to look at it and decide. That is drama. Embrace it! These days, some females and some males want to short circuit this dynamic. That is absolutely bloody drama! Embrace that! We're too wrapped up in what we think males/females should be that we've nearly forgotten (as a society) what we are (as a species).
    Ask yourself this, if characters in fiction are symbols, what are you writing a female character for? Will the character be boring as a male? Are you hobbling your story's vision by overthinking sexual identity? What about the characters? What is the story about? Embrace that. :)
     
  6. J.D. Ray

    J.D. Ray Member Supporter Contributor

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    In my case, part of what I'm trying to achieve is writing about how society could be. This entire novel (and BTW, I somehow feel like I'm hijacking the original post here) was started as an investigation into how two peoples' relationship could be if they didn't have all the "normal" challenges. They would still have challenges, but if you take away bad parents, emotional baggage from previous relationships, weird societal pressures, lack of self confidence... the list is long. So I created a setting where all those things were stripped away. Some of them were easy, but others weren't. I had to go almost 300 years into the future, many generations past the women's empowerment movement of the twentieth century and the people who remember "the good old days" before women had a voice. I had to get out of America, because three hundred years probably isn't enough to make our population better (as a side note, about half of America has left America in my novel). I had to create events that shook the foundation of global society (though I didn't think of pandemic, and might work that in); famine and global war resulted in most people wanting better lives for themselves and others. And I had to provide a mechanism for long life.

    All this, plus providing my characters with generations-deep wealth, just to put them in a place where they felt confident in themselves and their own futures; where there wasn't a driving need to mate with someone, establish a career, buy a house, make a home, and scramble to get to retirement and pay for the kids' college in good health so they can settle down and live the lives they've wanted to all their lives. What if they could be those people from the start?

    Only then did I add conflict, which is when drama comes in. Some of the conflicts have been easy for me to write; they overcome external things together. But no matter how well-founded they are, people have to relate to one another, and that creates tension and a different form of conflict. I know how I approach these things, and can write Marko from that perspective. But when it comes to Celeste, I can only imagine how she would approach things; I can't make them the same way that Marko approaches them, because there would be no conflict. So I find myself asking how Celeste thinks about things differently, and naturally drop into wondering "how do women think about these things?" I don't really know that it's a Mars/Venus thing, but I have a hard time believing that it's not.

    In this brief passage, Marko and Celeste find themselves trapped on an island and need to swim to shore. There was a discussion earlier about Marko having romantic ideas about the evening, and their predicament got in the way of that.
    In early drafts, I dwelled some on Marko's physicality, but it came out sounding "boobily". Now I'm concerned that this sounds too dry.

    Here, from Marko's perspective, they finished the swim:
    Again, in early drafts, much more "boobily" description. Celeste isn't particularly busty; that's not my point. When Marko looks at her, all he knows is that she trips his trigger; that his body responds with attraction. In this case, they didn't have the luxury of time for him to dwell on the situation. He loves her, and he's attracted to her. He's not turned on by the way her boobs bounce or don't, by the curve of her butt, the color of her eyes, or the fullness of her lips. It's something more holistic and deeper than that. But once more, I'm concerned that my description is too dry.
     
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  7. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    My offhand diagnosis—it sounds like you're describing denatured humans, with their biological functions and motivations removed. Do they not experience sexual attraction? If not, wouldn't the human race cease to exist in a generation or 2, or has that been accounted for somehow?
     
  8. J.D. Ray

    J.D. Ray Member Supporter Contributor

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    Certainly. I'm open to suggestions on how to... ahem... flesh out these scenes to more appropriately describe their reactions in this situation? It's not obvious from these clips, but the setup here is that a young couple are out on a picnic date and find themselves transported back in time with no preparation, no supplies, and really no idea what happened. They're more focused on figuring out their situation and dealing with what seems inconceivable to them than they are dwelling on being hot for one another.

    Later, after they've had some time to collect themselves:

    I'm not looking to write a treatise on sexual intercourse. Readers either know how the mechanics work or they don't, and it's not my job to teach them. Nor is it my goal to be tawdry. But show don't tell needs a bit of showing, and this is what I came up with.
     
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  9. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Oh ok, well that isn't as de-sexed as you made it sound. I thought you had stripped away all sexual desire along with all the other factors you mentioned. I see no problem there.

    As to how do men and women experience desire differently? The eternal mystery, isn' it? I've heard some theories, but of course the problem is that nobody has ever been both a man and a woman so nobody can really see inside the other. And this is another instance where it seems (in general) that men (those who fit the masculine profile pretty well anyway) are very straightforward about what they like and what they want and what turns them on, but often women (in general, those who fit the profile etc etc) like to create some mystery. In fact it seems men and women both play up quite a bit on women's mystery. How many songs and poems do you see written by men about mysterious and beautiful women presented almost as goddesses or mythical figures? Where are the similar poems and songs by women about men?

    One biology-based theory says that men are drawn to women who exhibit certain traits that are indicators of good childbearing stock, ie youthful looks, good secondary sexual characteristics (boobs, butt, hips, long sexy legs, smooth shiny hair, bright eyes etc) and women by nature are drawn to men who exhibit social power and prestige, such as wealth or a good job or standard Alpha characteristics. This assures good breeding and generally good offspring. The men have to vie with each other, jostling for position on the hierarchy, and when they're done and it's clear who has bragging rights, then the more desirable women decide which ones get a shot. Apparently 80% of women go after the top 10% of men, or so I've heard but then you know about statistics. And it's probably equally true that 80% of men go after the top 10% of women, or at least are strongly attracted to them.

    Once a society reaches a point where there are no longer any natural threats to fend off and conflict is handled legally, rather than through duels and fights, that seems to be when the society slips into decadence and everything gets turned on its head. Men increasingly become less masculine and women more so, and there's a lot of social pressure to do away with 'outdated' and 'primitive' things, which seems to equate largely with masculine men and feminine women. But of course once a society goes that way it becomes easy prey for societies where the men are strong and aggressive, and where there's a lot of reproduction going on.
     
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  10. Earp

    Earp Contributor Contributor

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    Elaine: "So you don't want to have sex with women you don't find attractive?"

    Jerry: "No, we pretty much want to nail them, too."
     
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  11. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Someone once advised to swap all the pronouns between your characters, as an experiment to show yourself whether your characters are "gendered" to a stereotypical extent. I found it insightful. I did that to one of my chapters a long time ago, and it quickly became evidence where the girl was being written in a ridiculous manner. You could try it.

    'Cause when you say, "Mary hesitated, blushing at the offer. She played with her hair and whispered, 'Thank you.'" - that looks fine.

    Now: Tom hesitated, blushing at the offer. He played with his hair and whispered, 'Thank you.'

    Feels more acceptable when it was Mary, doesn't it?

    So swap the pronouns up and see what jumps out at you, and then you can work to eliminate those traits or behaviours in the character - or limit them, at least. There's nothing wrong with Mary playing with her hair and blushing - just because it might be stereotypically female doesn't mean it isn't real or can't be written. But if she's gonna do it ALL the time, that's when it becomes a problem.
     
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  12. Lazaares

    Lazaares Contributor Contributor

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    I disagree with all those here who claim writing women is the same as writing men. Could you swap around the average 21st century man with the average 21st century woman? Of course not. They have differing preferences, culture, values, looks, routines and priorities.

    You can argue what caused these differences; if you maintain a world similar to ours with historical or present gender roles there likely will be similar differences. And those differences will cascade into further distinctions. An extra note here is that these relate mostly to roles & expression, not necessarily sex at birth.

    Woe to the fantasy worlds that feature mixed-sex armies and give no explanation to how they are handled.
     
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  13. SoulFire

    SoulFire Member

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    My general philosophy is to create deep, complex characters with their own flaws, motivations, fears, and desires. Generally, I try to make this separate from their gender/sex. Certainly, there will be times where their gender/sex impacts those characteristics, and that will be important to flesh the character out. But I only draw attention to gender/sex when that is important.

    Much like Lazaares above says, the gender/sex of a character will matter in a cultural sense. But, a character's sex/gender shouldn't be their main driving force unless that is the intention behind the character.

    So essentially: Make a compelling character regardless of gender/sex, only make that gender/sex relevant if it is necessary for plot, culture, or character growth/development.

    Avoid idolizing a character for their body as the narrator. There might be characters who draw attention to the physicality of a character, but unless the idolized character themselves draws attention to it for any reason, you as the narrator should avoid doing such. Incessantly discussing the beauty or appearance of a character without deeper insight into them as a person comes across as creepy and voyeuristic. Now, this can be a good thing if you are in the POV of a character who IS creepy or voyeuristic, but as a general rule, the narrator of a story should be nonexistent or neutral unless necessary or intentional.

    Hopefully that makes sense and helps!
     
  14. Ted Catchpole

    Ted Catchpole Active Member

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    I do to. So I bought The Neighbours by Nicola Gill. A book written about women by a woman and have been speaking with her on Twitter. She is a delight. Give it a try
     

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