So how do _you_ avoid...

topic posted Thu, April 19, 2007 - 11:38 AM by  Mike
Writing badly gendered characters?
By this i mean writing "Men with tits" and "Women with dicks" ?

As a reader, and an agent i really have to say this is one of the characterization failures that annoys me most. I'm not talking about writing homosexual characters, just ones that don't act like the vast majority of their gender.

So what do you do to make sure your characters behavior matches their official gender?
posted by:
Mike
Boston
  • Re: So how do _you_ avoid...

    Thu, April 19, 2007 - 3:48 PM
    This is a hard one. I find that female writers make their male characters kind of girly and vice versa. Since I usually base my characters on people I know, I always try to imagine(and occasionally ask) how they would respond to different situations. Also, you could have a real person of specific gender read that part (or parts) to see if they think it is gender appropriate behavior.
    A good example of this is a female character in a book I just read. She was an assassin, smart ass, ballsy girl but she still fell in love dispite herself and cried when her friend died. Another character from the same book, a male this time was hopelessly in love with the main character and did a lot of whining about it (not manly at all!) but when it came down to it he had a lot of male characteristics like being jealous of his brother and constantly thinking about sex. (Okay, please don't assume I think all men are that way, it was just an example!)
    Hope that helps!
    • Ken
      Ken
      offline 7

      Re: So how do _you_ avoid...

      Sat, April 21, 2007 - 6:26 PM
      there are time when you need to blur characters sexual motives,it's almost impossible to a have an action female character that doesn't have ruthless points to her,but it's almost as more awkward to have that character with a supporting male character that as macho as she is. What I fall back on is the tried and true stereotypes, that women use they're brains and men use they're brawn to get out of tight situations. I know it's a cop out but it works for me.
  • Re: So how do _you_ avoid...

    Fri, May 4, 2007 - 5:01 PM
    Badly gendered? No. Badly developed? Yes.

    Backed with sufficient motivation, history, and all the "armwave-armwave" details that make any character believable, your character can be anything. Your character can do anything, but only with sufficient reason to make that action believable.

    Or, put another way: You can take a real person who has "atypical" attributes -- but without sufficient characterization that supports those attributes, that real person will not be believable as a character.
    Or, as I was once told in a fiction critique group more than 20 years ago, "No child that age speaks like that!"
    But I had spoken like that at that age. Did that mean my character should have been believable just because I had based her experiences on my own? No way. I had not presented enough evidence to support her existence.

    The first thing I thought of when I saw "men with tits" was Gardner Dozois's 1978 Nebula Award nominee, _Strangers_. And although Joanna Russ's female protagonist didn't have a physical dick per se, the first thing I thought of when I saw "women with dicks" was _The Female Man_(1975), and of course Ursula LeGuin's _The Left Hand of Darkness_ (1969).

    Okay, I lied. I thought first of the character Lois in her drag king persona "Max Axel" in Alison Bechdel's _Dykes To Watch Out For_.

    If you want to gender-bend, do your research. Find your character's motivations and all the details that will create a well-conceptualized, non-stereotypical person. Bad characterization often relies on gimmicks at the expense of depth. Find the necessary depth, and then find ways to articulate and illustrate it. Don't think about gender -- think about your *character*.

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