Top 5 mistakes when males try to write female POV characters?

This question is aimed at the ladytropers (and pertains to written fiction - narrative prose, in the form of novels and short stories), but of course everyone is allowed to share their constructive opinions, and if you happen to have more or fewer than 5 items to grumble about, then feel free to grumble anyway.

The big one for me? Making them "females" rather than "people." Women and girls are people first and foremost. They aren't a great homogenous mass who all think, act, and react the same way. There is no one right way that a female character will behave in a situation. How she behaves will be determined by the other facets of her personality and by her skills, experiences, and knowledge.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

On the flip side, one of the criticisms I first got with my female POV character WAS that she didn't feel like a girl and instead more like a guy. And the people giving the feedback were female.

Peasant, get Maddy to write a page or so from the POV of a female character then show it to those same friends and claim you wrote it - see if you get the same criticism.

I'll give it a go. Shoot me a link to some of your stuff, so I can at least vaguely match your style.

But keep in mind that it's far easier to say "I don't think that character felt like a female" than it is to say "That character didn't feel like I think a female should"

edited 16th Aug '13 4:28:56 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I would be interested in some examples of things that make a character appropriately or inappropriately female.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I have a couple BIG N Os right here

• Having all of the female characters be exactly the same or very similar (having very similar personalities with one 'twist' or having them look the same except for hair color)

Just like with all of humanity, women have a great deal of diversity. There's more personality types than the standard Action Girl tomboy and being an attractive, feminine minx. Just try to subvert sterotypes, please.

• Love Interest that only has one personailty trait and apparently no family or friends to speak of outside of their relationship with The Hero

Just don't do it, please

• Overdoing Menstral Manacre

Some women are REALLY badly affected by their cycles. Most usually just have a bit of bad cramping and get tired more easily. It just doesn't turn someone into a shrieking harpy with no rationalizing skills.

• All Girls Want Bad Boys

Some more exaggerated examples (especially if they don't make sense in-character) can make the woman involved appear to be dumb as a rock. Sure, falling in love with an attractive, misunderstood criminal who has hidden depths is somewhat plausible, but if the guy is an asshole towards her, yet she just can't stop fawning over him, that's a problem (unless her character is intended to be masochistic, very stupid or has developed Stockholm Syndrome)

• This is what REALLY destroyed my Willing Suspension Of Belief while watching the film adaptation of Kick Ass. Guy admits he lied about being gay and manipulated her over the course of several months, just so he could get into her pants. Her reaction: is immediately fine with it, has sex with him LITERALLY five minutes later and then proceeds to date him. What. The. Fuck.

• But the main guideline to remember is: WOMEN ARE PEOPLE AND NOT ALL PEOPLE ARE THE SAME.

edited 16th Aug '13 5:54:27 AM by TheMuse

Probably the most egregious thing I see when men try to write women is that they write them from a definite outsider's perspective, and it's extremely noticeable. They are behaving as if men are watching them and they need to act for the camera, so to speak. There is very little body-centered writing (of course because these writers cannot imagine having a female body), and everything seems to focus on the way things appear rather than the way things are.

This is very much in the vein of "write women as people" but is a more specific problem that I think even people who hear that over and over do not understand. It also seems to be a men's only issue — when women write men badly, it's never in this way. ^note There may be some in the Romance genre but it's done on purpose as a form of wish-fulfillment. When men do it they don't seem to realize it.

edited 16th Aug '13 10:29:18 AM by ohsointocats

(I'm a guy, but whatever) I despise when authors seem to think royal blood/speshul destiny/magic powers/vast quantities of money plus obligatory stunning good lucks are necessary for a 'strong' female characters (I enjoyed Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but it really suffered from this. Every significant female character is either a superhero or a witch.). So few female characters are 'strong' and normal. The Unfortunate Implications of this is that few or no RL female can be 'strong' because magic and destiny don't exist and not everyone looks like a post-photoshopped model and are wealthy and royalty tend not to make up a sizeable portion of the population. If the character does not have these traits, she's not show solution in the plot or make decisions without the input of the male characters. This kind of faux-feminism really irks me.

Another brand of faux-feminism that I despise is the kind that lets a fairly standard 'damsel in distress' character who is stuck in the orbit of the male characters have one or two 'strong' moments when she slaps a male character or something that is supposedly 'strong' and pro-woman, but really she's just being a bitch.

'All shall love me and despar!'

I really find it irksome when a female character that's supposed to, or starts out as a tough, independent character, but eventually devolves into needing her man for everything. It just reeks of pandering to the (usually) adolescent male demographic because the author thinks that male readers/viewers can't read about a female character without some sort of male character to project themselves onto. It's just insulting to both genders.

Likewise (though writers of both genders have been guilty of this) is the fact that quite a few stories with female protagonists tend to have a male love interest added in somewhere, with a Romantic Plot Tumour not far behind. Really irritating, especially for people who want to read more stories with female protagonists, but couldn't care less about romance.

"I'll show you fear, there is no hell, only darkness." My twitter

Or conversely, they include too much body-centered writing because they are imagining having a female body and don't realize that to someone who was born with one, it's normal and not something they think about all the time. I've read more than a few cases where a male author tries to do a female POV and gives the character this bizarre hyper-awareness of her own breasts.

Stuff what I do.

I guess that's kind of what I mean too. They're focusing on boobs because they don't know what it's like to have them, they are very much so focusing on what they notice from the outside not the inside.

@Posts #8 and #11: Could anyone shed some light on how to write for characters with different bodytypes (not just male and female characters; skinny/fat characters, tall/short characters, etc)?

I just tried thinking about how often I notice various aspects of my anatomy and all I got was a Centipede's Dilemma....

TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faer

Well the big one for fat people is that fat people are not unaware of their size. They are not skinny people with "extra" that they are unaware of where it is. Therefore a fat person is not going to be clumsy because of their fat.

I guess the main thing is that people aren't really going to be that aware of their bodies and will move in them competently until something comes up. A person with large breasts is not going to notice their large breasts until they try on a shirt that doesn't fit over them, a person who is short isn't going to notice their shortness until they try to drive a tall person's car and have to adjust the seat, a fat person isn't going to notice their fatness until they have to manoever through a tiny space, etc.

What it boils down to is that whatever body type a person has...they have it. Unless they've undergone enormous physical changes in a very short period of time, they're used to it and whatever is needed to compensate for its particulars, they do it unconsciously.

Stuff what I do.

Yes, a person who has recently shattered their leg and is stuck in a wheelchair is going to handle themselves differently than someone who has been a paraplegic for years and years.

It always kind of puzzles me when "short" is stuck in these lists because unlike everything else, everyone has been short at one point in their lives.

But for many people, the time when they were short was when they were kids and weren't generally in a position where they were having to adjust car seats and they knew they were kids in an adult world.

Then they had that horrible time when they had to keep replacing their clothes frequently and then it all stabilised out.

Once they've stopped growing, people forget what size they were when they were younger and they become used to interacting with the world in a certain way. Thus it's a shock when a person gets someone else's car and has to adjust the seat - in either direction.

I'm shorter that a lot of my friends (I'm 5'6") but seldom notice it unless something calls my attention to it - like suddenly being surrounded by a lot of them and I find myself having to look upwards more often to make eye contact or I turn to find myself looking at a throat or a nose, or I borrow a car and mutter, while adjusting the seat, "Jesus, some tall bastard's been driving this".

I do have shorter friends, too, and have had to adjust the seat out when using their cars or after they've used mine.

But you definitely become used to your own body size and only notice it when encountering something set for another size or finding yourself the odd-one out in a situation.