Writing Men vs. Writing Women

People generally wear clothes that they think they look nice in, with what other people think only as an afterthought. Other people seeing the clothes does not effect whether or not the person is wearing the clothes for themselves.

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bunch of : The distinction is between the thought 'I'm wearing this because I think it looks good" and "I'm wearing this because other people will think it looks good". Yes, both are going to be seen by others, but the latter is trying to create a specific reaction from others ("oh they look nice") while the former is done without considering what others are going to be thinking.

edited 15th Dec '13 7:17:21 PM by kotep

On the contrary, I think one of my greatest moments of fridge logic was when I realized women's fashion isn't meant to impress men, but to impress other women. I'd always been thinking 'If they want to be attractive to men, why do they wear that bullshit?', and then it hit me that maybe attracting men was never the point, and it suddenly made so much more sense.

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How you will write male and female characters depends on the time period, local culture of wherever they're from, and how they were raised.

I think most other opinions are too simplistic.

Optional explanation: For example, a lot of people say there's no reason to write women differently than men. That's just wrong. If your story takes place in The '50s, or Saudia Arabia, or, on the other end, a feminist Straw Utopia where women wield all political and social power, that will radically alter how your characters behave. And so will their personal background and identity. A butch lesbian's perspective on "how a woman should act" will be very different than a Princess Classic's, as will how they let their gender affect their behavior. Same goes for a Camp Gay vs. a marine colonel's perspective on manliness.

That explanation also refutes the point some people make that stereotypical gender behavior has to be incorporated into your writing to make it more "believable."

edited 28th Dec '13 9:57:03 PM by Wheezy

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This. The environment also has a lot of influence on a person, especially in how they act. I wouldn't say everyone is a social construct, but we do need to have it in mind.

Now then, I am unsure where I should cross a line between "Write men and women as people" and "Men/women are different from women/men". I know I can't just write them equally and expect people to believe it.

edited 29th Dec '13 5:25:45 AM by Rapier

Write them as individual people who are influenced by their environment? Take that character's personality and figure out how their background and society would alter their behavior.

Would they care what others think of them, or would they just continue doing as they please despite it not being "correct" for a person of their status/age/gender/etc.? Or are they just culturally ignorant? Maybe the character is still struggling to decide how to act, and experiments throughout the story.

edited 29th Dec '13 12:16:08 PM by ScorpioRat

This has been brought on many time, but it needs to be said again.

It's not that you cant write male and female characters the same. You could create a very engaging and plausible story in which males and females display no systematic differences, and yet still end up with complex characters and an exciting story. The thing is, the differences between men and women are interesting, and many people like thinking about and discussing them, including authors and readers. Gender is fascinating, and being able to incorporate that aspect human experience into a character's personality in a convincing way adds a layer of complexity that can enrich a story. To do this properly, one cant do worse than take Neil Gaiman's advice, which is hang out with some people who happen to be the gender of interest and discuss your character with them (next best is to run your character past beta readers on the internet).

That said, there are a couple of problems inherent in writing gendered characters. First is that everyone in the world believes that they are an expert on their own gender, and if they think your character is unrealistic in any way, or fails to fulfill their expectations based on their their own personal experiences, they may accuse you of not being able to write a character of that gender very well. There is no realistic way to make all such people happy, so the best thing to do is try your best and hope that enough readers will find your characters interesting enough to keep reading.

The next problem is that gender tends to be too interesting, in that it has a tendency to take over the characterization and distract attention away from all the other aspects of the character than are potentially interesting. It's rather challenging not to get so caught up in writing, say, a "powerful woman", that you (or the readers) forget that there are other aspects to being human. That's what GRR Martin meant when he said that he thinks of female characters as people. Nor are you as the author under any particular obligation to fulfill some vision of social progress in your writing. There is no intrinsic reason why one cant write a "weak woman" or a "strong man" and not have it work out as an successful element of your story. It all depends on what the story context demands.

As to how to write gender well, that's something so nuanced that I don't think there is any way to describe it in a simple, concise format. It's like writing an intelligent character, or a sensitive one, or a morally weak one, or any other characterization that requires a deep understanding of how human beings relate to each other and themselves. Practice makes perfect is really all anyone can say. The real differences between men and women are so varied, so subtle and interactive (how a woman expresses herself, for example, will depend sensitively on how other male and female characters in the same story express themselves). You try it, run it past your beta readers, accept their feedback in moderation, and try again. There's really nothing else to it.

How to write women well:

1) Write as if male is not the default.

That's it.

How to write a good opening scene:

(1) Start at the point where your story begins.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

You'd be surprised how many books don't start at the beginning of the story. Especially EPIC FANTASY NOVELS.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

...okay, point taken. I just meant that I don't think that really answered the question so much as rephrased it.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

The problem is that there is no question to answer. If you ask this question, you obviously cannot understand the answer.

I disagree. I feel gender does have an impact on a character's personality; be it biologically, socially or mentally. Asking the question of how to write a female character is no more invalid than asking how to write a doctor, Hispanic, bipolar or male character. Everyone has to begin at a base point of what they do know and compare how these "others" differ from said starting point. Otherwise, the writer would be simply making it up and runs a much higher risk that the readers find this particular aspect "unrealistic". In that respect, it would make sense that male writers would ask the question of how female characters differ from male ones.

Essentially, it's called doing research.

edited 8th Jan '14 1:30:42 AM by peasant

The answer heavily depends on where and when the story takes place. What roles/behaviours are demanded of men and of women in the setting? If you're writing fantasy, alternate history or science fiction you would not need to write them differently at all. And even when roles are set, there mostly are different outlets femininities and masculinities in a society.

You need to know the society the story takes place in. Much like writing a peasant as opposed to a knight in a medieval setting.

edited 8th Jan '14 10:20:06 AM by Antiteilchen

You severely overestimate the audience's education on these matters.

Nous restons ici.

Likewise, I think you underestimate it. Besides, is it not better to assume that the audience are smart than to assume that they're stupid? Particularly with respect to their own intuition on what they feel is and isn't appropriate?

I concur.

The problem I have with this, is that it assumes a man knows how men are and women know how women are. But there is no thing that all men have in common and all women don't have/are not regarding personality and vice versa.

That's a valid counterpoint, but it's better to consult someone possessing the inherited traits you're writing about instead of falling into a Perfect Solution Fallacy by presuming that the question of how to write female characters shouldn't be asked to begin with because women have different views on what it means to be a woman.

Where I agree with you is how we go about gathering information about women as a group. Or black people. Or white paraplegic war veterans or something. One of the problems I see with the portrayals of black people in fiction is precisely what you mentioned. You can tell writers probably just spoke with a few black people here and there without really gathering an accurate and non-stereotypical viewpoint of how black people can be. And as others have said numerous times here and elsewhere, your setting and central conflict will influence what kind of women you're writing about. If your story is meant to be a historically accurate or historically reminiscent feudal society in which patriarchal values are openly adopted, it's not necessarily unrealistic or offensive to portray many of your female characters as uneducated, objectified and sexually repressed because that's how feudalistic societies actually operated.

EDIT: I basically agree with demarquis' overall view on the subject.

edited 9th Jan '14 6:42:38 AM by Aprilla

My solution would have more been to treat female characters the same as male ones. If i can write different male characters even though I'm only one particular male; I can also write female characters by using myself as a starting point. Emotions and thoughts work basically the same for all of us. Individual differences are bigger than those between the sexes.

Sure, all those female characters will probably end up with my particular bent on things, but so do the male characters.

You could also ask members of a particular group how to write a character of that group. But I can also base a female character on a male person and vice versa. You can not generally ask how to write women. If anything you would have to be more specific. Writing a 14th century noble woman in Aquitaine is different from writing an IT-specialist in present-day Argentina. The latter will likely have more in common with her male contemporaries than with the noble woman. Context is everything. Writing an Irish character in 1890 is different from writing one today.

Just start your characters as humans and then put them into specific situations. What is expected of them? That requires you to know the environment, of course. I could not just write a Chinese guy living in Shanghai with no research. But I could write the same guy more easily if he grew up where I live.

That's a good assessment and I mostly agree with it. The problem I keep seeing here and elsewhere is this temptation to create blank slate characters while insisting that they be divorced for the cultural, social, political and economic baggage of their reality. It's a perfectly fine strategy to develop character traits that are of no consequence to one's sex, but unless you are intentionally writing a story with a genderless/raceless/otherwise tabula rasa society, you eventually need to plug in the aforementioned ideological elements to develop an authentic, plausible setting.

With that said, I'm not all that interested in attempts at tabula rasa narratives; that is, a writer attempting to just write characters while denying the socio-political implications of their inherited traits. If you write a story with an impoverished female, and she's just all hunky dorey with the fact that there are people in her world who are not poor or female, I'm going to call bullshit on your story if you don't even attempt to reflect or elucidate the implications of being a poor woman in that setting. If your story is made up of nothing but poor women, your setting needs to plausibly explain how this is so.

However fantastical the writer's world and characters may be, they are still inevitably infusing their ideology into their narrative, and I'd rather see more writers make judicious use (or just better awareness) of their ideology, whether stated or implied, instead of pretending that ideology does not exist, that it has no place in fiction or that the audience will not approach their fiction with their own inclinations already in place.

edited 9th Jan '14 8:54:21 AM by Aprilla

This.

You always see and write from a particular standpoint. Better to make it known than trying to pretend you're neutral. That leads to things like science fiction stories on the moon with women still being housewives or Politically Correct History.

...And Aprilla wins an Internet!

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~