Can "good" female characters be written by men?
Can "good" male characters be written by women?
Can "good" male characters be written by women?
What makes a good female character?
- Thread starter Mr Light
- Start date
Absolutely
Memoirs of a Geisha
The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy
Madame Bovary
Anna Karenina
Freedom
Seating Arrangememts
And many, many more...
So, what you're saying is that most of the time good female characters deep, deep, down, have been men?
Of course. Male and female aren't opposites, just variations on a theme. We all have the same physiological and psychological ingredients making us up, just in different proportions. There may be subtle difference between the behavior of the average male and the average female -- which are as much due to social conditioning as anything innate -- but there's also a far wider range of variation within either sex, so there's a ton of overlap in the bell curves.
It's a total myth that you can't understand anyone who isn't of the same sex or race or class or nationality or orientation or whatever as yourself. That's only true of people with narrow minds and no imagination or empathy. It's not hard to understand other people if you just listen to them, and if you have the imagination to look beyond your own narrow perspective and consider how other types of person could see the world. Heck, you can't be much of a writer if you can't do that. If the only perspective you can understand is your own, then all your characters will be clones of you, or else the ones who are different from you will just be caricatures. Putting yourself in other people's mindsets is basic to being able to write characters well.
And, again, the differences in personality within either sex can greatly outweigh the differences between a given man and a given woman. For instance, when I wrote my X-Men novel, the character whose mindset I had the most difficulty getting into wasn't Jean Grey or Kitty Pryde or Rogue -- it was Wolverine. It was much harder for me to try to put myself into the mindset and worldview of a career killer than that of a heroine who held values close to my own.
But even so, I could find enough aspects of Wolverine's character to empathize with that I was able to get a handle on him. Every person has lots of different aspects within them, so there's always going to be something about them you can relate to, and that's your entry point into their psyche. The rest is just doing the work to extrapolate from that.
So it's nonsense to think that, say, a male writer could effortlessly write about every other man and yet be unable to understand any other woman. That's not how it works. There are many, many ways that people differ from each other, and gender difference is one of the more subtle variations.
No, but what I have learned from both Literature and Life is that there are men that understand females better than males, and females that understand men better than women, and some of each end up creating characters of the opposite gender, and do a bang-up job!
More to the point, since society has tended to see men as the "default" setting, writers have had no trouble creating male characters who were defined by qualities other than their gender, such as their careers, their beliefs, their goals, etc. And that's the way to write good characters -- by not treating a single feature of their identity as the only thing that defines them. Yet the double standard is that most female characters have been defined simply as "The Girl," defined primarily by their gender and thus lacking in the same depth. Of course it's not that good female characters are intrinsically male; that's ridiculous. It's that male characters have always been allowed to be more than just their gender, and that's how all characters should be written.
You know I'm just asking stupid questions to wring smart answers out of you lot, right?
Never a doubt, my friend...never a doubt!
I thought you would appreciate the malefemalemanwoman opposite gender answer.
But do you know, that, out of your wringing are wrought some Pearls and Nuggets regarding Life and Such, that are unique and Valuable?
True Fact, Guy! True Fact!
I thought that your assessment that this conversation is a sausage fest, points to deeper problems.
Damn.
No sorry, that was Kodos.
My bad.
No sorry, that was Kodos.
My bad.
But still, see???...your "nugget" already contained at least one double entendre, a triple meaning, and food (especially in the Rocky Mountains - "Nuggets"?!?! "Rocky Mountain Oysters?!!?) for thought...additionally, the tone of the Thread was leaning toward a Male perspective of character and writing, and the "sausage" could be seen as metaphor...
...Jesus, I gotta get this down...there is a Thesis in here, begging to be eate...errr, written!
...Jesus, I gotta get this down...there is a Thesis in here, begging to be eate...errr, written!
Well, it's basically what hamlet said, right?
"Small? No, I could live in a walnut shell and feel like the king of the universe. The real problem is that I have bad dreams".
I am currently looking at Kenny Everette in drag, disguised as Dolly Parton.
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5LcYT2-QTE[/yt]
"It's all done in the best possible taste"
"Small? No, I could live in a walnut shell and feel like the king of the universe. The real problem is that I have bad dreams".
I am currently looking at Kenny Everette in drag, disguised as Dolly Parton.
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5LcYT2-QTE[/yt]
"It's all done in the best possible taste"
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Best Possible Taste, Indeed! And, you could actually pick a much worse example of a Good Female Character than Dolly Parton. She has been through One Hell of a Lot.
Little Known Fact: BerMAN was going to use Dolly as a "Q", but the Dialogue Coach couldn't get her to correct from, "John Luke"...that damn Coalminer's Daughter accent curse!
Little Known Fact: BerMAN was going to use Dolly as a "Q", but the Dialogue Coach couldn't get her to correct from, "John Luke"...that damn Coalminer's Daughter accent curse!
Remember the landlady, Mrs Carmichael, from Time's Arrow?
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