How to Write a Character

I've been sitting at my computer for the past hour, perusing Facebook, and Tumblr, and all the writing blogs I read, and generally putting off actually writing a blog post, because I had no idea what to write about. I was just beginning to say things like, "What if I don't write a blog post today, and then I never write a blog post again?!" when I came across this blog post, by Jaye Robin Brown. She talks about how although she's a white author, she doesn't only write white characters, because although she might get something wrong, and there's always a chance of offending someone:

1. a story with only white characters would be incredibly unrealistic in almost all settings, and
2. the basic human experience and emotions are the same no matter what your race or background.

I was inclined to wholeheartedly agree.

Reading this post, however, got me thinking about a kind-of-related issue that I've seen a lot of writers worry about: writing characters of the opposite gender or sex. The main characters in my current WIP are both boys and I've never actively thought about how I portray the opposite gender in fiction, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to do a little bit of googling on the topic.

What I found absolutely terrified me. I'm relunctant to name names (or blogs, rather) because I'm not actually going to say anything nice about the blog I was reading. What I will say is: scary things happen in the romance genre. To wit: this lady, whose name I will not name, aimed to give advice on writing male characters who seemed 'believable' and 'male'. Her list of the four things that detracted from a male lead most included crying (thankfully she later agreed to make an allowance for the deaths), and being unable to control the heroine.

And then I did some more googling, and I kind of just wanted to crawl in a hole and die. I have learnt:

• If you're writing a male character, you should never, ever have them say, "I feel..."
• There's no point in arguing that guys you know don't fit into the egotistical, lust-oriented stereotype, because it is the norm, and most guys do.
• Men should never cry
• If your male character isn't checking out your female characters it's unrealistic.
• Men don't throw out off milk without someone else telling them it's off first. If your character does this, your reader will subconciously know that something is wrong with your writing.

The list goes on. It's really, really scary. In fact, I wish I'd never researched this issue at all.

Thankfully, there are also people out there on the interwebz with more balanced thoughts on the subject. It turns out - perhaps unsurprisingly, when you think about it - that they're just not the people writing articles called "How to Write Male Characters" because they've realised that male characters ought to have enough variation that they can't all be lumped into a How-To. So, to cheer me up - and hopefully my readers - here are some more useful thoughts and quotes on the subject:

•  "...I suspect that the more anxiety with which you approach the project, the less likely you are to get it right. Male and female characters are people before they are gendered. That is, if you write any character with depth, you should be able to write any gender of character with that same depth." (Mette Ivie Harrison)
• Your characters are people first, and genders second (or third, or somewhere further down the list). Rather than asking "How do I write a male character?" you should ask "How do I write this character?"
•  I feel like not only men, but also women should be really offended by this shoe-boxing of male characters. By saying, for example, that male characters shouldn't talk about their feelings, you're also implying that female characters should. As well as being patently wrong, this squashes your scope for characterisation massively. And for people who read too much poorly-characterised fiction, it also makes them feel really awkward about whether or not they 'fit' into their gender, by perpetuating stereotypes that most people aren't going to fill.
• A study by the German Society of Opthalmolgy shows men cry an average of 6-17 times a year. That's anywhere from once everyone couple of months to once every three weeks. I haven't been able to source the study itself, but it apparently combines the results of many studies done before, and leads me to the conclusion that if your novel spans more than two months, it's not only perfectly fine, but statistically probably for your male character to shed some tears.
•  Judging from the people I know, I would say that the boys have no more in common with each other because they are boys than they have in common with the girls. As someone very wise on Nanowrimo said, "if I described their personalities to you, you wouldn't be able to tell what gender they were." (Catorrina, Nanowrimo) Gender is just one aspect of what defines your personality, and there are so many others that you may as well learn how to write the personality as a whole, rather than learning to write a stereotype of the gender, and then having characters deviate in different ways from a perceived 'norm'.
• "As much as sitcoms and romantic comedies try to tell us otherwise, men and women are incredibly similar. We all have “feminine” and “masculine” traits within us." (Drink Me Read Me, Tumblr)
• "everyone's a people" (Catorrina, Nanowrimo)

Women in Fiction

Of late, I have become more aware of the problems of gender imbalances in novels and movies, and more specifically, the way female characters are dealt with when there is only one of them around. Case in point – X-Men: First Class. At the end of the movie, Charles Xavier and Moira (to prove how little of a thing she is, I just had to look her up to find out her name) have a sudden, unexpected romance that takes place over the duration of a single scene. I really felt like this relationship was never, ever developed, and that basically, because Moira was the only girl around - or at least the only romantic option - they felt like they didn’t need to develop a realistic relationship, since her role was clear. The leading man apparently needed a love interest, and so they gave him the shallowest one they could find. For want of a better term, it was Bond-romance, minus the sex-scenes.

I feel that this illustrates the dangers of gender imbalance – because someone is the only woman on screen, no-one feels the need to explore her character, because her character is ‘the woman’. This has always frustrated me about the Smurfs, because all the boys have different personalities and traits, and then there is Smurfette, whose defining trait is that she is a girl. And that works for her, because there are no other girls, so she is sufficiently distinguished by the fact that she is 'girly'. No, being a girl is not a personality trait. (Disclaimer: I have never read or seen the Smurfs. All I know comes from watching trailers, and playing a computer game that we had in primary school. I may be entirely wrong here.)

I don’t think the answer to this problem is necessarily to put more female characters on screen or on the page. Gender imbalanced casts are not actually the cause of the problem, but I think that it can be exacerbated by it. Having several female characters forces you to think about them as something more than just ‘the girl’, and instead to develop them just as you would any other character. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t need multiple female characters just to understand that they need to be defined by more than just their gender.

This rant started because I have been planning my Nano for this year, and am finding it a little lacking on the female-character front. On the one hand, it is a historical-type fantasy, loosely based on the culture of Ancient Rome (I think, maybe) and largely set during a war. The focus is going to be on military and political sorts of things, and obviously, there weren’t many – or any, really – women operating in these spheres in that type of setting. I never felt, for example, The Lord of the Rings lacked women, although from what I can remember, there are only two female characters who fill roles other than love interests.

On the other hand, well, basically everything I have said above about gender-imbalanced casts. As a girl, I feel like I should have a handle on depicting female characters well. Recently, however, I have found myself falling into the damsel-in-distress trap: using a girl, usually abducted by the antagonist, as an instigating plot-device. Both times I’ve done this, the character in question has had traits other than being ‘the girl’ and there have been other female characters around. But it still makes me vaguely uneasy, and similarly, I don’t like the idea of writing a male-dominated novel, even if I am entirely aware of the fact that female characters tend to end up characterised as 'the girl' if there is only one of them around.

What do others think of the potrayal of women in fiction? Is it a good idea to add female characters into a male-dominated novel just to ensure gender balance? Is it always bad to have a girl function as a ‘damsel in distress’? Being a girl who often writes about girls, should I just stop worrying about this and assume I can do it right?