Writing stuff

[shadesong]

Noticed something funny today... yendi is writing first-person from the perspective of a female character. I'm doing third-person with shifting focii, but *most* of my characters are male.

Just thought that was interesting. For those of you who write: do you tend to focus more on your gender, or on the opposite gender?

So I finished issue #2 last night. Issue #1 focuses on Shawn - his arrival in the city, meeting people, setting the scene for some later stuff. Issue #2 is the council meeting wherein it is decided that Tessa and her crew will be sent to look for Julia, and the "explosion" referred to in the ashcan is explained; the meeting is followed by some chatting amongst characters wherein we find out what exactly the purges were. I think this issue is way exposition-heavy, but yendi says I've made it work. Issue #2 finishes with a few-page intro of Katrianna, Ani, and Trey. Which is the part the squicked me last night - writing Trey does icky things to my tummy. He's Not a Nice Guy. As a matter of fact, I give everyone permission right now to hate Trey.

I've already begun Issue #3, which starts out on a more fun note (which I think is needed after the goosebumpy end of issue #2).

And that is where I am. :)

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Well, rosalynde is female, but her ficton has some males as well, into whose heads I occasionally crawl...

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

I tend to write my opposite gender. In fact, I tend to roleplay female characters, too.

[ga-sunshine.livejournal.com]

I have a friend (male) who will ONLY play female characters because he said it causes him to be more "real" with the character; he is less himself and doesn't fall back on his own personality this way. I think it's pretty cool because I have seen too many guys play female characters in really bad bad ways!

Re:

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

It's not that way with me. It's just that I have female aspects of my personality that I sometimes express in roleplaying games. In an RPG, or a MU*, I always play some part of who I am. I'm told my characters tend to be rather....unique.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

I was wondering what gender you were! :)

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

Yes, my flesh is male. (smile)

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Oooh, a picture and everything. :)

I currently have no photo icons (well, none of my face), but the default icon really does look veryvery much like me.

[deza.livejournal.com]

I tried writing first person male once, and I was pretty ahppy with the result. Unfortunately, I was also required to read the work in a jr high class, and as soon as I got to the steamy bits (reproduced from memory below), the snickers and jokes started flying. I haven't even tried writing from a male perspective since.


I could hear her breathing in the dark. I walked towards her, and felt her hands on the shoulders of my jacket. I put my arms around her. She was wearing a fur coat. Her mouth was close to my ear. She barked.

"Down, dammit, down!" I said.

Collies. Why is it always collies?

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

*giggle* Too cute. :)

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

For most writers, their characters are based on themselves. That's true for me, at least, and so my main characters always begin as male.

But then I ponder whether the character or the story would be more interesting as a female. If so, I'll change it.

On the other hand, it can be too interesting for the character to be female, too. If the femaleness of a character in a given situation would be so unusual as to distract from the story, then it will stay male.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

They *always* begin as male and sometimes switch? Interesting!

Yeah, my characters are all based on bits of me - but, being raised by men and always being around men, I tend to think like a guy (and give compliments like one - ask morenasangre!). Which may be why I write more male characters than female.

[gev.livejournal.com]

Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: Easy. I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

Ah! See, I was raised mostly by women. I never really had good male role models growing up. My mother tells me that when I was really young I used to call my underwear panties. She had to correct me. I was never very fond of males.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Heh. Never said I had *good* male role models... *wry grin*

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

Actually, very, very FEW of my characters have ever been based on myself. Comes of starting out writing fanfic: the characters are already there, and you have to learn to be true to *them*. I did write an original female character for a fanfic once that was based on my foster-sisters, but I never really finished that one, so never posted it. (It's available on request; it's interesting reading even though there are pieces missing.)

As for my original characters, neither David nor Larian bear any resemblance to myself that I've noticed.

[auryn29a.livejournal.com]

hmm. That's probably why I have trouble writing fanfic. I'm always terrified I'm not being true to the character.

[two-star.livejournal.com]

The PC of my IF WIP is of a neutral gender, although recently male. (In the the PC's race it is possible to change over time, with volition, pheromones, and herbal supplements all playing a role in determining what gender one becomes.) I started out wanting the PC to be just gender-unspecified, and leave it to the player to fill in the blanks, but I decided that I wanted to put in more detail about the character and eir background than I could if I were to do so. But by that time the character already felt neither male nor female, so I had to design a whole race around what that meant and how that would work. To make things vastly simpler from an implementation perspective, I needed gender changes to occur on a much longer timescale than the length of the game.

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

Since I mostly write slash, and even my original fiction is m/m homoerotica, I perforce am writing in the heads of males most of the time.

[edie22.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm with iroshi, I basically have only written fanfic, so the characters are already there. I write almost exclusively male characters, but I have done a few things with the female ones. Like right now, I'm writing something from Martha Kent's perspective, and I wrote one thing from Chloe's, but almost everything else has been from Clark or Lex.

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

Gender is highly overrated.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Brat. :P

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I focus on males. Getting female characters in my roleplay, and thus my writing is a challenge for me. I tend to give myself a crutch and put in non-human females. Who can say how an elf female would think or act? if I do a human female and she comes out subtly wrong, you know it, because you know how human females act. Maybe she's quirky, but I don't want quirky unless I intended it. But in an elf or a halfling or a demon, it feels like the offness doesn't show because you expect the character to be a little different.

Guys

[songwind.livejournal.com]

My POV characters are almost exclusively male. There's a very simple and depressing explanation for this.

I'm a misogynist of sorts. Not a violent misogynist, or a male supremacist. I just dislike most women. I find that the older the average women is that I have to deal with, the less true this is however; I suppose that means in reality I don't like girls. So, rather than write a long string of characters that are either 1) all like the small subcategory of women I mostly *do* like or 2) all possessed of the sort of character traits I have a tendency to expect from women, I find it easier to write the POV and thought processes of men and just the behavior of women. I still TRY to write women or play women NPCs during gaming, but so far the results are spotty. But getting better.

Re: Guys

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Heh. This is going to sound even worse coming from me, but, um, me too. I have very few female friends, and I just tend not to like women in general (note to women on my friends list - you, I like. Don't worry.) Probably something to do with the type of male role models I had as a kid and the complete lack of strong female role models...

Re: Guys

[songwind.livejournal.com]

For me, it was a combination of things. In late high school days, through the first couple of years out of college, I was that guy that all the women felt perfectly comfortable talking to as if I weren't a guy. This was interesting in some ways, frustrating in others (like when the person talking to me is someone I want to be with, and I get to hear all the reasons it won't happen), and ultimately damaging.

The experience caused me to expect women to be catty, two-faced, shallow, self-deluded and unwilling to take responsibility. Concurrent with this I had a string of relationships with women whose actions bore out the impression the women who were talking to me were making. Of course, the fact that the women I was dating stopped telling me anything while we were dating didn't help either :)

As I said, as life goes on, this has improved. I think that partly it's a maturity factor. Another factor is that I have become more selective of my companions as I got older, so the women I spend a lot of time around now are a lot further from what I perceive to be the norm for women than the ones in college. They are also more like, like you, to say to me, "Yeah, I don't like women either". I think it's a combination of the two. For a while I had decided it was just a maturity thing - but every time I come to that conclusion I go to a con or some other event with a larger sample of women, spend some time watching and listening, and go back to my original analysis. :)

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

A lot of my first person pieces are male narrators, but they're A)all Church of Chain and Roses stories, and B)apparently not very convincing as guys. It's apparently what comes of making non-macho guys. I'll have to have him scratch himself and spit.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'll have to ask around to make sure my male characters are believable, though no one yet has said they aren't...

[phantom_wolfboy]

Hmmm. First-person perspective stories are always male, or almost always. Third person-perspective can be either, or both.

I don't think I have a preference. No one has ever complained about my female characters being unrealistic, and in fact I've had a compliment or two.

[eilonwy.livejournal.com]

I've almost always written in the third person pov from a female persepective... I'm branching out right now, with a first person (female) pov in what will, I hope, become a short story of the horror persuasion, and I'm writing a switching third person pov right now, in which there are three male characters. I'm worried. I've never had a lot of males in my life (other than my father and family members.) My friends are nearly all female... so I don't know if I can crawl into these characters' heads. Still, I'm giving it a go...