Writing Women as a Man
When I started Girl in Red, I already had Rose worked out. It wasn’t a conscious choice to make her a girl, I just decided to. I’ve always liked the idea of Hermione, even if I don’t like how J.K. Rowling wrote her, and Luna and Rose were similar enough that I figured they’d get along great. So those were three of my main characters, all female. It gave me a lot of experience writing women, something somewhat more challenging considering I am male (Edit: No I'm not, but I've lived the life of a male, so bear with me). I didn’t have trouble with this, but I’ve seen characters clearly written by a specific gender of writer, so I know it’s not easy for everyone.
Something I’ve noticed with other writers, men and women, is that they describe the opposite sex as though the author is checking that person out. Every physical detail at which the author would be staring is described. Not only does this make me uncomfortable to read and write, but it makes the character obviously not the sex they’re supposed to be. Maybe it’s a female character doing this with a female author, but if it’s a heterosexual female character checking out another woman like this, she’s lying to herself.
That’s the biggest gotcha of writing the opposite sex that I’ve seen. The best way to avoid this: write them without considering their sex or gender. This is how we got characters like Nausicaä in Nausciaä of the Valley of the Wind, Toph and Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender, and most of the characters in RWBY, all of which were written primarily by men. They are treated differently than men at times, and occasionally act “girly”, but they’re so busy being awesome the rest of the time that we don’t care. Not only can you get strong female characters like this, but you don’t run the risk of it being obvious that a man wrote it.
I had two advantages that I imagine most male writers don’t have when writing female characters. The first is that my beta reader is female. She could catch anything I did blatantly wrong. The other is that stereotypical gender roles have been turned on their head in my world. My mother is the breadwinner of my house, which is why most of the families that feature in my stories have the mother as the breadwinner.
The quick fix is to not consider gender when writing. The same goes for race as well, although be warned you might still fall into a trap with either. If in doubt, find a woman in your life and ask her to proof-read it for you. It could be a cousin, a sister, your mother (who I’m sure would be happy to talk to you anyway), or a coworker. Remember, this is for your writing; it’s worth the effort.
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