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authors, humor, insanitybytes22, men and women, Twitter, writing
There was a recent twitter feed that totally made me laugh. I was reminded of it when some delightful woman posted a link to this article on facebook, ‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would.”
First let me say I am not a feminist, not a SJW, not the least bit interested in rehashing the gender wars through literature, and not a part of the #OwnVoices movement.
I do however, find our attempts to describe the opposite gender when writing to be hysterically funny. It simply cannot be done. Seriously! I should qualify that, it simply cannot be done in an honest manner that will also be pleasing at the same time. You have to choose between honesty and appealing to your readers. If you’re honest, you’re going to offend them. If you wish to appeal to them, you’re going to have to lie. Yes, lie.
CS Lewis came very close a few times, almost, kind of, but nope. That is not quite a female character, that is CS Lewis’ perception of a female character, one he put a great deal of thought and consideration into, but she has clearly been written by a man.
I used to read cheap detective novels, also known as trashy, and one thing that always made me laugh was the honesty. Guy wasn’t even trying to create female characters, they were incidentals. Stage props. Background noise “…she had eyes and a personality attached to her somewhere, but who cares, that’s not really what I was looking at.”
Now of course at least ten pages would be dedicated to the crime scene alone and most of the rest of the book to how clever and inventive the hero was. But the female characters, well, what you see above is what we shall call, “brutally honest.” Also, the beginning, middle, and end of the character.
I like to read because I like to study how authors perceive things. It is almost far more fascinating to me to study their character development, to peek into their imagination, and to ponder what may have shaped it, rather than to be pulled into the story itself. I am all about the characters.
Men often get a bum rap, the focus is on them, the cultural outrage, the frustration and resentment from women who feel not heard or not represented properly, and this is a big thing today.
Many women writers have the same dilemma however. It can be very hard to create a male protagonist. He is either going to be a hyper masculinzed caricature or come across as a distinct representation of your cat. I kid you not, cat-man is alive and well. I’ve bumped into him in many books. He’s aloof, until he brushes against your leg and lets you pet him, which of course means he needs to be fed…
Women cannot write male protagonists either. If you are of the feminist persuasion he’s going to sound like one of your radical girlfriends, a fact that is going to make you eventually dislike him even more, because as much as you insist you enjoy getting your nails done together, you actually now despise the man. He’s going to need to run off to Europe to go find himself and you will soon be replacing him with a cat.
Or an alien or a dinosaur or a vampire. Seriously, just about anything would be an improvement over what you have just had the free rein to totally create…..in your own image. I kid you not, many feminist writers will create a male character in their own image and then reject him out right.
A more honest portrayal would be like, “he was neither attractive nor unattractive, not particularly intelligent looking either, but he seemed smart enough to have found the doorway into the building. He doesn’t look like he would be of much use for much of anything. Wait…why is this guy even in my story?”
That really is far more honest, a much better representation of how women tend to perceive men. It terribly unfair. I’m so very sorry. Never, ever, have I heard a woman say, “He had eyes and a personality attached to him somewhere, but who cares, that’s not really what I was looking at.”
There is no moral to this story, no deeper tale, beyond the simple fact that life is a whole lot better if you can learn to laugh at the absurdity if it all and to embrace a bit of mystery. I don’t know what was funnier in this thread, the fact that the original author actually believed he had done a good job representing a female protagonist, or the fact that so many took offense.
I’m going to share this with my writing group. All men. All three of us have novels in the works with female protagonists. Oh boy. Or maybe oh girl. No. Make that oh woman. Help!!! I’m in over my head.
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LOL! Well, one key element is to try to avoid perceiving the opposite gender in a way that would benefit us personally. What we want to see is not necessarily who people really are. Men can lighten up on describing all the physical attributes of women……or not. 🙂
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Novels are littered with female characters written my Male writers/authors and TV dramas and soap operas and films to boot. Men can write effective true representative female characters. See my blog for a challenge.
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Your post is spot on, IB. I recall a quote from Steve Martin’s LA Story film that summarizes it quite nicely: “Sitting there at that moment I thought of something else Shakespeare said. He said, “Hey… life is pretty stupid; with lots of hubbub to keep you busy, but really not amounting to much.” Of course I’m paraphrasing: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.””
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LOL! Perfect quote, Rob. I must admit, I laugh at all the sound and fury over the fact that men actually find women attractive. The offense, the outrage, oh my. C’mon people, it’s just basic biology and it’s one of life’s blessings.
Although, “I could read the expiration date on the credit card in her back pocket” was pretty darn funny. Funnier still, that was actually presented as a serious character attribute. 🙂
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It is one of life’s blessings. Hopefully, the madness and righteous indignation will burn out soon and we’ll realize that our civilization depends on men and women finding each other attractive. 😉
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Especially as a writer, I really enjoy the humor and… well….everything in your blog. Thanks.
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Thanks for your kind words and for reading. You are much appreciated yourself. 🙂
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Fun topic. 😆
Paul and Bill gave each other a look of alarm, as though they were on a Paris runway show, wearing white flats and hose, BEFORE Memorial day.
(I suspect a man would describe me mostly by my driving style:
“She turns corners like a person transporting a large stack of dishes, balanced on top of a cat”
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Ha! Very funny! 🙂
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Now I’ll have to read the article and the thread. If I were writing a heroic male protagonist, I suppose he would be real elements of my dad and my hub and other good guys I’ve known. Plenty of good characteristics to draw from there. If I were writing a villain, I’d draw from the smarmy teacher who sexually abused me, and from various other cads I’ve encountered. Neither type would be conjured up from my imagination, he’d be constructed from my life.
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Great points, Julie. Something that is always so hard for me, people tend to be shades of grey rather than just good or bad. So in real life, our heroes have flaws and our bad guys can be likeable enough, at least on the surface. In fact, in the real world, it is often the good guys who society rejects and the total losers who appear to have the world’s favor.
If all the bad guys simply had “cad” tattooed on their forehead, life would be lot easier and we would not have these challenges.
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Lots of bad guys – or, more accurately, dud guys – do have cad tattooed on their foreheads, my daughter is always telling me how she can see the tattoos plain as day and yet her friends marry the guys anyway. So perhaps tattoos aren’t the answer. But I agree, a snake never looks like a snake in the coming, only in the going. Just ask Eve.
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LOL! I have that same discussion myself, sometimes. Can’t you see this guy’s potential? No, no I cannot, but I admire your leap of faith and I’ll be praying for you. 🙂
I have an amazing SIL. My oldest daughter brought him home and we immediately fell in love, so there may be something to this discernment thing. 🙂
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But it never ceases to amaze me that the focus is usually on the bad guy and not the women involved. I believe that there are as many “cad” women out there as there are men.
That being said, my daughter married one of those guys that I felt like, “This is a trainwreck in progress!” from day one.
There are all sorts of people, good and bad of both sexes, but in today’s world, it seems fashionable to blame men for everyone’s problems. I used to toss a lot of blame around, some of it right and some not fair at all. None of that did a thing for me.
I feel like the world is suffering that same malady, throw blame and then be angry because they don’t feel better.
I’m just rambling. I enjoyed your post as always. Sorry if I chased a rabbit far off the trail…lol.
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I enjoy your rambling. 🙂
You make a good point about the world suffering a malady of blame and anger. The problem with blaming others is that it is just like handing all your power away. If someone else is to blame, then you become helpless.
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Oh, I like that…handing all your power away.
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Exactly we all write characters that are influenced by the people around us. If we have strong female characters to draw inspiration from we end up with well rounded believable characters. But the same can be said if we have softer feminine role model. The bad think would be portraying all female characters as being the same. We need to celebrate individuality and diversity of both sexes and everything in between.
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Well said.
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To this day, whenever I see “SJW” I immediately read “Single Jehovah’s Witness”… sigh….
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Ha! Good one. I’ll have to remember that. 🙂
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What a great way to wake up this Sunday morning 😊
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Depends who your reading some authors are excellent at writing male and female characters despite being opposite gender. I can recommend a few if your interested.
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I thoroughly enjoy your cat-man image–so true! J.
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Are you trying to say that I, as a man, cannot write a story about a girl/woman or from a female perspective sufficiently accurately? Or, that you, as a mature woman, cannot write a story about a man? I am sure, if you got to know me well enough, walked in my shoes a while, you’d have a fair shot at the effort.
As for pleasing readers, if I knew more about who I was trying to please, I might try to skew my work to achieve that goal. But, without any knowledge of who may read my creations, I can only write as I feel fit. I write what sounds and feels right, what appeals to me. And, even then, I know I’m going to sound static or dull if every character I create sounds the same. Yet, I struggle, myself, with diversity, because I am most comfortable around my own kind.
So, I generally write about Caucasian characters. I seem to focus on women with light blonde and dark brown hair, with the occasional fiery redhead thrown in the mix. Male protagonists are usually close to “home” (me) while antagonists and the like are a variety of shapes and personalities inspired by people I have met or seen in movies/TV shows. However, I am slowly working on stories and adventures about “African” (brown-skinned) and “Asian” characters. I’ve taken pecks at certain famous faces appearing as everyday passersby.
Most of the detective stories I’ve read focus mainly on the detective and, maybe, a close friend or two. But, even the close friends are shallow characters like cutouts in the foreground. It’s not necessarily that the author is incapable of giving them more depth. It may just be the nature of the story. After all, when I think of detective stories, I hear the detective talking to him/her self most of the time, like a narrator. And, when does the narrator who doubles as a protagonist living inside the heads of others?
I think of the one detective series I’ve read the most and most recently, the Sue Grafton alphabet mysteries. She’s clearly writing about a gal close to herself and turning guys she has both loathed and admired, along with an assortment of catty women and possibly one coworker who dresses like Annie Potts from Designing Women, into other characters. She writes a rather raw, lustful perspective on her protagonist (who obsesses over white wine and QPs from McD’s) without a plate to put it upon, and there are her share of sexual-magnet men, catty older women, young tramps, and lustful lowlifes. I don’t expect or feel deprived in any way by her keeping the secondary characters simple. And, I cannot say she wrote the men like robots or unrealistic jerks. I think she did an adequate job justifying the good and the bad characters…even if her hormones were leaking into much of the content (as I am sure mine would in my single state).
If others are like you and all about the characters, then I think it’s time authors, including myself, started writing more books like that one anthology of poems about the people who all died by some accident or moral failing. Spoon River was it? It was a semi-memorable read from high school that inspired lots of sad poetry and dramatic stories (by me). Maybe we need to write a genre of books into the mix that is a collective of short stories that hone characters over plot. Or, like the oddly maddening series LOST, give a bunch of individual back stories to feed people like you and then somehow muddle through a story that connects them all to reach some generally approvable end. But, at least, the characters had their stories, and they all shared a deadly plane ride.
Isn’t it also possible, and possibly fruitful, that some characters are left shallow or with shorter than short stories to open doors for fans to write fan fiction?
I’m only responding to the first half of this post as others are waiting for me to join them at the moment… So I may have more to say when I return. 😀
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I’m reading some of the Twitter stuff from your link…
I am not sure what can be done about this. Either women want to think of themselves as garbage with feelings that are not properly attended or they expect men to only focus on their physical assets or lack thereof. It’s a bit sexist all around.
The whole matter might have gone without “blowing up” if the original male author in dispute didn’t boast that his writing or the writing of his whole organization was enough to make any women’s movement pointless. That’s the sort of boasting that could make a goddess turn you into a spider.
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That Electric Lit site sounded interesting and almost like my cup of tea til I saw membership came with a fee and an offer for a feminist tote bag. I guess it’s geared towards female authors and impulse reading. I’m not that much of a bookworm and I don’t want that tote. 😛 And, if I had to pay to write here at WordPress, I would think I’d work elsewhere where I’d get paid. Though, they do say they pay their writers.
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LOL! I’m sure you will dearly miss the feminist tote bag. Thanks for your comments, Writingbolt. You’ve made laugh and I like the way your brain works.
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I know, it’s tempting. I mean who can’t benefit from one more tote on the pile of totes they amassed from all those extra-curricular female-energy-driven groups they join and all the animal and handicapped kid charities. And, then, if you’re over 50, well, let’s not leave out AARP.
It’s nice to be appreciated. 🙂 Are you showing me the door?
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Ha! I am not showing you the door at all. I appreciate your visit. It’s nice to meet you and to read your words.
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It was just the way you wrote that last bit. Like…thanks for coming, it was a pleasure. I felt a tad like I was leaving an interview with a talk show host. Past tense matters. 🙂
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