# Female Characters... I just can't...



## PhunkyMunky (Dec 6, 2015)

I'm having the most impossible time attempting to portray female characters as... Not Vanilla. I don't think like a woman. I know how I'd LIKE them to be, but this isn't that sort of story. Or maybe I'm just getting into my own way... Either way it's been a frustrating week attempting to write female characters. How do you at least semi-accurately show female characters? I don't even know why this is so difficult for me... It seems so stupid that I'm having such a hard time with this. I have a wife, for God's sake... LOL Yet I can't seem to write a female character... :upset:


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## Ariel (Dec 6, 2015)

Write them the way you would a man and give them boobs.  Really, women are just like men with different sex characteristics.  We all want the same things--health, security, power, love, and money.


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## Red Sonja (Dec 6, 2015)

If they're already in the story then just write your story out and let a female critique the female characters for you. If you are putting female characters into the story just to have them there and they're not really essential, give those roles to a young guy. So what if your story turns into a sausage party? Lots of good stories are. At least imaginary female characters can't complain about inequality. 

Again: If the female character is essential and she MUST be female, just write your part for her, and find a female (one who will talk to you and give you an honest opinion, if such an entity exists) to critique the character. Or, if you are brave enough, base your female characters on someone you know. Make sure it's someone with NO CHANCE of ever reading your story is my advice! 

Good luck!


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## PhunkyMunky (Dec 6, 2015)

Thanks. I was thinking back a bit and a guy named Jason Halstead, who write a Post Apocalyptic series called "Wanted", portrayed his first female character as a washed up, has been porn star LOL. Not the direction I want to go, but he managed to pull it off and the story was pretty good. I think if he can do it, I can too. Maybe I'm overthinking it. 

The female characters ARE essential to the story, as there is a bit of romance weaved into it. I think I'm just getting in my own way with it maybe, over thinking things.


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## Ariel (Dec 6, 2015)

Something to remember: women are people too.  Our conversations don't always center around men, fashion, or children. Many people have many interests and hobbies.


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## shadowwalker (Dec 6, 2015)

I have to strongly disagree with the "men with boobs" thing. That's the sort of thinking that made me wary of reading books with female protags. 

As to writing women, there I will agree that it's no different from writing men - if you write the _character_, not the gender. I honestly can't write "women"; I can't write "men" either. But I do one hell of a job with Character A and Character B.


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## Ariel (Dec 6, 2015)

That's precisely what I mean, Shadow.  Women are not inherently different from men except for our gender.  The role of Ripley in Alien wasn't written for a woman yet it's iconic and no one can think of anyone but Sigourney Weaver as Ripley.  There may be societal differences in the way a woman or man is expected to behave but not everyone falls into those expectations.  Transplant most women (or men) alive today back to Victorian London and we'd be ill-equipped.


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## PhunkyMunky (Dec 6, 2015)

I just got done hacking out part of a pretty good dialogue by not worrying too much about the gender. Two of the women are a bit "manish" anyway and the other is a "No cussing" sort of softie... It could have been male or female, I just slapped in the female names I'd made for those characters. It's working out pretty well for now. Unlike "The guys", their conversation won't be about boobs or blowing stuff up LOL. But everything else is up and it seems to be working out. 

Here's my example: 

Once everyone had their food and sat down Frankie mentioned around a mouth full of spaghetti “You see that Asian chick! Whooey!”

“Dude! Don’t be spraying your sauce all over me!” Jason said with disgust as he wiped red sauce off his face. 

“Yeah” Gunner nodded. “She’s pretty hot. Probably has someone, and I’m not here for that anyway.” 

“Man, you get a look at those tits! You think they’re fake?”Dusty asked. 

“No, man, I bet they’re real” Jason said as he stuffed afork full of salad in his mouth. 

“Well I don’t give a fuck what you guys do, I’m staying. Hot chicks, awesome food, plenty of shit to shoot or blow up… I’m home!” Frankie nearly shouted. 

“Me too” came two other replies and Gunner shrugged, saying “I’ll stay for a bit anyway. I’ve nowhere else I can be.”

“Mind if we sit?” a deep, rumbling voice asked as the doctor took a seat next to Jason. His voice reminded Gunner of James Earl Jones. 

Aimeesat across from him and Dani next to him. 

“FNG’s! How fun!” Dani said before she dug into her food. 

“Be nice” Aimee told her. She looked at Gunner “So you guys saved that group that came in earlier? 

“Yeah” Gunner said, refusing to meet her gaze. “Just a few guys around, everyone else had moved on I guess…” 

“They took them down like a bunch of fucking ninja’s” Sarah said, sitting next to Aimee. “Not a shot fired until the very end.” 

“Sarah” Aimee said with a slight frown. “No cussing…” 

Sarah grinned with her mouth full of noodles “Sorry”. She then opened her mouth and said “See food!” and laughed at Aimee’s disgust while Dani giggled. 

“Seriously, they were amazing” Sarah said when she’d finally swallowed her food. 

“Not really” Gunner tried to say but Sarah ignored him.

“Gunner and his guys knew exactly how to handle it. I’d been standing there trying to decide how best to take them for an hour when they showed up. Then Gunner says 'Dusty, get high' and off he went. The rest of them rolled those fellows up like a tortilla in short order.”


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## Crowley K. Jarvis (Dec 6, 2015)

Different thought patterns may develop based on the area and way any given person has been raised. Social structures a person has been a part of through their youth have an effect too. Backstory solves this. Education, background, parenting style of whoever her legal guardians were, hobbies, interests... 

How do they feel and think? What kind of personality do they have?

These questions help you write any person in general, because they give you a better idea of how they behave, so you can actually write it!

But saying men and women don't think differently would be ignoring a plethora of studies on the subject... Our brains do develop with certain differences. 

However, every human being develops uniquely, so these differences are usually very subtle, ergo, pretty ignorable for fiction writing. 

The difference is usually just environment. 

A woman raised by a single father on a post-apocalyptic desert island would act much differently than a 'city girl' who went to public school and was raised in comfort, spoiled by doting parents.

Just my thoughts. Oh, that dialogue read pretty good to me. ;}


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## aj47 (Dec 6, 2015)

Think of them as people.


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## PhunkyMunky (Dec 6, 2015)

Thanks  I was hoping it would come off fairly smoothly. It sounded like it when I read it out loud, but I also think the differing personalities sort of show through. 

The trick for me here is to keep it consistent.


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## shadowwalker (Dec 6, 2015)

Crowley K. Jarvis said:


> A woman raised by a single father on a post-apocalyptic desert island would act much differently than a 'city girl' who went to public school and was raised in comfort, spoiled by doting parents.



Precisely. I grew up in a rural town, in a neighborhood of mainly boys, and 1 of the 3 other girls grew up with horses and semis. My mother was, among other things, a grease monkey, and built her own house from scratch. I've worked mostly in manufacturing for the last 45 years. I've been told that my female characters don't sound like "real women" - well, yeah, they do, if you knew the women I have.


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## PhunkyMunky (Dec 7, 2015)

Real women are simply who they are. I've known girly girls who's only worry was whether their hair was good and how popular they were. My wife came from a hard working Blue Collar family that crawled their way up into fairly close to upper middle class. My wife's a worker and can be found sipping a mimosa with a girlfriend at a bridal shower as easily as she can be found digging up a garden, building a new wall, or fixing her car. She's awesome like that. Very independent and girly to boot. 

I've met women who were quite mannish too. Some liked other women, and some liked men... Just like us guys, no two are the same. I think I was just wrapped around trying to figure out how to write them because they do usually think differently often times. Maybe it's more about the individual and the life and experiences they've lived, and less about estrogen and other biological things... But I do think that hormones make some difference. I've never met a man who nested when their wife was pregnant for example, but almost every pregnant woman I've met did so. Rearranging the house, etc.


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## JustRob (Dec 7, 2015)

Hormones influence behaviour but they don't necessarily drive behaviour. That said, there probably is a difference between a genuine male testosterone junkie and a woman behaving like one through the influence of adrenaline, but I don't know the chemistry of that. It's probably true that a woman may choose to do what a man's got to do, but women traditionally are able to change their minds while men seem to find that more difficult.

The only woman that I know well, my angel, is definitely a person in a woman's clothing. When she went to work at a nursing home they assumed that this gentle blue-eyed blonde would give up the job as soon as she got something disgusting under her long fingernails, but they were wrong. When the sister needed someone to help lay out a dead body she didn't hesitate to ask my angel to do it. Our next door neighbour is always impressed by how smartly my angel dresses to do the gardening. She can dig out the most stubborn tree root with her well developed muscles, but not without her makeup on. That's about preserving one's self-image though, not about being feminine. If our neighbour knew that sometimes at night she walks into his garden wearing no makeup and nothing but a dressing gown to break up a cat fight he'd have a heart attack. I say this because he's already had quintuple bypass surgery and is lucky still to be alive, so I hope he never does witness the event. A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do though, same as a man.

I once read a book entitled "The Unfashionable Human Body" about the purpose of clothes. In a way the human body is just that, clothes that aren't always appropriate to the situation and the person.

P.S. 
For anyone curious about that book, here's a reference to it. http://www.diemer.ca/Docs/Diemer-Unfashionable.htm  It's a fascinating read covering the social distinctions between male and female clothes but, far more than that, about the place of the human body itself in society.


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## Kevin (Dec 7, 2015)

How does one write a man? I have no idea.


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## Sam (Dec 7, 2015)

Stop thinking of them in terms of women; start thinking of them in terms of character. 

No two women are alike; no two women think the same. 

You're tying yourself in knots about nothing.


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## The Green Shield (Dec 7, 2015)

amsawtell said:


> Write them the way you would a man and give them boobs.  Really, women are just like men with different sex characteristics.  We all want the same things--health, security, power, love, and money.


Basically this. Not all women are the same, just like not all men are the same. If your female protagonist likes fashion and shopping, that's perfectly fine. If she's the sort that likes boxing, jamming death metal on a guitar and chain smokes until her voice is a throaty gravel, that's just fine as well.

Focus on the personality, the wants and desires; not the private parts. Just know one thing: Unless she were lesbian or bisexual, she's not going to be interested in porking other gals. You'll have to figure out what about men she's attracted to. Again, it can be whatever you want. Maybe she's into his looks, or maybe she likes him because he makes her feel complete, or it gives her that sense of companionship she wants, ect. Or maybe she just wants some of that sweet, sweet man-ass and sexy, SEXY beard. 

It all just depends on what sort of person she is.


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## HunterJonson (Dec 10, 2015)

I guess it all depends on what role does a woman character needs to play in your story. If she has to be flirty, make her like that. If she needs to be cool-minded and tranquil, make us believe she's like that by using appropriate language. And if a female character is just a passing-by one with no importance for the plot, she can be whoever you want. There are "vanilla" women in real life, after all, so there will be no harm made to the credibility.


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## PhunkyMunky (Dec 10, 2015)

That's true. Everyone I pass by on the street, if I don't know them, are vanilla. Just faces. They could all be illusion or robot for all I know. People aren't "real" until you say "Hello!"


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## JustRob (Dec 10, 2015)

I write about office workers. Even acquaintances in an office may seem like little more than robots. It may be some time before one learns much about who they really are. Consequently my characters don't seem that deep, because the environment makes them that way, not that they really are that shallow. That is why I have to portray their thoughts as much as how they behave to show their humanity.

In real life some, if not many, women can be seen to have made some effort about their appearance. Even a man playing his real life role as an office worker can politely enter that world to get beyond the superficial robot for a brief instant, but one has to pick the moment. In the office I have passed remarks such as "You have lipstick on your teeth," and "That's a pretty blouse," the latter to the deputy manager of the office actually, just to register that their efforts do not go unnoticed. I have also used the time-honoured cryptic remark, "I see that Charlie's dead," to a woman whom I've judged would know it. One can see their demeanour change from that of a person, if not a robot, to a woman for an instant and then the mask of the office relationship drops back again, but these almost trivial interactions establish the social gender relationships without breaking the working ones. This is not in any way flirtation but simple acknowledgement. Why does a woman wear lipstick or a pretty blouse anyway? Both in life and a story gender may not be that significant but still figures in the detail.

On the subject of passing honest comments about a woman's appearance, one day I was walking along a wooded path between housing estates behind a young girl and was sincerely disappointed by what she was wearing. She had on a sleeveless top with a single strap at the back running down from the collar to reveal bare shoulders, a very sexy look. Why, oh why then was she wearing a bra with conventional shoulder straps to ruin that look? What image was she trying to project, if she had even considered that? Of course as an old man following a young girl down a wooded path this was not an occasion to pass any comments on the subject. To assess how one writes a female character one must have some idea as to how a woman behaves with various people in various situations, but that is so much a part of life anyway. Often it's just a matter of thinking how you would feel in their place. The mysteries of gender barely come into it, just common sense.


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