# How Do I Create a Woman's Voice? [Mature]



## PrinzeCharming (Jul 6, 2016)

*How Do I Create a Character's Voice? [Mature]*







"Oh my gosh, how do I even do this? Am I, like, a valley girl or something? Can you read that in the tone I am expressing or do I have to change something? _Ugh_, _whatever_. You guys will never understand any of ... _this_." 

WritingForums watches from afar as PrinzeCharming lifts his hand to showcase his body like a game show model near a brand new car.


In my WIP, I work with two female characters throughout the novel. Logan, my male MC, is dating a girl in his class named Jessica. Since I stumbled upon this comic, I was curious to see how others feel about creating the opposite gender's voice. Are men linear thinkers? Do women talk in circles that end up becoming Venn Diagrams loaded with emotion and feelings? Do men lean closer to discovering how something is done, while women worry about the reasons?

 Since creating my female characters, I have placed more sensitivity to their roles and placed more emotion to what matters the most to them. In intimate scenes, I connect with emotional and intellectual pleasure rather than feeling like a blowup doll. I try to incorporate the close relationships required for my women characters with other peers. 

Do you integrate insecurities with appearance? In general, do we start writing other genders as gender-less people to avoid generalizations or stereotypes? What about cardboard cutouts? Is the general rule of thumb to voice the people as _people _to avoid cardboard cutout characters? 


*Tell me what you think!

*_"It's okay. Keep staring. It's not yours anyway." _


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## Terry D (Jul 6, 2016)

As soon as you start wondering how to make your character sound more female, you've already screwed it up, IMO. That's like trying to make my character sound 'black enough', or 'old enough'. You've already bought into the stereotypes. Write the character. The differentiation you are looking for will come out of your character's voice naturally if you know them well enough.


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## PrinzeCharming (Jul 6, 2016)

Terry D said:


> As soon as you start wondering how to make your character sound more female, you've already screwed it up



That's exactly what I thought after reading the comic. The guy shouldn't have a hard time creating a character. If something sounds insufficient in what it was meant to be, whether trying to become 'enough' of a classification, that's a problem in character development. People are people. Express the characters as you know them, or at least how you want to know them.


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## dale (Jul 6, 2016)

i think too many people today are so concerned about "offending" or "being fashionable" (same difference),
that they force their characters to wear masks. they think...."oh. well, i can't have a female sound like that.
people will think that i'm a sexist, as a writer." or...."oh. i can't have a black guy doing negative things. people
will think i'm a racist, as a writer." and when a writer starts to think like that? the story becomes a lie. 
many of my stories exhibit "sexist" and what some would call "racist" and other negative "ist" qualities to them.
nothing bad. not in my view, anyway. but i had a problem with this on my 1st novel. my wife (ex-wife now) told
me after reading the 1st chapter......"no new york publisher is gonna touch this with a 10 foot pole. you have given
the fetus a soul. you have humanized a fetus and having it take revenge on the parents. you know that isn't going to
go over well with the new york crowd." and well....she was right. i had a new york agent tell me...."this is beautifully
written and a very interesting theme, but due to my personal reservations on the subject matter, i'm going to decline."
ok. wow. but you know what? i wouldn't have changed a thing about it. that was the way the story went, and for me
to have changed or altered it over fashion or "correctness"? sorry. but fuck that. i don't tell lies in my fiction. lol


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## bdcharles (Jul 6, 2016)

I just write what the characters say. They do all the work and I really have very little input into the matter.


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## midnightpoet (Jul 6, 2016)

I agree with Terry, create the character first, don't worry about gender - what they are like, their voice, will depend partly on the story, but people are people.   I've written several female characters, one of my best (it got published) was originally a story about a young boy dealing with a bully.  I changed it to a girl - actually a grandmother relating the story to her grandchild - and it was successful, mainly because I gave her a distinct voice.


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## PrinzeCharming (Jul 6, 2016)

dale said:


> i think too many people today are so concerned about ... masks.



You couldn't have said it any better. Personally, for the record, I have never cross-dressed. I don't know what it's like to, as the comic mentions, wear a wig while writing  a story. I rarely have the moments to argue or question whether or not my characters should say things. "Oh, that's not what girls do." "That's definitely a boy characteristic." Characteristics are shared by all people of all classes. You aren't one thing because you do the other. You're one person sharing the similar interests. That's the most intriguing part about writing. Why does my character have to be a color to be a criminal? When was it okay to slap color on crime? When the story touches gender, feminists are often curious to see how men depict women characters. Why aren't there any strong female roles? Why can't women be the main characters? I know, personally, I thought about this prior to creating my story. Not during the process.


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## dale (Jul 6, 2016)

PrinzeCharming said:


> You couldn't have said it any better. Personally, for the record, I have never cross-dressed.



once on halloween? i wore a nun's habit. that's kind of like cross-dressing, i guess. my wife bought it to wear
for sex, cuz she knew i'd like that. but then i wore it for halloween. i made a damn good looking nun, by the way.


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## Sam (Jul 6, 2016)

Terry said everything that needs to be said. 

The question really should be: How do you create a character's voice?


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## PrinzeCharming (Jul 6, 2016)

Sam said:


> The question really should be: How do you create a character's voice?



Sorry for any inconvenience for the way the original thread was created. I didn't intend anything but the comic itself. I was going off from the comic with both a woman's voice in perspective as well as the mother's voice in question. In addition, I figured it would be interesting to hear anyone respond to writing a character's voice based upon their own mother's voice.


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## Sam (Jul 6, 2016)

You don't have anything to apologise for, Anthony. Just reiterating what Terry said: that getting hung up on how to sound like a man or woman is a mistake.

The better use of one's time is getting the character to sound how you characterised him or her.


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## EmmaSohan (Jul 6, 2016)

I love to write about men and women being different, and about them interacting differently. My last short started with a scene that the judges probably thought was setting, but it was the part of the story I cared about most -- a husband and wife interacting.

And, what is a strong female? A female who acts like a man? Or a female who is strong in a female way? As you might guess, I vote for the latter.



> I ask, "Do you want to talk about anything?"
> 
> "Sure." He's agreeable.
> 
> ...


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## ppsage (Jul 7, 2016)

Treating a character as a woman instead of as Isabella is not only kind of disrespectful; it's also a good way to end up with stereotypes and cliches.


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## JustRob (Jul 7, 2016)

People play many roles in real life. In response to the OP, I was a late arrival in my family, so my mother always seemed old to me. I think I might have modelled my view of women more on my teenage sisters when I was crawling around their ankles at a very early age. It's an interesting view to take on women during one's formative years. Hidden away somewhere in WF is an old photo of one of my sisters wearing a swimsuit in a "playmate" pose and she was definitely that in the innocent sense to me. Probably for that reason I have always seen women as different but as much because of their interesting intellects as their physiques.

How one represents a woman when writing depends on the context and the role that she is currently assuming. To my mind a woman who doesn't take advantage of her effect on men on occasions isn't realising her full potential. Hence my female characters may be flirtatious when it suits them. They may dress provocatively, but to please themselves as much as the men around them. I spent my formative years witnessing two teenage girls discussing at length the clothes that they were making to wear or buying. For one of them that was eventually her life, for she became a ladies' tailor working for a top couturier. 

A conversation between a man and woman may be that or simply one between two people. I have written them both ways and on occasions ambiguously with both interpretations being possible. Are the couple discussing the task in hand or their relationship, or maybe a little of both? Maybe the woman is being totally task-oriented while the man is distracted by their relationship. It is something that a woman just has to put up with. If anything not giving the woman a woman's voice on such an occasion emphasises the man's character. 

Most of my characters have two sides to them, quite possibly in inner conflict. Physical gender is only a small part of the picture and indeed only arises because the language demands that we ascribe it in the pronouns that we use. In some cases that may be the only reason why a character has any defined gender at all, the preoccupation that our language has with it.

Our language developed to serve the needs of society and there are two clear distinctions that society has considered to be important in the past. One is the distinction between men and women, expressed through pronouns. The other is the distinction between events that have happened, are happening and will happen, expressed through the tenses of verbs. For someone like myself writing a time-warped story about people whose genders are seldom that important and events that are not strictly chronological, the language does me no favours but nevertheless I have to work around it. Our language is itself prejudiced in such matters and we have to bear the burden of that, but only so far as is really necessary.

The bottom line. Does it move the story along? When sex in our writing is discussed that issue is invariably raised. Why is gender any different? Some people don't even make the distinction between sex and gender. Perhaps that is literally correct.


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## Aquilo (Jul 7, 2016)

I agree with Terry and Rob: don't go in thinking about gender (Terry), think about the context and how voice changes according to context (Rob). E.g.,

Getting hubby up: "Go on. S'your turn to put the kettle on." Feet on his ass, hands on his shoulders, she pushes hubby off the bed.
                         "Cheers, luv." Hubby lands on all fours.
                         Pulls warm covers over shoulders as she turns over. "Anyone asks, I'll say you combat-rolled out of bed, all Danny-Dyer style, butt nekked and all real sexy-like!"
                          "Thanks."
                         "Welcome."

Getting the kids up: "That's twice now I've called. Next one sees me playing your Xbox tonight, and we're having a movie night: an old movie, one with no colour, sound, or any sign whatsoever to do with Mooshrooms and Minecraft."

Talking to linguistic tutor: "Corpora study of not-negation could help determine if it really is a fictional fallacy that contraction is used for formal contexts over emphasis. Naturally occurring dialogue already supports that theory anyway. Even the royals use contractions."

Talking to publisher. "Cover looks great, but there's just a slight glitch on the author name. C should be D. Would Sue be able to fix that, please?"

Talking to mother-in-law: on the grounds of being done for throttling her, she doesn't.

Talking to mother: on the grounds of being done for 1st degree murder, she doesn't.

Talking to Dad. "Hey, Dad. I got those Game of Gnome gnomes you wanted. You gonna come over for them? I'll throw in a... very bad coffee?"


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## Patrick (Jul 7, 2016)

As has been said, the key is to focus on character and dialogue. When I write my female characters, I hope they aren't like any woman the reader knows, and the same goes for my male characters. These are "Patrick" characters.


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## Ariel (Jul 7, 2016)

Christ, is it too much to just treat your female characters like people?  Not every woman has body issues.  Not every woman is an emotional thinker.   It's fairly insulting that of everything a woman is/does those are the two things you bring up.  Maybe instead of thinking of them as "other" you should think of them as an emotional, thinking being the same way you write a man.

Your character finds out that their father has cancer with six weeks to live--how does it act?  Just a suggestion but think about how you would act.  How would you feel?  Now think about your character--how would your character handle that emotion?  Notice how there isn't gender in any of those questions?


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## Tettsuo (Jul 7, 2016)

amsawtell said:


> Christ, is it too much to just treat your female characters like people?  Not every woman has body issues.  Not every woman is an emotional thinker.   It's fairly insulting that of everything a woman is/does those are the two things you bring up.  Maybe instead of thinking of them as "other" you should think of them as an emotional, thinking being the same way you write a man.
> 
> Your character finds out that their father has cancer with six weeks to live--how does it act?  Just a suggestion but think about how you would act.  How would you feel?  Now think about your character--how would your character handle that emotion?  Notice how there isn't gender in any of those questions?


I don't agree that you should write women and men exactly the same.  Women and men are treated quite differently socially and so how they behave in social interactions would be very different.

IMO, women are much more free to express their emotions.  Men have serious stigmas attached to any behavior seen as "feminine".  Women are far more aware of the dangers of certain situations (like walking alone through a dark parking lot or being in a room alone with a bunch of dudes) than men are.  There are a few more differences and all of them effect female behavior.  Just being generally weaker physically than men changes how women act.

I say write your story and have a woman or two give it the once over, focusing on how the women in your story act and if it's "normal".


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## Ariel (Jul 7, 2016)

I have one famous example for you: Ripley from the Alien franchise. The original character was meant to be male.  Instead of worrying about whether the character should act more or less socially female they wrote a believable character.


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## PrinzeCharming (Jul 7, 2016)

I find it intriguing that animation has always used female voices to act for male roles. 

1. Bobby Hill 
2. Bart Simpson 
3. Little Rascals
4. Phil Deville 
5. Ash Ketchum
6. Tommy Pickles
7. Jimmy Neutron 
8. Goku
9. Naruto
10. Woody Woodpecker
11. Dexter McPherson
12. Irwin 
13. Huey Freeman
14. Trunks
15. Martin Prince
16. Timmy Turner


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## Patrick (Jul 7, 2016)

amsawtell said:


> Christ, is it too much to just treat your female characters like people?  Not every woman has body issues.  Not every woman is an emotional thinker.   It's fairly insulting that of everything a woman is/does those are the two things you bring up.  Maybe instead of thinking of them as "other" you should think of them as an emotional, thinking being the same way you write a man.
> 
> Your character finds out that their father has cancer with six weeks to live--how does it act?  Just a suggestion but think about how you would act.  How would you feel?  Now think about your character--how would your character handle that emotion?  Notice how there isn't gender in any of those questions?



I agree with you. The female characters I write are all very different to one another, and I am as interested in at least one that I am currently writing as I am in my male protagonist, and I have another two who are less surprising but very interesting characters for me to work with. But that's just it. They aren't there to be the novelty women in a piece of fiction written by a male; they're there on merit.


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## Ariel (Jul 7, 2016)

That's just the thing--women are people just like men, we should be written as people. You do that and your female characters will be diverse and interesting without you jumping through all of those petty hoops. Yes, women have concerns that most men don't have to deal with but anything that can happen to a woman can happen to a man (and vice versa)


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## Sam (Jul 7, 2016)

amsawtell said:


> That's just the thing--women are people just like men, we should be written as people. You do that and your female characters will be diverse and interesting without you jumping through all of those petty hoops. Yes, women have concerns that most men don't have to deal with but anything that can happen to a woman can happen to a man (and vice versa)



Let's not go totally overboard here. 

If women were just like men, they would be _men. _And, no, not everything that can happen to a man can happen to a woman (or vice versa). A woman can't get kicked in the balls, and a man can't get pregnant, plus a dozen other things that differentiate a man from a woman. 

But none of that is even relevant to this discussion. Because it doesn't matter one iota what a man or a woman would say, think, or do in any given situation. The only thing that matters is what the _character _would say, think, or do. There's nothing to be gained by asking, "What would a man/woman do in this situation?", because you might as well ask: "What would a fire-breathing, twenty-foot-tall scorpion do in this situation?" 

Whatever the hell you want it to do! You created it. You, and you alone, decide whether it will terrorise the local populous, or whether it will use its fire-breathing powers for good.


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## Patrick (Jul 7, 2016)

Sam said:


> Let's not go totally overboard here.
> 
> If women were just like men, they would be _men. _And, no, not everything that can happen to a man can happen to a woman (or vice versa). A woman can't get kicked in the balls, and a man can't get pregnant, plus a dozen other things that differentiate a man from a woman.
> 
> ...



Yes, and that's because asking what a man or a woman would do in a certain situation is just simply too vague and abstract. For the purposes of the novel, one has to ask what Jim or Jenny would do. Characters have their own fragrance, and the skill lies in capturing that on the page. The differences between men and women will simply present themselves given the context, so one actually learns what it is to be Jim or Jenny opposed to a man or a woman. Jim and Jenny are people, while the man and the woman are nameless, faceless abstracts that don't give us a lens through which to explore aspects of masculinity and femininity. Herein lies the difference.


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## EmmaSohan (Jul 7, 2016)

I could just say my character is 80-year-old female, and then write the character the same way I would write a 20-year-old male. Does anyone really want that?

I could drag out the well-known cliches and stereotypes and exaggerate them. I'm guessing no one wants that either.

And once you've eliminated those, what's left? How do we create characters who might be male, female, old, young, principals, doctors, etc.?

That's a real question, I don't know how to describe it. There's no one sentence that makes my character sound like an 80-year-old female. But I don't think there's any sentences that let the reader forget, either. Obviously, not all doctors are the same. But . . . there's kind of a doctor personality, especially for interacting with patients.


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## Patrick (Jul 7, 2016)

EmmaSohan said:


> I could just say my character is 80-year-old female, and then write the character the same way I would write a 20-year-old male. Does anyone really want that?
> 
> I could drag out the well-known cliches and stereotypes and exaggerate them. I'm guessing no one wants that either.
> 
> ...



Yes, it's called a professional one.


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## JustRob (Jul 8, 2016)

Somehow I think there's a well-known piece of graffiti that's as relevant here as anything else. It was allegedly the line

I like grils girls

under which had been written in another hand

What about us grils?

Yes, the whole character matters more than any specific aspect of it, such as whether it's a man, woman or gril.

A friend of ours painted her entire bedroom green, even the ceiling. You couldn't tell that the ceiling was green though because with all the light in the room being tinged with green it would have looked green even if it had been white.  The contrasts between characters in a story have more impact than the individual characters alone. That is why how a character is presented is as much about the context as about any absolute characteristic of them.

There is a scene in a later part of my novel not yet circulated where a young man is in tears over the possible loss of his recently acquired girlfriend and is comforted by his former girlfriend who herself gave him up to marry another, possibly more macho, man who had consoled her when she was herself feeling down. In a later novel it is the reputedly macho man who is feeling lost and the whole situation is reversed with her consoling him with the allegedly lesser young man, now her husband, looking on. It is all about context. Each character assumes the role that they have to when they have to and there is no saying how they might behave in a specific situation. 

I refer to my wife as my angel, but she can be a veritable demon to anyone, hopefully someone other than me, who crosses her. These tend to be presumptuous men who make false assumptions about the stereotypical macho man / dizzy blonde relationship. Not a mistake to make, with her or in one's writing of female characters. This might imply that I am the underdog in our relationship, but again that is stereotypical thinking. In fact we both have the star sign Scorpio and regardless of the real significance of such things we do live up to the reputation of such couples. So, maybe one should consider a character's star sign as being as relevant as their gender. The main character in my novel is of course a Scorpio as indicated in chapter two.


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## shivanib (Jul 8, 2016)

tl;dr: Act it out in your head before you put words to paper.

It's funny, even I, as a woman, have trouble writing in a woman's voice.

I think the problem at hand has to do more with the character rather than gender. I personally talk differently than, let's say my mother . (And by the way, I thought the comic was hilarious.)

So instead of trying to think in binary of what a man might say vs. a woman or a black person might say vs. an asian person, I would imagine the character as a whole (is she old/young, what's her personality like, what's her upbringing like, what environment is she in, etc). And then just act it out in your head...almost like a movie scene. What is she naturally doing/saying based on how you created the world/environment/rules? Is there an accent? How is she delivering her words? Is there body language? And as a test, ask yourself, does it feel/sound natural? I think that might be more helpful in crafting any character's voice than a general rule of thumb around how to create a voice.

Does that make sense?


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## Annoying kid (Jul 8, 2016)

People keep getting in the way of their own characters. Get out of the way of your characters. Let the character write itself. This overthinking, this idea that there's a right way to write men or women. It's sensationalism is what it is.


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## dale (Jul 8, 2016)

i think we as men should really love and cherish writing our female characters. because
if you think about it? it's really the only time we can ever get away with telling a woman exactly
what to think and say and they actually listen to us.


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## Mutimir (Jul 8, 2016)

The biological clock...think about that for like 5 minutes. That's female voice/thought.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 9, 2016)

Everything effects how a character acts, behaves and responses to their environment.  the sex of a character is not some minor thing that doesn't really have an impact.  Sex is a MAJOR player in how a person behaves, UNLESS you create a world or environment where sex isn't a factor.

Gender roles are not minor.  If a character ignores gender roles and social norms, there has to be a reason.


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## Annoying kid (Jul 15, 2016)

> Everything effects how a character acts, behaves and responses to their  environment.  the sex of a character is not some minor thing that  doesn't really have an impact.
> Sex is a MAJOR player in how a person  behaves, UNLESS you create a world or environment where sex isn't a  factor.



That's a false dichotomy. Even if sex is a factor in the role, there will always be some who don't internalize stereotypical gender roles or have a sex drive that would impact behaviour, so one doesn't need to have sexless worlds for them to exist. Because they do exist.


> Gender roles are not minor.  If a character ignores gender roles and social norms, there has to be a reason.



They're minor for some people.
There's a reason for everything as everything has a cause. What people mean by "reason" in these instances is typically a unique or compelling enough reason. When really a character can defy gender roles because they want to or they never internalized it to begin with. A more complex reason is entirely optional.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 15, 2016)

Annoying kid said:


> That's a false dichotomy. Even if sex is a factor in the role, there will always be some who don't internalize stereotypical gender roles or have a sex drive that would impact behaviour, so one doesn't need to have sexless worlds for them to exist. Because they do exist.


I'm addressing the effect a person's sex has on how they engage with the world and how their environment engages them.  It's often very different between the sexes.



> They're minor for some people.
> There's a reason for everything as everything has a cause. What people mean by "reason" in these instances is typically a unique or compelling enough reason. When really a character can defy gender roles because they want to or they never internalized it to begin with. A more complex reason is entirely optional.


No.  Gender roles are NEVER minor.  How a person responses to external influences absolutely impacts how they behavior and engage with the world around them.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 15, 2016)

[video=youtube;b1XGPvbWn0A]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A[/video]

Men never have to experience this.  The lives of women are absolutely different, so how they behavior and engage with their environment will be different because the environment engages with them differently.  To not reflect the differences will make your characters read untrue or flat.  Of course, you can create an environment where occurrences like what's represented in the video doesn't happen, you'll have to explain why.


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## Sam (Jul 15, 2016)

Men never have to experience what -- people saying hello to them on the street?

And how exactly do you know what men do and do not have to experience? Are you in contact with every single one of them?


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## Tettsuo (Jul 15, 2016)

Is that a serious question?  I can't imagine it is.


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## Sam (Jul 15, 2016)

Tettsuo said:


> Is that a serious question?  I can't imagine it is.



What do you think? 

Are you going to try to tell me that that's catcalling? The majority of things said to that woman were, "Hi, how are you?" My goodness, she must have been traumatised! How dare anyone say hello to her! 

Here's some experience for you: 70% of all homicides last year involved male victims. So when I walk down the streets, I'm happy if the only thing someone says to me is "how are you doing?"


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## Patrick (Jul 15, 2016)

Tettsuo said:


> Of course, you can create an environment where occurrences like what's represented in the video doesn't happen, you'll have to explain why.



No, I won't. Believe it or not, this doesn't happen very often in the polite part of England in which I live. Nothing of the sort has to be explained in fiction. What you have in that video is a snapshot of one particular culture and has much to do with race and class. Whether this happens in your own fiction or not is entirely up to the author and the the setting of their fiction.

It is frightening behaviour, particularly the guy who decides to walk alongside her for five minutes, and the reason I strongly disagree with the "virtue" of multiculturalism, but doesn't it make you stop to think there must be women who enjoy that kind of attention; if they weren't getting a response from behaving that way, then surely they'd stop. So you'd need to include the sort of women who respond favourably and hook up with men like that, if you were to follow your own advice. Simply put, these men don't care about a bit of consternation and rejection if they're getting some skirt along the way. Those men are harassing women, for sure, but what is harassment to one is a compliment to another, and it's the latter those men are trying to find. If it didn't work, they'd have to change their approach because the goal for the vast majority of those men isn't harassment but sex. It's very simple.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 15, 2016)

Sam said:


> What do you think?
> 
> Are you going to try to tell me that that's catcalling? The majority of things said to that woman were, "Hi, how are you?" My goodness, she must have been traumatised! How dare anyone say hello to her!
> 
> Here's some experience for you: 70% of all homicides last year involved male victims. So when I walk down the streets, I'm happy if the only thing someone says to me is "how are you doing?"


What are you talking about?  Isn't this a discussion about writing a woman's voice?  I'm simply pointing out that men do not receive that much attention on the street.  Are you saying men receive the same amount of attention?  If are you, you must be  Brad Pitt or something because the VAST MAJORITY of men don't get that much scrutiny.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 15, 2016)

Patrick said:


> No, I won't. Believe it or not, this doesn't happen very often in the polite part of England in which I live. Nothing of the sort has to be explained in fiction. What you have in that video is a snapshot of one particular culture and has much to do with race and class. Whether this happens in your own fiction or not is entirely up to the author and the the setting of their fiction.


Explained as in the story is written to reflect your constructed society by putting on display the pressures or lack thereof in the characters actions.  I personally never explain (as in writing it out) any kind of social differences... I show it (also a way of explaining).



> It is frightening behaviour, particularly the guy who decides to walk alongside her for five minutes, and the reason I strongly disagree with the "virtue" of multiculturalism, but doesn't it make you stop to think there must be women who enjoy that kind of attention; if they weren't getting a response from behaving that way, then surely they'd stop. So you'd need to include the sort of women who respond favourably and hook up with men like that, if you were to follow your own advice. Simply put, these men don't care about a bit of consternation and rejection if they're getting some skirt along the way. Those men are harassing women, for sure, but what is harassment to one is a compliment to another, and it's the latter those men are trying to find. If it didn't work, they'd have to change their approach because the goal for the vast majority of those men isn't harassment but sex. It's very simple.


Are you being purposefully obtuse?  I don't mean that in an insulting way, but come on, women deal with this kind of behavior on a daily basis.  Do you not agree that for a group of people to experience this as a social norm it would make their behavior different than those that don't experience it?

A gorgeous man's experience will be markedly different than the experience of an ugly man.  Do you not agree with this?


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## Patrick (Jul 15, 2016)

Tettsuo said:


> Are you being purposefully obtuse?  I don't mean that in an insulting way, but come on, women deal with this kind of behavior on a daily basis.  Do you not agree that for a group of people to experience this as a social norm it would make their behavior different than those that don't experience it?
> 
> A gorgeous man's experience will be markedly different than the experience of an ugly man.  Do you not agree with this?



Obtuse, lol. I understand your point perfectly well. The point is, in some cultures, some women experience this kind of behaviour and their reactions to it vary. An author doesn't have to include these situations in his/her fiction, and he/she doesn't have to explain his/her choices to do so or not. As far as the behaviour of the woman is concerned, you have to know your character, as has been said all along, taking into account as many influences on them as you can.

A gorgeous man's experience will be different to an ugly man's; he'll have an extra few minutes of attention to prove he has a wallet with something in it, a car, and somewhere respectable to sleep.


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## JustRob (Jul 15, 2016)

Patrick said:


> No, I won't. Believe it or not, this doesn't happen very often in the polite part of England in which I live. Nothing of the sort has to be explained in fiction. What you have in that video is a snapshot of one particular culture and has much to do with race and class. Whether this happens in your own fiction or not is entirely up to the author and the the setting of their fiction.



I concur. Perhaps we British are better at compartmentalising our mental activity and hence our behaviour, or perhaps some cultures are more sexually deprived and need to compensate. My angel, being a fair-skinned blue-eyed blonde, had particular trouble when we had a holiday in Tunisia many years ago. It was most probably because she was out of the ordinary in that environment. I dread to think what that implies about the reactions in that video and how they might reflect on the average American woman. 

I worked in the I.T. department of a large company, a place where the real world and the virtual world that we have here sit side by side. Gender was not relevant to what we did there. Minds met directly regardless of their physical locations within bodies. Such environments are not at all unusual.

We have just acquired our second female Prime Minister because she is considered by her peers to be the best person for the job. Whatever opinions people had of our first such, they didn't arise as a result of her gender. Our new Prime Minister is a feminist, but where was that portrayed in her "voice" when she addressed us for the first time as PM? Character and role are different things.


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## Annoying kid (Jul 15, 2016)

Tettsuo said:


> I'm addressing the effect a person's sex has on how they engage with the world and how their environment engages them.  It's often very different between the sexes.
> 
> Depends on the activity, the context. Most activities require non gendered responses. I think the issue here is that the vast majority of genderless responses are things people take for granted. There are undue focuses on the differences between men and women because  that's more sensational.
> 
> ...


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## EmmaSohan (Jul 15, 2016)

The bad guy has taken a hostage, and the good guy is trying to save her.

Does the good guy have to be a guy? No, not really. Female might even work better.

Does the bad guy have to be a guy. Of course not, the character could . . . um, wait a second . . . a female might be a problem. You could try writing a female, but you would have to work harder to make that work.

Does the hostage have to be a female? Well, actually, female is a really good choice.

I guess, I am trying to say we writers live in a world where gender matters. But we can ignore it too. I am reading a book where there is no noticeable difference between the male lead and the female lead. I think the author is not good at characters. But it can still be a good action book, right?


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## dale (Jul 16, 2016)

i think we'd all just get along better if we came to the realization that men are dominant to women. or maybe you wouldn't
get along better....but i would. i could probably sustain a relationship on those terms.


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## Deleted member 56686 (Jul 16, 2016)

I wouldn't say that around too many women, Dale, you might not survive. :lol:

I wouldn't worry about gender so much as to trying to get in the head of the character you're portraying. I mean we're all the same and yet each person is different in terms of personality. I don't think gender plays into it as much as to what makes the character tick.


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## Annoying kid (Jul 16, 2016)

dale said:


> i think we'd all just get along better if we came to the realization that men are dominant to women. or maybe you wouldn't
> get along better....but i would. i could probably sustain a relationship on those terms.



Even the geekiest man likes to feel like the most amazingly skilled, beautiful, and clever and commanding alpha female would submit to him if he actually existed in universe. It's similar to the female fantasy, that the badass alpha male would terrify everyone else, but would be soft hearted and kind to her. That's why I was sure to include a male character who acts as a male audience power fantasy, who can on aggregate dominate the seemingly indomitable female main character. Simply making him the father, elder brother, or even romantic partner, it allows for the female char to be dominant in the story without being seen as a bitch or a manhater or a mary sue, sjw propaganda, or whatever word men reflexively call female characters who never submit to anyone, and thus emasculate.


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## Scizologic (Jul 22, 2016)

Listen to them when there talking to each other.


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## Rookish (Jul 24, 2016)

This thread is an interesting study of the human condition.

The fact of the matter is, writing does not need to represent reality. In fact, hyper-realistic writing may just come off as boredom incarnate. Each writer has a different voice and therefore their characters are bound to adhere more to the wishes of the writer than factors such as sex, gender, race or other biological and cultural parameters.

So the question should not be "How to create a female/Egyptian/transgender/sentient cat voice, it should rather be "How do I, as the writer, view males/Russians/bronies/the middle class?" 

Once you have an understanding of your own view of a type of character, you can either represent that in your writing or alter it to fit the needs of the story.

Who cares what the average human talks like? The average female or male voice would be a garbled mess of Mandarin, English and Hindustani.  Stop trying to define your characters by how a forum, or a culture or a society view them...write your characters as you view them, unless you are specifically writing from a new perspective.

If you are writing from, say, the viewpoint of a Russian mother, he best advice I can give is to research. Watch videos of humans in their(unstaged) habitats, read books written by or of Russian mothers etc. etc.


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## Annoying kid (Jul 25, 2016)

Calling a female character a "man in a wig", is as bigoted as calling a black character a "coconut".


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