I’m happy to welcome author Aida Brassington to our little corner of the blogosphere. She’s here today to talk about the challenges of writing male characters and how research comes into play when it comes to accurately portray men. Please help me give her a warm welcome!
Men communicate differently than women. I know this
doesn’t come as a shock to you, but many writers find it difficult to deal
with. It can be even more obvious when, let’s say, a female writer takes on a
main male character written from his point of view.
Between Season’s protagonist is
Patrick Boyle, a nineteen-year-old man who dies in 1970 and falls in love with
the woman who buys his house forty years later. How do you write a guy in his
late teens (and a ghost, at that) and make it believable? Well, for starters,
you eliminate current slang from his vocabulary and do research on popular
language from the late sixties. You
give him feathered hair.
It’s more than just physical appearance and slang,
though. The key to writing believable male characters when you’re a woman is
understanding how men communicate. In a general way, of course – all men don’t
think or act alike any more than all women think or act alike, but there are
some things that have proven true through clinical study.
