You might want to watch and read more female mains
Is that a conscious tendency? Or do you unconsciously do it and realize what happened later on or once someone pointed it out to you?
I tend to make characters very different from myself. Maybe characters and I share some values, but our personalities are quite different and if we met, we won’t get along all that well.
The one thing I did come up with is that we find the opposite much more fascinating and intriguing, and the familiar to be too bland. We don’t want to explore the thoughts and feelings of some woman character that we are too familiar with and deal with every single day. We want escapism to such a degree that we even want to write characters that are very different from us. Similar or familiar is bland.
Maybe. I’m not saying women are bland. But writing about them feels bland to us. We want to be excited when writing, and we want to escape the real world as much as we do when reading.
Thoughts?
I don’t think that’s it. At least for me. A lot of books I read, a lot of movies I watch have female mains. But when it comes to me writing them, I don’t
Some recent female main stories I’ve read.
Skyhunter by Marie Lu
Orphans of the Tide trilogy by Struan Murray
Sadie by Courtney Summers
Markswoman by Rati Merohta (can never remember how to spell her name)
Even when Skyhunter blew me away with the main character, I didn’t feel like I could write something like that. But not because I felt discouraged. More like “Leave it to the pros”.
Well I can’t force you to do something you don’t want to do.
Not about not wanting to do it. I’m already doing it
That’s interesting! I never thought of it that way
I think I relate to that.
maybe. idk.
I watch movies with female MCs all the time, but I think I rarely read books like that. At the top of my head, I can think of one book I recently read with a female lead that I actually enjoyed reading.
That is not good. Some of my favorite female characters all come from anime, too.
Like who?
Albedo
Togo
The entire cast of Lucky Star
Did you really say “Lucky Star”? LOL!
It is full of vibrant personalities
Interesting. LOL!
I relate a lot. Especially back then, most of my characters were guys, and all my main characters were guys. So to counter that, I wrote one book that had a female main character, written in first person too (all my stories were in third person prior to that).
Now I have more female characters than before, but my stories still tend to be male-dominated.
I mean, I’ve been surrounded by more guys than girls since kindergarten, so I guess it partly explains why? I’ve, uh, also had much more positive experiences with guys and they made up most of my friends whereas I’ve had more bad experiences with girls, so maybe that’s why my mind prefers male characters.
I also act more boyish than other girls (this is what people irl have told me) so…
Yeah
What was that like after having written so many male characters?
It came naturally to me too XD
I personally write characters that come to me naturally, and the main character for that book naturally appeared in my mind as a girl. I was like, “Okay, time to write a female main character for once.” it just so happens that male characters tend to pop in my head more often than female characters
Your brain was ready. The time had come. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things!”
Same here. The only time I don’t have a male character is when one of my supporting characters who is female says, “hey, how about a story about me?” But they’re not a character from scratch. I haven’t written a female character from scratch in a while The last time I did, it didn’t come out right and I’m not satisfied