Can a Man Write a Good Female Character?

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September 30, 2014 by JImbo

I know a lot of you are writers out there and all are readers (unless you just come for the pretty pictures.) Dave over at “Dave’s Corner of the Universe” asks if authors can write outside their experience. (Ex. Can a man write a good character?)
I can see both sides of it.
Yes you can tell when people get out of their depth and talk on things they have no clue about. Sometimes they shoe horn too much into a character. I still refuse to believe a goblin would have a huge English vocabulary living in a cave.

Tgen again, no sci Fi author has been to space or time travelled that we know of. So, how can they write about that? Tom Clancy has no military background but he does excellent in depth background work before he writes his military techno thrillers.

What do you think? Writers and readers.. Does it matter if the author is or isn’t the same race,sex,age,etc as the characters? Is it a big problem? Or more an issue of writer quality?

Dave's Corner of the Universe

Last week due to other people’s work schedules and illness, Uncle Dave was in charge of homing schooling my niece Mona. That meant Dr. Who episodes for science class ice cream with lunch and the writing assignment was a book report on the comic book Lumber Janes. Math was only a fifteen minute exercises on the computer but literature was an hour discussion on in media res, character, and setting.

We talked about whether or not gender was important in a story? I asked her if the Harry Potter stories would have been different if the main character was Herminie and not Harry? What if Star Wars had been Leia’s Story not Luke’s? Her answers where thoughtful and concise for a nine year old.

It also got me thinking about female characters. I do not consider myself a feminist, nor do I consider myself an anti-feminist. I consider myself a…

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