1/21/24
Capturing the Character
This is number forty-six in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“IF YOU ARE A MAN, you know women better than most women do.”
My response to that reader fan mail from a few years ago was “If you are a woman, thank you.”
Sadly, I believe the writer was a man and knew women even less well than I did—which was often somewhere between puzzlement and wonder. Nonetheless, since I don’t write army war dramas or cowboy operas, my books all involve characters of both sexes. The real question is not so much how well I know women, but how well I know my characters.
When I’m reading, I often come across phrases or comments that make me stop and wonder who this author was writing about. It seems so out of character for the person who was described that I wonder how well the author really knows his characters.
And that, I believe is the first criterion to writing engaging fiction of any type, but especially of erotica.
My third year participating in NaNoWriMo I set myself a unique challenge. My mystery novel would take place during the literal thirty days of November 2006. As a result, I watched the weather and events occurring wherever the characters were at the time and wrapped up For Blood or Money in exactly 30 days.
But, for me, the significant thing that was happening was preparing to continue the story from a different character’s perspective on the 31 days of December. That story, Municipal Blondes, did not have the external pressure of NaNoWriMo to govern its development, but was definitely a work of passion.
What most people didn’t know was that beginning in September, I created blogs for both Dag Hamar (hero of For Blood or Money) and Deb Riley (hero of Municipal Blondes). The Dag Hamar blog was simply a run-up to the adventure in November, but the Deb Riley blog was a concerted attempt to capture the voice and style of my twenty-five-year-old female protagonist.
I started Deb’s blog on September 25th with this statement:
This site is written and maintained by Wayzgoose a 57-year-old male, not by Deb Riley, a 25-year-old female. Deb Riley is a fictional character in the upcoming NaNoWriMo book Security & Exchange. But Security & Exchange is written from the viewpoint of Dag Hamar. Deb Riley is his associate. I thought it would be fun to let Riley (as Dag calls her) comment on the action, and even on some of the daily life around the office leading up to November 1. She'll also be commenting through the month of November on the story from her viewpoint. Then on December 1, the intention is to let her pick up the narration.
The only problem is that Wayzgoose doesn't really know how to write like a 25-year-old woman. So, he's using this site during the warm-up to find her voice. We (Deb & Wayzgoose) have friended a lot of people who have contributed to her character in the period of time leading up to Nano. Hopefully those people will friend her back and comment on what she is seeing and how the case is going during the month. If you know someone else who would like to be friends with a character from a fiction that is about to be written, please invite them along. The journal is open. Feel free to join.
The response was pretty phenomenal, with a number of young women (in their twenties) friending Deb and interacting with her. They sent me quizzes, games, puzzles, and interview questions. And I had to respond to each in character. I’m sure my wife and daughter questioned me pacing around my basement office reading my posts aloud in as softened and feminine a tone as I could to see if it sounded like a young woman.
The result was that some of my female followers for that blog intentionally forgot that I was an old man imitating a young woman. They responded with suggestions and comments for Deb Riley, not for me. When November ended and I continued the story from Deb’s perspective, my followers stuck with me. I continued the adventure taking place on the thirty-one days of December. But there’s a holiday in there and I got a little bogged down with family duties, so took a break for a few days.
I got a panicked email message:
Deb, We haven’t heard anything from you since you got in the car with that Ray fellow. I hope you can trust him. Please post something so we know you’re okay!
I knew at that point that I had a female character who was believable.
Municipal Blondes is available on Bookapy.com. Also available at other sites in eBook and paperback.
In order to write from the perspective of a person of the opposite sex, you need to suspend your own sense of disbelief. The natural perspective of a 57-year-old man in looking at the 25-year-old woman was “I can’t believe she’d say a thing like that.” But that was the old man’s perspective, not the young woman’s.
I will say that the same is true about women writing about men.
I was surprised to discover some years ago how many straight women were writing M/M gay erotica. A great deal of fan fiction called ‘shipping’ is based around gay relationships. Shipping is derived from the concept of ‘relationshipping’ or writing a relationship between two characters in a popular story. I recall a number of young writers talking about ‘shipping a Harry/Draco’ story, pairing up the male archrivals of the Harry Potter stories.
I had a publishing business at the time and also offered some critique and editing services. I was asked to read and critique a male/male spy love story. Not my usual cup of tea, but I took the job. My principal critique revolved around the characterization of the two men in this bizarre relationship. They were enemies, but in love with each other. At one point they fought, beating the tar out of each other while they talked about their feelings and how much the other had hurt them.
The critique I sent to the author was that I didn’t believe that gay men were just chicks with dicks. What I was reading was basically a story about a conflict between two women, escalated by the masculine abilities of the men. Instead of scratching at each other and pulling hair, they were punching and trying to strangle each other.
To the straight young woman who wrote this, however, this was the essence of gay erotica. On further investigation, I discovered a large segment of the readership for gay erotica is straight females. Just as a large segment of the viewership for lesbian porn is male. The story didn’t need to be based on how two gay men would actually deal with each other as much as it needed to be what women wanted to see in men’s relationships.
That was a sobering revelation.
There is no shortage of ideas on this topic, so I’ll figure out another segment to deal with in the next installment. Possibly, where I get my research for female characters. We’ll see next week.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
