Walk a Mile in my Shoes, Just Don't Fall Down

Most male authors create male protagonists and women create female protagonists. Have you ever tried to write a main character of a different sex?

by Paul D. Marks

Yes. In fact, I just recently finished two short stories, both of which have female protagonists. Neither is published yet so I can’t turn you onto a place to read them.

But a little side trip before I get to those and other stories. For me the question is not so much have I written things with female protagonists, but whether we can put ourselves in the head of the other gender to be able to write them.

The proverbial “they” tell us to “write what you know,” but if we did only that we couldn’t write
about much since we all only have a limited frame of reference and personal experience. How could we write about an astronaut, a Frenchman (if we’re not French), a Wookiee*, if we haven’t had those experiences. How could we say “je suis Charlie” if we are not Charlie Hebdo? We use what knowledge we’ve gained from living our lives and from the people we know, and fill the rest in with imagination.

Trite as it sounds, we all have experiences as human beings. And, though men and women are different, there is a lot of crossover in our experiences and our shared humanity—how’s that for high-minded pretentiousness? Plus we have empathy for other people if we’re not psychopaths (I’m not naming names here...), including those who are not necessarily just like us. As the saying goes, we have to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes to see what their lives are like...which, in some cases—like writing about the opposite gender for a man—might be a bit of a problem if they’re wearing six inch spiked heels.

So for me it’s more about knowing your character than it is about just having a protagonist from the opposite sex per se. The main thing is to try to avoid stereotypes. But whatever gender, the questions are the same: what do they want, what are their desires, what choices do they make, and that is the character, not whether or not they wear red nail polish or drink beer and watch football.  Would you expect a guy like Rosie Greer, former defensive tackle for the LA Rams, part of the “Fearsome Foursome,” to do needlepoint? But he does. Oh, and he’s called Rosie.

*       *       *

Besides the two new stories with female protagonists, I have a couple of golden oldies that have women as their leads. One of them, Graceland, a humorous mystery, is about a female detective hired to find the missing King’s (Elvis Presley’s) body. The main character introduces herself this way: “My name is Van Jones, short for Vanessa.  My mother wanted to name me Priscilla, after the King's Queen.  My father wouldn't hear of it.  He wanted to call me Johnna after John Wayne.  My mother wouldn't hear of that.  They settled on Vanessa – I don't know why, probably 'cause neither liked it – and my father calls me Duke anyway.”

And taking a trip into the Way Way Back Machine. One time a producer optioned a screenplay of mine. He had the brilliant idea to change the male lead to a female and the female lead to a male.  So I went through the script and did that, but found I had to change very little besides the names and pronouns to make him happy. The upshot being that men and women are human beings and human beings often have similar emotions, motivations and manners of speaking. We are different, that’s for sure, generally men are less emotional, at least on the surface and/or express our emotions differently. Women tend to be more expressive, but not all women are the same, just like not all men are the same.  But we are also not as different as we think sometimes, so changing the script in just minor ways seemed to work.

Both new as yet unpublished stories, hot off the presses, have female leads, but are very different in tone. One is a satire, told in the first person by a woman who may or may not be guilty of the crime. And the other is set almost completely in a jury room, where the protagonist tries to sway the jury’s vote for her own personal reasons. I had fun writing both, but in different ways. And for both I had to research various external things such as fashions and trendy gourmet foods and car makes and models. I also had to imagine what it would be like to be a teenage girl, now the woman lead of my story, and think about what experiences and feelings would shape her personality—I had to put myself inside her head as best I could. Something I would also have to do if I was writing about that astronaut or Wookiee, neither of which I am.  I also had to research murder kits, not having had a lot of real-life experience with them other than to know that you must always include duct tape.

Whatever and whoever we’re writing, we do our research, we rely on our experience, and we try to walk a mile in the character’s shoes and hope we don’t fall down and break our necks.

                                               

*Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. No, I’m not a Star Wars nerd – I had to look it up.

The Answer, My Friend, is Waitin' on the Web (w/ apologies to Bob Dylan)

How important is research in your stories, and has an error ever made it into print?

By Paul D. Marks

How important is research:

They say "write what you know," but we can't know everything we write about. Hemingway may have experienced bullfights and African safaris, but we often write about things that either we haven't experienced directly or, if we're writing sci-fi, things that might not even exist yet. Or we might be writing about the past – a past we never personally experienced.

I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt George Lucas has ever left this planet, and if he ever has, I again doubt that he went to a place called Tatooine. Still, he managed to come up with Star Wars and created a whole universe around it. How did he do that without ever leaving Earth?

Of course, that's where research comes in. Research is both fun and necessary to much of what we write. Without it how could we ever write about anything that we never directly experienced? So in answer to the question, research is monumentally important to writers.

It gives our stories verisimilitude, a sense of time, place and character that rings true.

Even though I lived through the "Rodney King" riots I couldn't see everything, be everywhere, experience every experience, nor was I a cop or rioter. So in writing my novel White Heat I turned to newspapers, magazines and the net, and since people are still alive who were there in the thick of it, I talked to them too, cops, and others.

I have a new novel I'm shopping now, a World War II homefront mystery set in L.A., based on a character that's been in three published stories. But that era is before my time, before any personal memories of mine. Still, I think I captured it pretty well because of all the research I did. On the internet, via old magazines, articles, movies, music, and maps. Maps are a great research tool and can be used in a lot of ways. But I also turned to first person resources. People who were there. My family goes back in Los Angeles well before the war, so I talked to relatives and friends of theirs. Plus I do have memories from after the war when things hadn't changed all that much, unlike today, so I could draw on them too.


Has an error ever made it into print:

There's always errors that make it into print. Some are innocuous, like typos or an out of place comma, some are big and make you feel stupid, especially when they're things you know but just got away from you. And then someone reads it and points it out and you feel like an idiot and think they think you're an idiot and will share your idiocy with the world. Makes you want to duck and cover.

But sometimes you might make a calculated choice to put something in that isn't quite right because it works dramatically – poetic license. For example, I might fudge it with a song that came out a year after an event took place, but that just works so well for a scene. But then there's always that know-it-all who sat in the front of the class and knows that that song came out three days after the date of your scene. So sometimes you just have to throw a slapstick pie in their face and fudge things a little.

So research is extremely important to just about anything we write. But it does have one major drawback: it's just too much fun. Especially in the internet age when you can just bounce from hyperlink to hyperlink and spend all day researching instead of writing. In the ye olde olden days you had to go to libraries or have tons of research books, which are fine, but today it's so much easier. And it's not only educational and important for your story, but it's the best procrastination tool ever invented because you can pretend to be doing work while you're really just having fun.