Over the past several months, since I’ve begun writing more on a daily/regular basis, I notice a lot of my protagonists tend to be male. I had admitted it before to myself, but this week my reason for this was emphasized more as I felt myself thrown into the “wonderful” moods of being a woman:
I write from the male perspective because, when I write from the female perspective, I feel overly frilly, i.e., girly. Nothing wrong with being girly, but when I read my writing (from the female standpoint), there’s this sensation I feel where I’m just irritated by my words. The cliche feelings, the same struggles…
Not to say that writing from the male point of view does not have its stereotypes, but I don’t play into those stereotypes as much since I myself am not a man. However, because I’m well familiar with the female gender, I know the stereotypes all too well and find that, as hard as I try to avoid the stereotypes, I play into them too well when I write.
It isn’t to say that my writing may be more interesting with a male protagonist; in fact, out of the three novels I have completed so far, the one novel that seems coherent enough (in the first draft) is my first one, which has a female protagonist. With the other two completed novels and the fourth novel I’m working on, they all have male protagonists. However, the plots have been more or less complex than the first novel.
I am hoping that I will soon be able to find a good balance between writing from both male and female standpoints.