Mission Impossible? – Empathizing With Female Characters

If you came here to find a misogynistic article to hate on, you have come to the wrong place. While my title may fit the definition of “click-bait,” it is more of a tongue-in-cheek way of summarizing the struggles I have experienced in writing effective, believable female characters as my writing style has matured and been polished.

As a writer, my goal is always to get into a character’s head. I want to know why they feel the way they do and why they do the things they do. In essence, your character must be real in order to convince the audience that they are real. To do this, you must have real motivations and actual problems that drive them.

When I first started writing in grade school this came easy. I was still operating with a young child’s understanding of the world, and all of my characters essentially fell into two molds. There were people like me (the good guys) and people who were different than me (the bad guys). The good guys all shared traits that I valued and respected, and this invariably meant that they were flat, one-dimensional beasts who were more or less me (or at least my idealized vision of myself). They were also invariably male.

As I grew in age and writing experience, I started to flesh out the idea of character empathy, working my way into character archetypes that varied from my own personality. This allowed me to add neutral characters, and it also allowed good guys that had personality traits I might consider annoying or less than ideal. They were, however, invariably male.

The next evolution in my writing technique came with bad guy empathy. This one was very hard for me, as I’m very much a “black-and-white” kind of person when it comes to right and wrong. However, I learned with practice to put aside my own values long enough to step into the mind of a given villain. I then realized that most of my bad guys through the first twenty years of my life were nothing more than mustache-twirling figureheads who cackled maniacally, representing evil in its purest form. By working to give them proper motivations I was able to create deeper bad guys, those who came across more as the angel fallen from grace. Still, however, there were no female leads, even in the bad guy camp.

I’ve always accepted that my writing projects were a build-up, practice for the real thing one day when I came across an idea I could take seriously. Dawnbringer is that project for me, and in its pages I have worked with every fiber of my being to bring a great variety of characters to life. I don’t necessarily want a given character to fit neatly into the realm of right or wrong. These people are meant to be believable human characters, and as such they should all inhabit areas of gray from time to time. Even if there is no malice in a character, it makes sense that they would occasionally do something wrong.

With all that said, I was determined to bring at least one female lead into play for the very first time. Her story started out simple enough, but as those who write will tell you it rarely stays that way. Complications arose throughout, and before I knew it I had a full-blown tragedy written into this young woman’s life. As I started to navigate her character through the issues, I felt like a driver just as he hits a patch of black ice.

Anyone who knows me well can tell you that I am a sensitive person; I hope my wife agrees when I say that her feelings and opinions mean a great deal to me. Still, trying to reach into the head of this female character proved to be a struggle that I wasn’t initially sure how to navigate. It seems to me that some of it comes from cultural norms; we all throw around light-hearted jokes from time to time.

Women can’t drive.

Men will not read instructions.

Characters on television don’t help matters in this regard; the American father has been made into a figure of complete idiocy in all the sitcoms of late. These stereotypes only damage our ability to truly understand one another.

So, I unashamedly started visiting sites for women in similar predicaments to my character. What I read on these websites made my heart break. I experienced the realization that women have the same feelings of failure that I do when they fail to actualize society’s expectations. This is something I’ve always known to be true, but knowing something and being rocked by its actual affect are two completely different things.

I think it’s unfair to call what I went through an epiphany, but I definitely had an eye-opening moment as I realize all the false constructs our society sets up between the sexes are just that: false. Again this is something we all know, but I had a very real moment of empathizing with these women as they endured problems that I as a man cannot go through. If I were to summarize what I’m trying to say into a single sentence:

Women and men are alike in far more ways than they are different.

Now, this is not to deny the inherent differences between men and women. To pretend that these differences don’t exist is a lie that belittles our nature as human beings and attempts to hide some of the wonderful gifts that come to each sex. However, sometimes I think society as a whole tends to exaggerate the differences to the exclusion of our similarities. Men also experience societal expectations that they sometimes cannot fulfill, or choose not to fulfill. The social stigmas, awkwardness, and frustration are, I imagine, much the same.

The process of writing this complicated character has helped to actualize me as a person, and it has also caused me to urge others to make attempts at empathy. This doesn’t just apply to the opposite sex, it also applies to those with different beliefs, skin colors, and all the other wonderful things that make humanity diverse. We each have our own struggles, victories, and accomplishments that bring us to be who we are. Take the time to put yourself into the shoes of another, and appreciate what they go through in this life.

To those of you who read Dawnbringer one day, I desperately hope that I’ve brought all my characters to life, male and female, big and small. In my eyes, anything less would be a failure.