Jessica Day George joins us again, this time to tell us how to write men.  Brace yourselves for the bandying-about of generalities, for painting with broad brushes, and for assorted other potential points of offense!

Let’s say, for a moment, that you’re not a man. How do you go about writing men? Now let’s turn the question around… suppose you ARE a man. How do YOU write men? And now let’s cut to the heart of the matter by comparing these two processes. Are they different? Should they be? And where do knitting and superconductivity enter into the picture?

This is why it’s so cool to have Jessica with us Y-chromosome types. We all get to learn stuff.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Maze Runner, by James Dashner

Writing Prompt: Alternative history! Take an absurd 19th-century folk belief, treat it as absolute fact, and write a story hinging on that principle.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: males talk straight to the point; feminine speech patterns tend to be less direct. Beware of stereotypes, cliches, and writing every character the same. Men tend to focus on tasks; women often multitask better. Men solve problems; women talk. Write, then ask your readers whether or not it works. Your readers always know when there’s a problem — they may not know how to fix it, but they know there’s a problem. Don’t overthink — keep it natural. If your brain overheats, strap ice packs to your head while writing.

[Brandon] Here we go. We’re going to see how this goes.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Nine, how to write men.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re really not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Jessica] I’m Jessica.
[Brandon] We again have Jessica Day George guest starring.
[Jessica] I just don’t leave.

[Brandon] Author of numerous wonderful middle grade or YA books. All right. So… Dan is very, very frightened of this podcast. We tried to take…
[Dan] I just don’t know what to say.
[Brandon] We took a stab at writing… how to write women. We’ve taken several stabs at that and have gotten derailed every time, so maybe we’ll try that again later on. But I figured we’d start with something that presumably should be more easy for the majority of the podcasters, which is how to write men. So, advice on writing men. I’m going to start with Howard. Howard, did you have any advice for… you write… you have a team of mercenary… a lot of them are guys and they are very manly guys. How are you writing them?
[Howard] I’m mostly just using dialogue, snippets, sentence fragments, things like that that I’ve heard in conversations with my friends. It’s… not that we talk about hurting people and breaking things all the time, but it’s a… we don’t mince words. I guess when I’m writing men, I try to make sure… this may just be an aspect of writing for a comic in which I don’t have a lot of words to play with… is writing straight and to the point. Male conversations, male communications, tend to be a little more direct. Tend to be… painting with broad brushes, obviously.
[Brandon] They actually in linguistics call it masculine and feminine speech pattern because based on… there’s actually linguistic traits. Again, all of these things are generalities, and you shouldn’t use… take generalities as hard and fast. But they do say men will say “I want you to do this” where women will say “It would be nice if…”
[Jessica] Could you do me a huge favor? My husband hates to hear that. He goes just tell me what you want.

[Brandon] Linguistically, they have named it that way. I want to throw in a preface also to this podcast. I mentioned this before when we talked about writing female characters. A character is a character. A character… any given person can defy some of the stereotypes and fall into some of the other stereotypes. But if you try to write every one of your man as thinking this must be a man, then you’re going to run into writing all your characters exactly the same and they’re going to be cliches. But I do think there are some things we can chat about that will help you… particularly those female listeners… to be able to write male characters. One of them is male speech patterns… masculine speech patterns. Do you, Dan…
[Dan] No… yes, I do.
[Howard] Clean rating!
[Brandon] When you are sitting down to write, do you specifically write the men differently than you would write women?
[Dan] No. Although I will specifically write the women differently than I would write men. If that makes any sense.
[Jessica] So you start with a male character, and…
[Dan] The trouble with me is that I start with myself. This is my answer… someone asks…
[Jessica] And you are a man?
[Dan] Yes, I am. Can’t you tell by my manly voice? I… when people will ask, how do you write men, how do you write women, how do you write for a teen audience — I always am writing for myself. Always. So I am writing the kind of characters that interest me, and I am writing them in a way that interest me, specifically. I don’t think about it with men. I will base them on people that I know, sometimes. But what changes for me is when I come to write a woman and I have to think, OK, I want to make this person different than all of the men around them.

[Brandon] OK. Jessica, have you ever had trouble with this when you sat down to write… the first time, you had to write a male character… was it something that stopped you or did you just…
[Jessica] No, it seemed very natural. I just… well, I started with dragons, really. I have mostly male dragons in my dragon books which were… so it was actually for some reason very easy to write a male dragon. I guess I just sort of picked the wings and scales off the guys…
[Howard] That’s disturbing.
[Jessica] That is disturbing. I’m sorry.
[Howard] No, no, don’t apologize for it. It’s disturbing in all the right ways.
[Jessica] In Princess of the Midnight Ball, who I think about it as my main character, although the point of view switches back and forth between a girl and the guy, it is the guy’s story. It is the returning soldier. For some reason, it just… this whole character just kind of came to me and I knew exactly how he would react in certain situations and exactly how he would talk. He’s a 19-year-old child soldier, now retired. I don’t know…

[Brandon] Howard, do you approach writing your female mercenaries differently than your male mercenaries?
[Howard] I try to. I think that’s actually one of the places where I am weakest. I spend time thinking about it. One of the things that you see in military organizations is that very many of the females who are in military organizations have adopted manspeak. They start to talk and think like men because that’s the community they’re living in. That gives me… that kind of gives me a buy on this. I can…

[Brandon] A story that pops into my head that might be useful for this. There’s been a study done, and if I had been on the ball, I could have this quoted for you, but… anyway, let’s pretend there’s a study. Anyway, what they did is they brought groups of people in… pairs of people in who described themselves as best friends, men and women. They brought them into a room and they gave them a test. Some little test that they’re supposed to be going through. They pretend the subject of the test is important for the psychological examination or whatever they are doing. Then what they’ll do during the middle of this test is that the people giving the test will get a call in the middle and have to like, “Oh, I’m going to have to leave for five minutes. I’ll be right back.” They will leave. The real test starts when they observe the best friends sitting together in the room and see what they… how they act around one another. The women would immediately start chatting about the test and about what’s going on in their lives and would have this big exciting conversation. The men would sit quietly until the people doing the interview would return. This kind of says something about the gender differences perhaps. It’s cultural… whatever it is though, I don’t want to get into is it biological or culture or what. But there are lots of theorizing going on. You may just assume, oh, it’s because men don’t talk as much. That’s not true, men talk a lot. But it’s… one of the things that we look at the psychology of men and women is then do tend to get focused on a task and they consider that we are now doing this task. The men in that room therefore were thinking we are in test taking task mode and even though the test cannot continue, we will not break this mode until we have accomplished this task which is taking this test. Whereas the women generally… again, generalities… multitasking, jumping from topic to topic is more common and this sort of thing, and they slip in and out of modes more easily. As soon as someone leaves, they slip into let’s-have-a-conversation-with-my-friend mode and then the person comes back and they slip into test taking mode. This is a way that I actually approach writing genders in my books. When I’m writing a guy, guys to do tend to get more focused on a single task. You give them something and they want to get that done. If they are not getting it done, it bothers them. They will ball over it, they will think over it, they will ponder over it, they will do all of these things. I think it’s a stereotype, and a wrong stereotype, that men don’t worry and think about things as much as women do. But I think it is true at least in my experience that men get more focused about things. Let’s go ahead and do an advertisement first. Hold that thought, Dan. Then we’ll come back and launch into you.

[Brandon] I wanted to do an ad this time, our book of the week. I wanted to actually pick The Maze Runner. Now you may be asking why didn’t we use The Maze Runner as our book of the week the week we had James Dashner on the podcast. The answer is because we’re stupid. Well, it’s not quite that…
[Dan] There’s a lot more flattery answer to that.
[Brandon] Yeah. We looked it up a couple of weeks before and The Maze Runner wasn’t on audible, which very much disappointed us. We actually wanted to use it as our book of the week the week before James came on and then have you all read it and then he would be on. We thought that was very clever. Then it wasn’t there. Then when James came, after he was on, he was like, “Why didn’t you use The Maze Runner?” I’m like, “Oh, it’s not on audible.” He’s like, “Yeah, it is.” He brought it up and it was right there on his phone. So we felt stupid. It’s a wonderful book. It looks like it has just gone up on audible. I have read this book and enjoyed it immensely. I think you’ll enjoy it as well. You can go to audible and download your own copy. To get a 14 day free trial of audible’s bookclub, go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse.

[Brandon] All right, Mister Wells. You had something very poignant and deep and important and philosophical to say?
[Dan] It was brilliant. Right along the lines of what you were saying before about men getting very focused on a task and dealing with it until it is done. Men are also problem solvers, much more specifically, in general, than women tend to be. That’s how we approach things. I’ve even noticed… looking at the way my wife and I will use our free time for the way we will deal with stress is, I will do it by fixing something or solving something, playing a strategy game that I can win. Something that I can accomplish.
[Jessica] That’s cheating.
[Howard] And Dawn breaks things?
[Dan] No, Dawn will go and do whatever other things she does when she needs to deal with stress.
[Brandon] I was… you were talking about something last night that even kind of works with this. That is, that Dawn, your wife, will just kind of keep cleaning all the time.
[Dan] Because I’m messy.
[Brandon] No, I think it’s again the modes thing. A guy thinks, “It is time to clean. I am now going to clean the entire house and be done. Then I will enter video game playing mode and I will play video games for five hours or whatever.”
[Dan] You can look at this as well in your relationships. Women… if… one of the complaints that you see a lot with women about men is “I’m telling you this not because I want you to tell me how to solve my problem, I just want to tell you why I’m sad.” Men will answer by saying, “Well, don’t be sad. Fix it, and let me tell you how.” No, that’s not what women want.
[Brandon] Here are seven ways to fix it. Just pick one of them.
[Dan] It’s because men have this kind of mental toolbox. Problems are there to be solved.
[Howard] Oh, wait, you’re having a hard time picking one? That’s a different problem. I can solve this by picking it for you.

[Brandon] Let’s turn this focus back towards writers. How can the writers use this in their fiction? How can they… what advice can we give them, specifically? Do they want to go read psychological profiling of the genders? I’ve never done that. I just kind of picked up…
[Howard] Neither have I. There was this gal sitting in front of the booth at LTUE who asked… she said, “I’m a girl. I have nothing but sisters. How am I supposed to write men?” I remember listening to that and thinking that the easiest thing for you to do is just stop being paralyzed and thinking that just because you’re a woman, you can’t. Just write. Then hand it to your alpha readers or your writing group or your mom or your sisters or whoever and ask them flat out, “Does this sound like men to you?” One of the things that I’ve learned over and over and over again is that your customers, your readers, your… the people who are consuming what you create… they always know when there’s a problem. They don’t always know how to fix it, but they always know when there’s a problem. Don’t borrow trouble. Start writing it first.

[Dan] When I think about the cases where I can specifically remember feeling that the gender roles in a book felt off, are when someone… when the author is obviously trying to over think it. In My Sister’s Keeper, the men in that book did not act like men, they acted like a woman trying to write very many people. I think for the most part, if you don’t overanalyze…
[Jessica] They were way too concerned with their feelings for guys. I’ll be quite honest.
[Dan] Every man in that book at some point showed off their muscles to the women. No, that’s not how men are, for the most part.
[Howard] It’s like those scenes in Mulan where she joins the army and tries to fit in by doing feats of strength…
[Jessica] We’re very manly, aren’t we? We have these swords and we spit…
[Howard] We’re very manly, aren’t we?
[Dan] I would say my main advice is don’t overanalyze it. Just try to make it sound natural, rather than trying to make it sound manly.

[Brandon] Maybe kind of what we come back to. Start with character, and build out from there. When I do start with character though like… a great example of this might be to read the… I started with my Mistborn books, I started with Vin as a guy. Right? I wrote Vin as a guy. Then I changed Vin to a girl, and wrote chapters with Vin as a girl. The character worked fantastically better. I’m not sure why. I think it might’ve been that I made the conflict for this character starting out kind of an abandonment complex. Which when the guy was thinking about it, the way he thought about it, the guy [garbled]
[Jessica] Kind of sissy.
[Brandon] It didn’t work. It really didn’t work. When the girl thought about it, it worked beautifully. That’s not to say that girls are weaker, because… just the abandonment complex, the way he considered it, the way a guy approached it, made for a boring character. The way a girl approached it made for an interesting character. I can’t even really explain why that worked or why that happened. But it did.

[Brandon] Jessica, have you ever taken your books and given them to guys and said, “Will you fact check on my guys? Will you give me a read here and see if they feel like men?”
[Jessica] Oh, yeah. Princess of the Night Ball, which is the one where the main character is a guy, I put a plain cover on it since there is a princess on the cover on some of the early copies of the book and gave it to some of my sisters AP English students, the boy students. They absolutely loved that book. They said it was awesome. They said they didn’t mind the girl in it at all because they loved the guy and they thought he was just…
[Brandon] But you’re saying [garbled]
[Jessica] I’m like, “Really? So that seemed like a guy to you?” They’re like, “Yeah. How did you do that? Is that based on your husband?” I’m like, “Not remotely. He can neither shoot a gun nor knit.” So, it worked.
[Howard] You put a guy in your book who can knit?
[Jessica] Yeah.
[Howard] That’s awesome.
[Dan] I will recommend Princess of the Midnight Ball as a great example of a woman writing a man, because I thought it worked really, really well.
[Jessica] Thank you.
[Howard] I just confessed to not reading one of Jessica’s books, didn’t I?
[Jessica] It’s all right. You totally did.
[Dan] I totally have.
[Brandon] I haven’t read that one yet, either. But I have read one of her others.

[Jessica] Well, thank you. Until the early 19th century, women were not allowed in knitting guilds because it was considered too complicated and they were afraid they would overheat their brains and be unfit for bearing children. Most professional knitters were in fact guys. They would teach soldiers to knit because there was no mail on the front lines, so if you needed new socks or hats or anything, you had to make it yourself.
[Howard] So what have you done, Jessica, to overcome the overheating problem, because I see you thinking a lot.
[Jessica] I strap ice packs to my head all day while I’m writing because I am concerned…
[Howard] Superconductivity.
[Jessica] That I will not be able to pop out eight babies and make a pot roast and iron my husband’s shirts by 5 PM.
[Howard] Wow.
[Jessica] Yeah. Kind of a struggle.
[Dan] Great way to end the gender roles podcast.
[Brandon] On that note, I’m going to make Howard give us our writing prompt because he forced Jessica to answer that question.

[Howard] This is a fantastic writing prompt. This is your alternative history writing prompt. Go back into the 19th century, take an absurd folk belief like one of the ones that Jessica just shared with us. Take that and treat that as fact. Treat that as fact and write a story that hinges on that principle.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.