Creating Male Characters in Novels

As a writer, I must admit that I’ve always been more comfortable creating female characters than delving into the minds of the male characters in my books. This is because, as a woman, I find it easy to create realistic female characters. However, getting inside the mind of a man is a completely different story.

Of course men and women are human beings before anything else, and human nature is well… human nature. However men and women also have many differences, and recently I’ve been reading a number of books about these differences. One such tome is Dr. Marianne J. Legato’s Why Men Never Remember & Women Never Forget where she writes about the nature and importance of the differences between men and women and how we really are wired differently physically, emotionally and mentally.

This means, as a writer, I need to ensure that my male characters think and act like men! I don’t struggle to write about a male character’s actions, as it’s easy to observe and describe those from an objective point of view. But I do hesitate when I’m about to write a male character’s innermost thoughts down on paper. I’ve asked my father, brother and an assortment of male friends in the past to read my manuscripts in order to let me know whether I’ve created realistic thoughts for my male characters.

In Send and Receive, the main character, Angie, who is a romance writer, also struggles with the concept of creating convincing male characters. Here is an extract from an email she writes in the book:

“Women… are intrigued by typical storybook heroes because these men have an aura of mystery about them. I write romance novels, and it’s quite a challenge writing about dark, enigmatic men who smoulder… especially when I have to get into my main male character’s head at certain times to give his point of view.

Women love mystery and I don’t want to disappoint my potential readers by writing mundane, ordinary inner monologue…”

Angie expounds on this later on the book, in another email:

“I… observe male behaviour and speech patterns… and try to accurately portray them in my writing. The thing is that men don’t speak in the same way women do. There’s a subtle difference in their use of language - in the tone and the rhythm of the words they choose. Men are far more likely to speak in a monotone than women, for instance, and they use less flamboyant language. Women often exaggerate things when they speak and say things like ‘My boss hates me!’ ‘You never listen to me!’ ‘I had a terrible day!’ while men play down emotive expressions in their speech - even though they might be feeling strong emotions under the surface. So when I’m getting inside a male character’s head, I try to remember all this.”

Writers as a breed are interested in what motivates people - their thoughts and feelings, and how they process their experiences, and being able to capture this in authentic detail in a novel, I would say, is the aim of most fiction writers.

Overthinking such things can lead to stilted attempts at creating characters of the opposite sex, however, so sometimes it’s best to take a risk, rely on instinct, and trust that if what you’re writing makes sense to you as a novelist, it’ll strike a chord with your readers as well.

Read The Dashing Debutante, Lord Fenmore’s Wager and Send and Receive