Young Writers Society

So I am writing a book, and half of it is from the POV of a girl... and I happen to be a very ignorant boy who is totally clueless when it comes to girls.

I have tried writing according to their perspective, and each time I get the comment of "This sounds very masculine" which is only normal because I am that way, but I want to make the character sound like a girl, and its difficult for me.

So how do you write a character and make it seem like its a girl, even when you don't tell the reader its so? What do girls see when they look at a picture? And, quite honestly, how often do they cry? I know that is a strange question, but I don't want to have the girl crying at weird times--or not crying at all, even at times when it is necessary.

So just general comments from girls (or guys, even, if you know this stuff) on how to write a female character would be super helpful.

I pay in reviews, and lots and lots of cookies. Always cookies.
~Timmy

Here's some advice on girls.
1) We overthink everything. We see somebody hold somebody else's hand and immediately assume that they like each other, when in fact one of them may have just lost their balance and the other was just helping them up. Or we think a guy might like us and we think, and stew, and go plain crazy about it when a guy would be like, "She did this, this, and this. Yeah, she's diggin' me."
2) We tend to focus on the little details. For example, when looking at a mopped floor, a man would see an immaculate floor while a woman would be panicking about the two footprints she thinks are smudged onto the floor. Or when looking at a painting a man would see the whole thing, while a girl sees the little details.
3) We're way more emotional. The slightest thing will set us off in tears. Most of the time, it's something tiny. But sometimes, we don't even know why we're crying.
4) We have hidden strengths that men don't even know about. Can't really elaborate on this one too much cuz every woman has her own.

Well, here's a short list. I could write a book on what we're like but it would only scratch the surface, right girls? lol

We think and talk an awful lot more than you might imagine about our bodies. As well, I wouldn't necessarily say we cry all the time or at every small thing, but it's not just a cliché that we are more emotional just before our periods (and then really cranky and immobile during them )

Girls are also a lot more loyal to each other than you might think, but we analyse each other as much as we analyse boys. We see each other's actions as expressions of character or how somebody else sees us. We analyse words and tone of voice and looks and also punctuation in text messages!

Most girls I know talk a lot to each other about clothes and make up, and I don't think this is a shallow or worthless fact - it's just like talking about sport or some other non-entity.

I think the analysis thing is the biggest difference between the thought processes of boys and girls. But I could be wrong.

Okay.

Deep breath, and say it with me.

Girls are individuals just as much as boys so there is no way to "write like a girl".

Every single question you have there is answered "depends on the girl." Take crying: I tend to be very stoic and only cry when I have a free moment to break down, in a safe environment, usually talking to somebody; meanwhile, a friend of mine has what you'd call "waterworks" and cries about ten times more than I do. That's because of our upbringings. She had more freedom to express her emotions than I have, resulting in her emotions flowing more freely in all situations. I, meanwhile, have an ability to put my emotions on hold until I have the time and space to deal with it.

When I look at a picture, I dissect it for composition, materials, texture, anatomical correctness, colour use, and other artist things because I'm fine arts trained. Some girls will go "oh that person is cuuuute", while others will be bored with it, while others will notice the setting first. Some will build stories for what's going on, while others take the historical context, and the list goes on and on and on.

As for overthinking, some men will believe a girl simply taking to them as a sign of friendship or having a crush on them, when that is not the case at all (an example: a girl helps a guy out. Guy starts falling over himself because "she helped me she must like me!" Girl was only helping him because he needed help and/or it was her job, had no actual interest. Boy then becomes offended when she rebuffs him because "I thought we were friends". Girl wonders where in the world he got this assumption based on one or two interactions). Some girls do not overthink at all. Other girls do. It's based on personality.

People focus on whatever little details they're trained in focusing on. I do not notice missed spots when washing the floor, because I don't wash the floor. My mother will notice these details, because she washes the floor. I will, however, notice details wrong in a graphic design that she doesn't notice, because I've got quite a lot of graphic design training and my mother does not. Men in graphic design notice colours more than men not in graphic design, because they've been trained to notice them. So the details noticed depend on social expectations and training.

We're expected to be more social and trained to be more social. Therefore, autism manifests differently in girls, because we have more scripts for how girls are supposed to behave and can navigate social situations on scripts.

Figure out the usual things for characters:
- How they grew up (parents, friends, class)
- Their personality
- Expectations placed on them
- How they related to those expectations

And you'll have a good female character. The only difference between men and women is how they're expected to behave. For example, men's brains become more "maternal" when they're the primary caregiver, because all of a sudden they have to take care of different things. It has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with what's required at that moment. When dads take care of the kids, they get better at taking care of kids. If a mother doesn't end up taking care of the kids much, her brain won't be very "maternal" at all.

This article will also be of use.

Okay, Rosey. I really do get what you are saying, and my character is their "own person" and not just the stereotypical cliché girl character. And what you said is super helpful.

But girls do think differently than boys, don't they? I mean, when reviewers read my works written on a girls perspective, they tell me that this is very "masculine"--even though I am trying very hard to make it sound girlish.

So what I am trying to achieve is simply giving the reader the visual of a girl character, without describing her, and without giving her a name--yet. And a more girlish personality is more natural for a... girl, like you said above. ^.^ I will work on making her seem more "girlish", all the while making sure she has her own unique self, shaped from her own piece of stone, as it were. Thank you so much for all this help. I truly appreciate both your opinion and your feedback. It gives me a lot to think about and work on.

Thank you @Nica and @StellaThomas for giving me tips on what girls think about and how they react to different things. It will certainly help me twist my thinking a bit to make my character seem more like a girl. As for the make-up part, I don't know if I could put that in there if I wrote for a million years. But I shall try. *squishhugs* You are all so awesome and helpful.

Here you all go. *hands out lottssss of cookies*

But girls do think differently than boys, don't they?

Nope.

Nope nope nope.

Human brains are completely and totally plastic. Therefore, these brains adapt to their environment, expectations, and society. This does result in wiring changes, but it is by no means along gender lines. It's based on how you grew up and what's expected of you while growing up.

Yes, some girls have different expectations placed on them than boys, but not all girls do. My mother routinely says I'm "too masculine" because she never put the expectations of girls— cooking, cleaning, housework, childcare— on me, therefore I plain old don't think like girls who have those expectations on them. When a girl grows up taking care of her younger siblings or younger kids, her brain will naturally become more caregiving simply because she's doing it more.

Meanwhile, a girl who grows up with expectations that are more masculine, such as working with her hands, getting dirty, and breaking stuff, she's not going to have a caregiver's mind. She'll have a mind more akin to a guy who does the same things she does, because the brain wires itself to do what it often does.

A "girlish" personality (whatever that means) is by no means "more natural" for a girl to have. What is a girlish personality, even? Serious question.

It's why men's brains become more "maternal" when they're the primary caregivers. People thought that all women were like that and it was inherently female to be a caregiver... when it's really just a lot of practice being a caregiver. Society says women are caregivers, resulting in women being given more caregiver type roles, resulting in women's brains wiring themselves to take better care of people. Put men in exactly the same situation of social expectation to be caregivers, and they will have brains wired exactly the same way as their female caregiver counterparts simply because, surprise, being a caregiver isn't gender specific.

The human brain is a very complex, messy, and poorly understood organ. Most psychology done is highly sexist, so of course it's going to look for a very clear gender divide based on biological sex. These divides, when closer examined, plain old do not exist. Nurture more than nature has an impact on how girls and boys think.

Do not make your character "more girly". If you make her "more girly", then you will make her more stereotypical and less of her own person, because really, that's all gender divides are. Stereotypes. All the ideas for "how women think" are based on sexist rhetoric trying to prove itself because science is not innocent and always biased.

They talk a lot and aren't as direct. They're better at manipulating verbal information. They're good at rationalizing. They're ruled by their emotions but have greater empathy.

Want to see something cool? I don't know if you've heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, but it's basically a personality test. (Some people think it's pseudoscientific crap, but hey, it's fun.) You've got four binary categories: Introversion vs Extroversion, Intuition vs Sensing, Feeling vs Thinking, Perceiving vs Judging. These are expressed as types, like ENFP, or ISTJ. According to this site, the highest reported type among males is ISTJ (Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging), while the highest reported among females is ESFJ (Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging).

Incidentally, this explains why most people suck, since Sensers and Judgers are the worst.

Also, I agree with Rosey's first post, but not necessarily her second.

All the ideas for "how women think" are based on sexist rhetoric trying to prove itself because science is not innocent and always biased.

There are scientifically proven differences between the male and female brain... having to do with size, grey matter vs. white matter, etc. Also, sexual attraction is fundamentally different between the sexes; I don't think many people dispute that.

I agree that the process of "thinking" is not terribly different.

There is one difference that comes up fairly often in terms of brain wiring, and that tends to be attraction: for example, there are a lot of studies about how attraction dictates reaction to pheromones, so gay men react to male pheromones while lesbians don't. As a result, their biological reactions do result in different wiring.

And a few thousand years of evolution can do some changes to the biology, but when it comes to the variation between sexes, there really isn't much on people who are neither men or women, and there also isn't much mapping on intersex individuals. When you only study people who very strongly identify as "women" and who very strongly identify as "men", then you're going to have some bias from lack of representation.

Thinking, though, yeah. Plastic and depends on the upbringing.

All of this arguing is largely pointless, when writing for entertainment you try to make characters people can relate to, an anchor into that world. "it depends" does not matter, what matters is just picking the most common aspects of a gender/sex as a starting point, things that fit the culture you designed or are working in. Only after that do you worry about what "depends". Pick things that people can recognize as a aspect of that gender, even if its not true for everyone.

To that end examples like what Nica, StellaThomas and Prokaryote gave would be a good starting point. Complexities tend to be lost on most readers unless you are planning to make multiple novels out of it to flush it out, and by then likely what ever planning you have for their personality will be far different.

I'm going to have to agree with Zolen, that whether it's nature or nurture or biological or social, it doesn't matter when you're writing!

I think the most important thing for you to do in your story is not necessarily think "this doesn't sound like a girl" but instead "does this have a different voice to the other narrator?" Not that I don't think gender is something that can/should come across in literature, but because a distinct *genderless* voice will already set in stone the first differences!

I had the same problem in reverse with my novel when I added a second (male) perspective. But I found that the main differences lay in their personality. Astrid is a very anxious person (and also female, I suppose), and a lot of her thoughts were analysing situations that she was currently in. She didn't analyse herself very much, but more those around her, and plotted and planned her next moves, because she's a planner. Also, when Astrid is the perspective I'm using, colours are a lot more prominent in description (which isn't intentional, but females and males do see colours differently!), and she also takes note of what people are wearing (because that's something she's learnt to do, as a girl in her universe).

Whereas whenever Nathaniel has time to mull over his thoughts, he doesn't think much at all about the present or the future, he spends most of his time thinking about the past. He has a lot of flashbacks - and he frequently focuses on how beautiful he finds certain girls (whereas Astrid, if she's attracted to someone, wonders about their feelings, the feasibility of them being together etc etc and doesn't spend muchtime looking at their face). Nathaniel's very introspective, which surprised me as his writer, but he spends a lot of time thinking about his own actions and what he could have done differently in the past.

Are their differences mainly due to the fact that they're individuals? Abso-friggin'-lutely. Is it ridiculous to suggest they might partly be due to their genders? Not at all!

A huge high five to Rosey for saying out loud something I totally agree with. It's only in your brain and the people who told you it sounds masculine probably knew that you were a boy. Believing that girls should say different things/ act different is part of the same stereotypical thinking that's been promoting the whole "women-should-stay-home-and-cook" mentality. *feeling like a feminist for saying this* XD

Good question...

Dude, I'm a girl and I have no idea about girls sometimes. Girls, as everyone, are completely unpredictable! I think I know some things, though... hopefully... >.>

When do girls cry? When do girls cry? Seriously, have you seen girls crying that much? Probably not... I mean, you have sisters, but other than them, do you see many girls crying? Maybe you don't, and why is that? Girls really don't want to cry in public. We'll do almost anything to keep from crying in front of our friends, family, foes, or of course random strangers. Deep down, we want to be considered tough ( keep in mind that nothing applies to everyone ), and that's hard since so often we're thought of in the opposite.

We go through stages where we're more emotional than other times. For instance, I'll tell you a secret, the other day I got off of work, and was waiting to get picked up at the Library. I was really tired, and they have super comfy couches... anyway, I drifted off, and one of the librarians woke me up and told me, in a firm but not mean way, that I had to be 'sitting up straight, and not sleeping'... I stayed calm long enough for her to completely abandon me, and than my eyes filled with tears. Why the hell did I cry about that?! We like to blame those little events on hormones, because it makes us feel better.

I wish I knew what it were like to be a guy, because then I could compare the two and tell you what makes a girl a girl, and what makes a guy a guy... but I can't. Sometimes it feels like we think more ( that's so incredibly sexist, I know... just being honest, sorry XP ).

I'm not sure how you write a girl, rather than a boy... I'm terrible at writing from the female perspective so far, actually. I think the key is to think like a girl. There's no right or wrong way to think like a girl, which is why I think it's key: Just think like your character, and that character is still your character regardless of gender, and that character can be anything.

People say girls are tidier, that we like pink, cute things, pretty things, boys, flowers, etc. but really, a lot of girls these days don't like to get lumped together like that, and so they go in the extreme opposite. Some girls, like myself, just don't care anymore if we don't mind pink, flowers, etc. and some girls do like pink, flowers etc.

You know that 5 girls can look at a painting and come away with totally different ideas to what the painting's really of? Did you know that 100 girls can come away from a painting with a different understanding about it? Of course we're all different, but there's something more.

I think that most girls worlds are maybe more colourful... it's hard to explain... I don't mean we're more cheery, or have better imagination, or anything like that. I think there's just so much going on around us, and our brain on overdrive most of the time... I think that's why the 'talking too much' stereotype came about.

One time I watched my friend get her wisdom teeth removed, and the doctor said that women need a bit extra sedative because their brains are really busy ( not saying anything against guys )... it did take a lot to knock her out.

I don't think I can ramble anymore about this... it was interesting to try and figure out what the difference is. I hope this helps in some way.

I forgot to mention that not all girls wear make up! I only wear make up on special occasions, sometimes not even then, or very rarely when I feel the urge to make myself 'pretty'.

Even if your character does end up wearing make up, it can be whatever you want- some people go to town and put on creams to make their skin colour more the same all around, and use mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow, blush, lipstick, etc. while others might just put some mascara and lipstick on. It totally depends on the girl- I find make up uncomfortable to wear too often.

I've wrote from a girl's perspective before and I've been told through reviews that you must describe the smaller details like sound and smell. Guys generally write more towards sight. I'm not sure if I remembered that right but it's something along those lines.

Girls do tend to be more emotional, but not necessarily in the crying sort of way. I'm a girl, I hardly ever cry. But it takes very, very little to get me angry. One little annoyance, and even though I may not show any change, I'm probably stabbing you in my mind. Also, I think females have smaller tear ducts, so tears might roll down a girl's face more often than a guy's, even if they are experiencing the same amount of sadness. But don't over-do it.

Girls will think about stuff way more than necessary. Any time we say or write something that might be taken in a slightly different way than was intended, we will overthink it "What if they think I'm trying to be rude and get mad at me." "What if they think I'm referring to this other thing." You get the jist. But that's just one example, it's not always social.

I second Holysocks on "not all girls wear makeup." I honestly hate it. It feels so weird on my face.

I sort of disagree with Rosey. Girls do think differently, in my experience. Sure not every girl, but most do, yeah.

Anyway, I hope that was some help!