Neutral Character Generation

It’s always easier to write a character of the same gender as yourself - at least that is the theory. It’s actually also easier for women to write men than it is for men to write women - simply because there’s a lot of media from a male point of view which women can consume whereas a lot of media from a female point of view is something men don’t dare or wish to consume.

 

One big thing about being a writer is to be able to imagine things. That’s the first step to writing something - having it in your head. The huge second step is to put it from your head on paper (or file), which comes with a lot of problems on its own.

Creating a character is a long process which usually, at least for me, starts with a vague idea - a trait, a skill, a background - and ends with a character which, hopefully, is three-dimensional and can stand on its own. During the generation process, the character gets sculpted, parts are taken away, parts are added, until it feels complete and like a person.

One big danger during this process is that you end up with a stereotype. That’s more likely when you create a character very much unlike yourself. So if, as a man, you create a woman and vice versa. It’s easy to pick some character you’ve seen or read about somewhere and just model your character on that one, making them a two-dimensional paper cut-out and not a three-dimensional character. This is less likely to happen with a character of your own gender, because you know how your gender acts, at least in general terms.

Some people suggest to beat this problem by writing the character in your own gender and then just flip them. That usually works, unless you have a very personal plot which demands a deep understanding of some aspect of the opposite gender - in this case, only research can help.

 

I suggest going one step further: do not write your character as any gender. Write them as a character, as a collection of traits, skills, and background. Give them what they need to further the plot and to survive until the end - if they are supposed to survive that long. Give them traits which fit, no matter what gender they’re usually related to. If you need a character who is a fighter, but also caring, that’s fine, no matter whether they end up male or female in the story. Ignore gender for as long as possible. In a lot of cases, you might not have to decide on it until the last step - naming the character and putting them into your story.

The neutral approach might help you make a rounded character, because it removes the seduction to work of stereotyped templates, no matter whether for male or for female characters. You’re not making a warrior, a damsel, or a mentor, you’re making a character who will be in the middle of the action (thus you give them a fighting skill, good reflexes, a past which taught them the necessary survival skills), a character who gets kidnapped (perhaps they know several languages and can listen in to the talks around them or they know how to crack locks and sneak around), and a character who has a lot of experience and knows how to share it (a former teacher, someone who travelled a lot, or someone who was what the character who needs guidance wants or needs to be).

There’s a lot of different characters you can make, especially this way. As with real life, where people are no stereotypes, but personalities who have been shaped by their lives so far, you will find them more interesting and, perhaps, more fitting for your stories as well.

Even if you start out with a stereotype, though, you can make it better by removing the gender and thinking about what you really need or want of your character. Does your warrior need to be stoic and silent or can they also be the life of the party? Does your damsel have to be a woman? Why is it that mentors are always old, not middle-aged or just a few years older than the person they’re supposed to mentor? Once you go neutral in character generation, you can pull stereotypes apart without too much worry and experiment on them.

 

While we’re at it, does a character have to be a gender, the way most people define it? Gender is a spectrum, it’s fluid, from the manly man to the very feminine woman there’s a lot happening there. With my two necromancers, Gabrielle Munson and Isadora Goode, I toed the line, but for different reasons.

Gabrielle lives in a late-Victorian-Steampunk setting where women don’t have as many rights and possibilities as men. Being tall for a woman and lean, so with small breasts and narrow hips, she can easily pose as a man, which gives her more freedom. In addition, Gabrielle likes women a lot more ‘that way’ than men, which means she could even court a lover without raising any brows.

In Isadora’s case, there’s more intention to it. Isadora comes from a long line of heroes, most of whom married ‘their’ damsel at some point - as it was with her parents, too. Isadora refused to follow her mother’s example and be a pretty, feminine damsel who gets kidnapped and rescued whenever it is suitable for her hero and his nemesis. Given the chance to keep her body androgynous through a potion her father’s nemesis (who became her mentor) taught her, she grabbed it with both hands, staying physically in-between man and woman. Without a cycle and in male clothing, she can very well appear as a man. Also against her family’s strict ‘black and white’ thinking is Isadora’s own sexuality: she’s pansexual, not bound to any gender when it comes to love and lust.

I feel that both of these characters have won a lot by not having been created as ‘average’ women, but by dipping into neutral character generation and giving them the skill sets, backgrounds, and traits I felt went best with them.

On the other hand, John Stanton, another of my characters, pretends very well not to be your average noble (which he also isn’t, but in a different way). He doesn’t use weapons around his family, he doesn’t ride out with them, he acts like the silent, bookish boy he was before his trip to Italy - and the events which turned him into a seasoned hunter of other humans who did whatever was necessary to get around. John is too comfortable in his own masculinity to need society’s approval for who he is - also a thing which I could work out by not trying to make a male character, but a character who happened to be male.

With Jane (in both her identities), admittedly, I went a different way: here I tried to turn the average, suave spy around, make them a woman instead of a man. For about half an hour, Jane Browne was Jane Bond, then I decided differently. Since I’m a woman myself, though, it wasn’t hard to transform the character from male to female, since female is my natural perspective.

 

Here’s a suggestion: try it out. Try making a character without thinking of a gender and see what it gives you. You might be positively surprised. If it doesn’t work for you, then it doesn’t, but at least you tried it. Well-rounded, three-dimensional characters are important for a story, so whatever helps you create them is good.