Meme question #2

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

I think I have too many to count – and I’m not going to count them to prove it.  Though I suppose it makes a difference whether we’re talking major players or walk ons.  I wouldn’t like to not count the walk on parts, because I’m very fond of them, from Emmie who runs a boarding house in Jamaica and loves her ridiculously high fashion red-heeled shoes, to the guy in the off-license who sold Darren a bottle of vodka while wondering if he should call the police.

Male or female whats?  I hate this tendency to call people males or females – it’s not a noun, it’s an adjective.  You mean a male or female human?  Then bloody well say so.  Or, failing that, use the proper words, which are “men” and “women”.  Using “female” to mean “woman” strongly implies that everything about that person is summed up in their gender, and that gets right up my nose.

I’ll assume the question means “Do you prefer male or female characters?”

I prefer writing male characters because I don’t feel I understand the idea of “female” and “femininity.”  I don’t really feel that I understand women as a whole, or even feel reliably confident that there is such a thing as “women as a whole.”  Gender flummoxes me, and I would much rather write a world where it didn’t exist at all, but for some reason, (probably not unconnected to society’s belief that only men are important) the female gender is more obscure and mysterious to me than the male.  I’m working on this by reading up lots of feminism, but at the moment it’s still the male point of view that comes naturally to me.

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