Everything Wrong With HARRY POTTER Fanfictions

* Writing From A Guy's Perspective (Part 2)

As we are done with the cliches so let's move towards the actual reason this chapter and the previous was written for:

How To Correctly Write A Male Character

There are many preset assumption and misconceptions about male characters, and we have gone through all of them in much detail.

Now we will discuss the ways to correct these assumptions. Note that these are merely ways suggested by other authors to correctly write your male character but it totally depends on you if you want to agree with the tips or place forward your own advice.

I'm highlighting a few of the aspects in general according to what I have deduced from the article.

1. Boys have feelings just like girls do, but they have a tendency to hide it all inside. You won't see a man crying for nothing everyday because that's not what the societal norms have made him do. Now that too is a stereotype, that men are stronger and tougher, but usually a lot of guys in that category even in real life.

Usually when people portray a man as tough and reckless on the outside and completely heartless on the inside, that is just totally wrong. You can make a guy tough but also keep in mind that males also have feelings and they know if you are feeling down they just don't know what to do in that situation.

If his girlfriend is feeling down, he will know that. It's just that he doesn't know what to do to make her feel better so he would try what he does with other guy fellows; leave her alone to sort out her priorities. That doesn't mean that the said boyfriend is heartless.

2. The disrupted sense of masculinity; this is also a problem while writing male characters. In literature there is a very clear outlook on how a man should behave and these criterias change as time goes on. When it was Jane Austen's time, people preferred to read about the gentleman character. In Cassandra Clare's time, dark characters hunting demons (shadowhunters) became popular among fans. In Stephanie Meyer and L.J Smith's time, Vampires became a sensation and so did Werewolves.

And just like these characters change from era to era, so does the reader's view on masculinity. However one thing is similar; all the guys are portrayed as tough and daring.

Which isn't exactly how every guy is in real life.

While writing male characters, take help from your male friends/brothers etc and ask them what they would do in a particular situation. Cross questioning them will provide you a lot of insight on how your characters should be.

If you interview a considerable number of guys and line up their answers you will not only find similarities but also some stark differences. That way, you would be able to identify and choose the most fitting response for your character.

Compare, for example, Pride And Prejudice's uptight but upright Mr. Darcy with the scummy, womanizing Sam Spade of The Maltese Falcon. Compare either to Patrick Bateman of the appropriately named American Psycho, or secretive, heartbroken Patrick from The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.

Could it be that these male characters, so different in their expressions of what it means to be a man, are reacting to a similar set of experiences and values? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and by understanding how expressions of gender can be so complex, authors can write far more realistic men than they might ever have suspected.

If you want an example on a character that is not tough and daring but still masculine in his own way, look at Newt Scamander from Fantastic Beasts.