Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Creating Out of Body Characters

Point of View (POV) Characters

As a writer you only have one POV and that is yourself. Yes you can imagine being someone different and that is part of the wonder of imagination but like it or not you are unique and are what you are.

Thus when you write you are naturally inclined to write from your POV. All the baggage you have acquired in the course of a lifetime, all the things your seedy little brain has been attracted to, all the areas of interest that have compelled you like a moth to a flame give you the personal perspective of how you look at things.

When you write, about yourself, or some factious character, your POV puts your signature upon it. At conception men and women begin to differentiate and as they mature begin to see things from different perspectives. Volumes have been written on how men are from Mars and Women are from Venus but as sexes go men and women have much more in common then they have at issue. Superficially there are some plumbing and strength differences that evolved in support of our roles in reproduction but while men and women have much in common, the differences are still huge and the forces that attract men and women to make babies is a subject of great interest.

Now we know that at conception those little squiggles carry an X or a Y and depending on the sperm the sex of a human is decided. However, a good question to ask is what happens to the X or Y, who like the Man in the Iron Mask is sent to spend a lifetime in the dungeon of our souls. Actually this is a bad analogy. We have a female and male side regardless of the sex we are issued thru the biological process. In some cases the strength of the submerged attribute is strong indeed and finds expression in many interesting (troubling?) ways as we discover ourselves inclined to those compelling inclinations and voices that speak to us as we toss and turn, or share "muse" dialog with as we go about our days.

So while as writers we find ourselves generally fitting into one category or the other and are usually better suited to writing in the POV we are born into, we still, in the pursuit of our craft, need to create characters that share a different overt sexuality than we do. Thus, as we write from the opposite POV, unless gay or particularly sensitive to the opposite orientation, there is the danger we will create a character that does not exactly ring with authenticity. This doesn't mean the character won't be interesting and that the reader won't suspend disbelief that such a person can exist and the whole nature of imaginative writing is full of examples, such as Wonder Woman, Amazons, and Girl in the Dragon Tattoo that are really men disguised as women or the flip side, those sensitive men in Romance Novels who are totally unlike any man I've ever seen in real life.

So what is the writer to do? A male writer can't write a novel with only males any more than a female can write one that has only females. The answer is proceed cautiously if you want a believable character that is remotely authentic. Shakespeare was faulted for having children characters that sounded like miniature adults. r I often read ethnic characters who sound like the author with a little skin tone. I submit that many male characters I read about are very unmanly sounding. I am sure that many of the female characters I write about are very unfemale sounding. If you are a female writer don't think that writing a male character is going to be easy and vice-versa. Getting to the "gut" of an out of sex character is a daunting task. To begin with I recommend authors write from the POV they are comfortable with, which is usually the one they are born with and grew up in. In creating out of sex characters use men or women you know well as examples. One last thing I would disabuse writers from is the notion that men and woman can be "lifelong friends." It simply doesn't work that way despite what some would have you believe. Life is a journey and between the sexes there always comes that day of reckoning.