Savannah Watson

During a stretch of writer’s block, I decided to watch videos on writing craft. One such video that I stumbled upon was offering advice for “how to not write male characters”. As a female author who is writing a series with a male as one of the two main characters, I figured this could be really helpful. After all, the male experience is different from the female experience in some ways that I don’t necessarily know the nuances of.

So, I watched it and felt somewhat educated… until I got to the second book in the series and realized I had taken one specific piece of advice to heart: Don’t make men emotional. The person in the video stated that men don’t express emotions the same way as women, which is likely true. But they also made a point that where women are more freely and openly emotional, “men don’t cry”.

So, fast forward a few months, to me writing a scene where everything is falling apart for my male main character… and I got completely stuck on how to present this scene. I didn’t want my male lead to be angry; I wanted grief – deep, dark, all-consuming grief – which he had never had the chance to truly express before this moment. But I didn’t know how to show this level of grief without tears. And honestly, tears felt appropriate for the scene. But I just couldn’t bring myself to write it because of that one piece of writing advice.

So, while I sat stuck, I turned to Google and literally typed in “why is it uncommon to show men crying in media?” And the search results were unexpected. Instead of a straight answer to my question, forums came up where people identifying as male discussed their own experiences with their emotions. And time and time again, they discussed how they cry because of deaths and grief, or “smaller” things like movies and music. And so often in these posts, I saw men referring to the ability to freely cry and show emotions as being a quality of a “real man”. I was amazed and relieved.

As a female writing a male character, I wanted to be careful about how I was presenting him – I wanted to make him a believable character – but I was also afraid of giving him “too much emotion”. But after reading those forums with men certifying that it is not only okay, but truly masculine to show a healthy range of emotions, it made me feel more secure in my representation of emotion in my male lead. While to some degree, I fear someone saying “I can tell this male character was written by a woman”, I am also starting to think that it doesn’t really matter, as long as I to my best to be respectful in my portrayal (as I feel all people should be towards representing people of different genders, sexualities, races, backgrounds, etc.).

In modern Western media, we tend to see male characters having anger as their only/predominant response to being upset, sad, or any other negative feeling. Or if it’s not anger, it’s being stoic in the face of everything. (As a tangent, I love K-dramas for the way they show male characters crying or feeling emotions openly – at least the ones I’ve watched do).

This whole experience made me realize that I hope to see more range in male characters’ emotions in media, and a societal shift that lets everyone express their emotions in a healthy way without bias or stigma. And going forward, I will keep writing my characters with the emotions that feel right, regardless of gender.

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