Writing Gender Quotes

we as authors have been writing about people we aren't for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are people too. Instead of asking yourself, "How do I write this female soldier?" ask yourself, "How do I write this soldier? Where is she from, how was she raised, does she have a sense of humour? Is she big and tall, is she short and petite? How does her size affect her ability to fight? What is her favourite weapon, her least favourite? Why? Is she more logical than emotional? The other way around? Was she an only child and spoiled, was she the eldest of six siblings and a surrogate mother? How does that upbringing affect how she interacts with her team? etc etc and so forth." Notice how the first question gets you some kind of broad, generalised answer, likely resulting in a stereotype, and how the second version asks lots and lots of smaller questions with the goal of creating someone well rounded.

One would hope, really, that we as authors ask such detailed questions of all our characters, regardless of gender.


So let me, at long last, actually answer the original question:

"How do I write a female character?"

Write her the way you would write any other character. Give her dimension, give her strength but please also don't forget to give her weaknesses (for a totally strong nothing can beat her kind of girl is not a person, she's again a ty ~ Adrienne Kress

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. ~ Theodore Dreiser

The best way I can describe [being transgender] for myself [...] is a constant feeling of homesickness. An unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that only goes away when I can be seen and affirmed in the gender I've always felt myself to be. And unlike homesickness with location, which eventually diminishes as you get used to the new home, this homesickness only grows with time and separation. ~ Sarah McBride

I think in times of fear and hysteria in a culture, gender experimentation as it pertains to men has to go underground because it scares people too much and it's too much for people to take on. Especially when a culture is held hostage by fear and hysteria and fundamentalism. ~ RuPaul

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry. ~ Edith Hamilton

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire. ~ George Saintsbury

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. ~ Toni Morrison

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is. ~ Guy Clark

To write is to inform against others. ~ Violette Leduc

Authors must spend months, years making fantasy believable in a single work while reality runs rampant and complete chaos elsewhere. ~ Don Roff

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) ~ John Gardner

learned to read and write in the Slavic alphabet from a single sheet. Then, I proceeded to make up my own dictionary using a small notebook with every page a different letter. An added impediment was the difference between these two Slavic languages. The writing presented also slight differences, also the orthography. All this added to the difficulties and the confusion, at first. The new, Soviet administration never thought of offering language classes for the new citizens. ~ Pearl Fichman

Song writing is about the male-female relationship. Yes, there are songs of, of brotherhood and politics but very rarely do we write about computers or, there are car songs, cars are cool. But even in the car songs, it's, ah, usually gets down to me and my baby and my car. ~ Jeff Barry

The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift. ~ Christina Baldwin

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.' ~ Peter David

Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. ~ George Orwell

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A sociocultural environment is not some cunningly contrived thing only exists in social psychology labs. Don't look now, but you're in one right this moment. ~ Cordelia Fine

When I was writing songs or performing or producing or dabbling in movies or even putting my career on hold to go to art school, I was just following my muse. A woman who did that then was criticized for having no direction. Today they call it versatility. ~ Jackie DeShannon

I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography. ~ Richard Simmons

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it! ~ Robert B. Parker

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us. ~ Alexandra Fuller

I write pretty often. I have a home studio. Music is what I do for fun. I never get tired of it, so to take a break from [TV and movies], I would go make some music. ~ Queen Latifah

The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy. ~ Enya

If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death. ~ Elie Wiesel

Writing is one of the main ways that I process the experience. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

I write abundantly. And then my next step is to struggle to reduce the ornament, to reduce the abundance-to prune the book, in other words, the way one prunes a tree-so it can grow. This is my idea of a book. ~ James Wright

When I came out of service, the first couple of releases didn't really hit so I just took a little hiatus and sat down to see what was happening. I just glued my ears to the radio and then I started writing - the first hit record that came out was 'Everybody Loves a Winner.' ~ William Bell

I got a little bit lost in the writing process: like, that moment in the 'Fight Song' music video where I'm throwing the crumpled paper on the bed, that was really true life. I was filling journals with different possibilities of lyrics for the first verse. And none of them felt right. ~ Rachel Platten

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write. ~ James T. Farrell

Our culture is in deep trouble, and at the heart of its trouble is its loss of a vision for manhood. If its difficult for you and me as adult males to maintain our masculine balance in this gender-neutral culture, imagine what it must be like for our sons, who are growing up in an increasingly feminized world. ~ Stu Weber

You could write your way into happiness. It might not be the happiness you'd experience if Eldric pushed Leanne from a cliff, but there's a firefly glimmer in writing something that would please Rose. ~ Franny Billingsley

I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did. ~ Tom Stoppard

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing. ~ Michael Dirda

Writing that sort of [songs like "Let is Roll"]made me try to almost sort of ingrain it in my own head every time I sing it live as well. It's like therapy. It's like "Move on, Pip! Come on. You can do this! You can do this." ~ Ladyhawke

Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software. ~ Larry Constantine

this lightness is something created in the writing, using the linguistic tools of the poet, independent of whatever philosophical doctrine the poet claims to be following. ~ Italo Calvino

So many men in my life have tried to "fix me"; they viewed me as a "fiery" being who is in need of taming ~ Mohadesa Najumi

I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that. ~ Joan Collins

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all. ~ Billie Holiday

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect. ~ Ann Beattie