The Male POV and Me...

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I was awake quite late last night and I didn't know what to do, I'd just finished editing and my eyes felt quite strained after looking at the computer screen for so long and I couldn't focus my eyes when I was reading on my Kindle. So I put a film on and picked up my pad of paper and a pen for scribbles or notes, anything that could turn the end of the night into something productive…and it kind of ended on a productive note, I was left writing the names of each novel I had planned and the main character in each of them…that turned out to become 4 mind maps, one for each of the different main characters.


Daniel Satoria, (Lumen) the Blood Luminary series. 




Brandon Harper, (Clandestine) the Night Falls series. 





Wren Caldwell, (The Salem Gates) the Caldwell Witches series. 




Lucius Jacques, (Life Elixir) the Forever Torn Trilogy.




I started telling my friend about each of them and she asked, "why all the male characters?"





Of course this is something I'd thought about, I'd consciously made all my protagonists male, and I suppose the main reason is because I believe that I write them better, I don't think I could write as a female because in reality I'm never in the mind-set of a female. However, I do believe in challenging yourself as a writer but sometimes you just have to know what voice you can and cannot write in, and not to stress yourself out if you can't.




She continued to question me about my choice and asked again, "but why the male point of view, won't that alienate some readers?"




No, I told her immediately, in fact most of the people who have Lumen on the Goodreads 'to-read' list are actually female, and I read a lot of books written from the female viewpoint, so why should my writing be any different in the sense that it's a male viewpoint and there are female readers. The silly thing would be to try and alienate any gender or say this type of person will like such-a book because of their gender…that's silly.




She agreed then asked, "If you're writing them altogether don't the voices all merge and you end up with one character who's spread across 4 identities and 4 series?"




I held my hands up at this point, I didn't know if they all sounded the same and I liked the fact that she'd asked me such a question. So I put the same question to you. 



If you have created many characters around the same age and gender, how do you differentiate them with the voice? 





It took me a while to get an answer, but when I did, this is what I said. I can't say for definite that all my characters are different, but I do make them all different, they all have an A3 sheet of paper with notes scribbled all over the place, they all have such different up-bringing's and back stories and their futures are far from similar, and none of them look the same, plus they're from all around the world…and because of how different and real I've made the characters to me, that's how I make them real to my reader and that's why I'm reassured that they all have different voices, because they all speak to me differently.


How do you create your characters? Do you draw a picture of them---or with a picture of words? Do you start with a name and then flesh them out? 


-Joseph


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